Let's call people what they are

In the United States, we have the bad habit of mislabeling. These days, mislabeling is a major problem in politics. The labels of liberal and conservative don't really mean much anymore. In saying this, what I mean to say is that these labels don't represent what they once came to mean. They have been warped by our politics and our culture.

Let's look at reality. The word conservative today means many things. It generally brings to mind: lower taxes, reduce size of federal government, get rid of entitlements, bolster national defense, and order society by institutions of family and religion etc. Conservatism as an idea, however, doesn't entirely fit into this definition. Conservatism literally means conserving the institutions that are already put in place, by the rationale of society changing slowly, evolving over time. The Tea Partiers cannot call themselves conservative activists. If their plan is to dismantle the federal government down to its bare essentials, they are not conservatives but radical libertarians. If we speak of conservatives as the people who conserve the institutions that already exist, we cannot consider anyone who wants to dismantle the welfare system, drastically reform social security, dismantle systems of regulatory oversight, and generally dismantle the federal government.

What conservatives of today really are, for the most part, are classic liberals. They are, paradoxically, conservative in the sense that they are conserving the original LIBERAL constitution of the United States. All of the founding fathers were children of the Enlightenment, liberals of their time, fighting the conservatives of their time who represented the powers of monarchy. They wrote the U.S. Constitution with the liberal values of the Enlightenment in mind. Conservatives today are trying to preserve that vision - the liberal vision of 1776. The vision that every human being, when left to his or her own devices can make himself/herself into anything they want to be. That is quite a liberal way of looking at humanity. In my opinion, conservatives have something of a contradictory position, and probably wouldn't have much reason to call themselves conservative if they weren't also obsessed with traditional social institutions such as family and church (not that liberals hate family or church).

Liberals of today should be calling themselves what they are. If they actually do follow the words that they seem to preach, the label they deserve would be Social Democrats, Democratic Socialists, etc. "Liberals" put in place social safety nets, welfare systems, increase taxes on the rich to spread the wealth to the poor and middle class, legislate for labor rather than capital (at least historically... maybe not from 1994-2008), regulate the economy in order to protect the working class from economic downturns. If they actually did this job efficiently and honorably, they would deserve the label social democrats... but since they don't do this job efficiently or honorably, most of the time, they deserve the label of "Democrat."

The essence of the idea of being Liberal is sometimes mismatched with the idea of Progressivism and Social Democracy. Liberalism should, ideally, be more associated with someone like Ron Paul than Barack Obama. Liberalism in its very nature is obsessed with freeing constraints and allowing human beings to flourish with as little control as possible. The so-called liberals in this country are not always so happy about freeing constraints and controls... in fact, they quite like controlling the economy if they can get it to act the way they want it to act.

When FDR put in place the New Deal, he was in a sense radically altering the way our government worked and the people of our nation lived (although it is important to note that he was acting towards the logical conclusion of the former "Progressive Movement"). He raised taxes on the rich, created safety nets for the poor and working class, put in place massive corporatist controls on the economy - in some ways aided to the creation of the middle class society of the 1950s and 1960s, which if studied in its entirety was massively socialist in nature, if we are to call it by its true name. Of course, the post-war era wasn't marxist. It was socialist in the sense that it was more equitable and that the government made it that way.

I am not suggesting that we get used to calling Ron Paul a radical liberal or Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi socialists (although it might be amusing). I'm not exactly saying that the majority of Democrats and Republicans are "conservatives" (because they feel totally fine to just preserve the institutions that already exist and not really do much else). The point of this was that the meaning of all words changes over time. The meaning of documents and ideas change over time as we change. Glenn Beck would probably hate to be called a liberal, but his heroes (the founding fathers) would hate to be called conservatives. What are the implications of this? No idea... maybe i'm just writing for writing's sake.