Freedom in One Lesson

4.

Dupes of a Politically Managed Glossary

American political electioneering has become unbelievably nasty and irrational. Campaigns are often reduced to name-calling and denigrating opponents. Ad hominem arguments and imputing guilt for association with an “ism” (e.g., dismissing someone for leaning conservative or libertarian or even for being supported by others with those sympathies) seem to be everywhere. Political epithets often almost completely crowd out logic in political discussion.

While such tendencies are particularly strong now, this problem is hardly of recent vintage. Only the degree, not the existence, is new. In fact, Leonard Read, in the opening chapter—“Debunking the Labels”—of his first book, The Romance of Reality (Read 1937), may offer the most incisive analysis of our “politically managed glossary” and its implications.

No sober discussion of public questions is possible at this time without first clearing the thinking atmosphere of . . . politically managed labels.

Few thoughts of others are accepted without first comparing colors, labels or isms. If these do not match, then the projector of a thought is obviously steeped in prejudice—he is a tool of the “interests.” . . .

By their opponents, New Dealers are called socialistic . . . [and] radical. . . . They call themselves liberal . . . [and] progressive. . . . To a New Dealer, an anti-New Deal Republican is at best a reactionary, shrinking from there . . . or he may be so low as to be termed a “tool of entrenched greed.” . . .

What chance has logic against these headwinds of hate? To criticize one’s government is to invite oneself before the firing squads of the literary mercenaries. To sponsor or defend an economic principle to which current passions may be opposed is to ask for . . . an odious label. . . .

. . . Conclusion: we are the dupes of a politically managed glossary.

. . . Who likes to be called a REACTIONARY? And to be dubbed a CONSERVATIVE has sadly become just a shade less nocuous. But to be called a LIBERAL is glorious!

Demeaning and flimsy attacks are not hard to find. During the 2012 election campaign, Chris Mooney (2012), in The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality, asserted that conservatives (more accurately, nonliberals) are not only scientifically illiterate but hard-wired to ignore evidence that conflicts with what they want to believe.

Even more instructive than Mooney’s Swiss-cheese “analysis” is an earlier study that Mooney relied on heavily: a 2003 article in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin titled “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition.” Backed by $1.2 million in federal research money, its authors assert that it provides an “elegant and unifying explanation” of political conservatism.

The authors find resistance to change at the core of political conservatism. While claiming to be nonjudgmental, they conclude that conservatism is “significantly linked with mental rigidity and closed-mindedness, increased dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity, decreased cognitive complexity, decreased openness to experience, uncertainty avoidance, personal needs for order and structure, need for cognitive closure, lowered self-esteem; fear, anger, and aggression; pessimism, disgust, and contempt” ( Jost 2003).

To get to their desired conclusions, the authors equate Hitler and Mussolini with Ronald Reagan as “right-wing conservatives because they all preached a return to an idealized past and favored or condoned inequality in some form.” Unfortunately, their conclusions are not based on logic, and they overreach in their failure to make important analytical distinctions.

The core problem with these and similar conclusions is that “conservative,” “liberal,” “progressive,” and other such labels are adjectives that get converted into nouns—isms—for political purposes. Adjectives, however, do not define themselves but modify something else. The consequence is that crucial questions such as “ What is being conserved?” “In what ways are we liberal?” and “ What do we consider progress?” are ignored.

Those are exactly the sorts of questions Leonard Read thinks carefully about, beginning with the historical evolution of political labels.

Liberalism as a movement was born when the Magna Charta was exacted from King John. . . . It was born of an era when governments were characterized by their despotism and economic practices lived under feudalism. This liberal movement, liberal because it was aimed at the liberalization of the individual from government coercion, progressed . . . over a period of five centuries, drew nearer to its ultimate realization—the American form of constitutional government and its relation to and observation of natural economic law.

Thus was experienced a complete transition from the philosophy that the individual is the servant of the state to the American philosophy that the state is but the instrument and the servant of the individual.

No small wonder then that the title Liberal is so avidly sought by political self-seekers whether they are liberals or not. Because of the centuries-old struggle for individual freedom which was LIBERALISM and which blossomed into full bloom as America, it is, of course, the smart thing to sail one’s political ship under the liberal banner. . . .

A RADICAL is one who desires to uproot something. If he wants to uproot liberty he is anything but liberal. The liberal movement from the Magna Charta to The Bill of Rights was radical because it was a movement to uproot despotism, centralized political control and coercive economic practices. . . .

Present-day radicals have wrongly appropriated the word LIBERAL. Present-day radicals are bent on uprooting liberalism. They seek constitutional amendments so that bureaucracy, centralized governmental and economic control—the very essence of despotism—may be substituted for individual self-management and local self-government—the very essence of liberalism.

REACTIONARY . . . in King John’s time . . . would have meant a return to all the practices of despotism and of feudalism. . . . However, it can have a narrower definition: a reaction against a contemporary event or events. Thus, a reactionary could be either a liberal or a conservative. . . .

A CONSERVATIVE is one who desires to conserve something. If he wants to conserve liberty he is both a conservative and a liberal. If he wants to conserve a coercive system of government he is both a conservative and a coercionist, the opposite of a liberal. A conservative is one who wants to conserve the best of the old order and who is not in sympathy with radical movements. . . . Its meaning in relation to liberalism has become just the opposite of what it once was.

The conservative of King John’s time did not believe in the liberal movement but rather wanted to conserve . . . coercive monarchical government and the regimented feudal system. The conservative of today does not believe in the trend of the radicals back to centralized control or extreme government interference, which is the modern counterpart for the monarchical government and the feudal system against which our forefathers fought; but rather insists on conserving liberalism and the best of the order which found liberalism at its fullest.

Thus today, a conservative is a liberal and what a radical once was; that is, he is fighting to conserve what the radical once fought to achieve. A radical today is no longer a liberal but what a conservative once was. He is fighting to achieve what the conservatives of old were trying then to conserve.

The analytical confusion Leonard Read sees resulting from such morphing labels is illustrated by our history. America was radical in its founding, although it sought to conserve what colonists considered their rights. It was liberal in that it tried to provide the broadest possible freedom for individuals from government coercion. And it was tremendously progressive in its recognition of inalienable rights for all (a far cry from the “conservative” divine right of kings) and united under a constitution intended to conserve that vision. So which label should we use to capture what America was?

Trying to restore or conserve a vision does not logically align one with every politician ever called conservative, including Hitler, Mussolini, and uncountable despots. To lump such disparate “conservatives” together fails to distinguish between those who want to conserve the power of governments to abuse their citizens and those who want to return to an approach that prohibits such abuses.

In the same way, to associate those who today call themselves liberals (or progressives, a label adopted by many liberals averse to certain consequences of liberal policies) with classical liberals is not only to confuse reality but to get it exactly backwards and to manipulate Americans by substituting the good associations earned by what liberals once represented for the failings of current liberal and progressive policies. This confusion has elevated the image of liberals and denigrated the image of conservatives and libertarians. Leonard Read sees through the subterfuge.

Those confusions . . . have their base in . . . the honeyed words . . . the fantastic romanticism and the soul-stirring oratory of politicians whose behavior is too far removed from statesmanship.

These intriguing demagogues . . . basking under self-made halos of liberalism and humanism, have been largely responsible for the popular and false assumption that righteousness and radicalism belong one to the other, that radical thought has a monopoly on virtue. . . .

A radical states his social objectives and, because they smack of righteousness . . . the masses too often leap to the indefensible conclusion that the methods proposed are equally efficacious. . . .There has developed the peculiar notion that Liberal, as today misapplied, is a synonym of virtue, moral rectitude, nobleness of intention and purity of character, and that CONSERVATIVE is synonymous with an evil course, immoral intent, inhuman practices and economic privilege. The radicals and the demagogues have done a good job of foisting their designs on the gullible public, of perverting the English language to their own ends.

The above was true in 1937 when Leonard Read wrote it and seems even truer today.

It is not considered merely conservative but actually reactionary to favor a balanced budget, to argue for tax reduction, to urge thrift, to defend individual liberty, to protect the fundamentals of the Constitution, to demand the sanctity of contracts or to insist on a stable currency. To support the Constitution was once considered patriotic—it is now partisan.

It is not considered radical but rather liberal to seek inflation, to abrogate individual rights, to usurp federally the prerogatives of local self-government, to spend beyond our capacity to pay, to peg prices artificially, to build bureaucracy, to stimulate class prejudices . . . [or] advocate . . . a Share-the-Wealth scheme.

This misconception and mal-association of terms has developed many evils, not the least of which has been a serious destruction of faith in our responsible and competent leadership. The mere opposition of any measure which has been radical-labeled LIBERAL is of itself sufficient to nullify, in the public mind, experienced views of an opposer. Must not this oppositionist be a reactionary? . . . Such an oppositionist, so it is thought, cannot possibly be thinking of the human side, cannot be thinking of society in general. Have his opponents not stated or at least implied publicly and oratorically that they are the sole possessors of such Christian qualities and ideals? Have his opponents not called him dishonest and earmarked him as among the “money changers to be driven from the temple”? Has he not been publicly and officially generalized as a culprit? . . . Why should his advice be heeded?

The answer to that last question depends on the reason those who are labeled conservative oppose the new but unimproved liberal orthodoxy.

Let us diagnose this person who dares not claim the liberal label and who by the radicals and self-styled liberals is called a reactionary in a voice that breathes of blasphemy.

. . . This person may be a conservative because he wishes to conserve liberalism and the best of that order. He may be a conservative because he is opposed to the radicals who would uproot liberalism and take us once again to centralized, coercive and despotic governmental and economic control. . . . More likely than not . . . he is the first to want the elimination of vicious, immoral and unethical practices, but he would not burn down the stately mansion to kill the rats. He is properly a liberal for precisely the same reason he is a conservative.

Leonard Read’s analysis puts a new face on conservatives denigrated for their supposedly closed-minded resistance to political change in contrast to liberals who define themselves as open-minded. Hesitation to impose sweeping new political changes may instead demonstrate recognition of the recurring failures of politically imposed change—a recognition shared by libertarians. As economist Paul Heyne once put it, “Economic theory often treats proposals for reform of the economic system so unkindly. . . . [It] calls attention to the unexamined consequences of proposals for change. ‘It won’t work out that way’ is the economist’s standard response to many well-intentioned policy proposals. Realism is not necessarily conservatism, but it often looks quite similar” (Heyne 1999).

After offering his analysis of America’s “politically managed glossary,” Leonard Read finishes by labeling himself in a way that makes clear just how damaging the substitution of misleading labels for actual thought has been.

The writer has confessed to being a reactionary on one matter, a radical on another. Certainly, he believes himself to be a liberal and there are aspects of our former economy he wishes to conserve, thus giving him the tag of conservative. He wants a new deal from what we are now getting but he looks in vain through the whole roster of party politics for an enunciation of principles he can wholeheartedly support.

The throwing off of these political fetters clears the atmosphere. There is room to think—to approach our problem objectively and without an inherited prejudice. The discussion, however, must not be dispassionate. It would hardly be decent for an American to be calm when he speaks of his country and thinks of the times.

America was founded to define our freedoms and defend them from government coercion. No genius is required to recognize the value of conserving that practice, which is at the core of what principled conservatives who share a classical-liberal heritage with libertarians believe.

Imputing such positions to mental rigidity and closed-minded dogmatism, rather than considering underlying principles and evidence, offers little more than fodder for liberals to deflect attention away from the unconvincing logic of their own proposals and abysmal real-world track record. Dismissing their objectors as unthinking or uncaring, modern liberals can feel superior and shift debate away from real analysis of specific policies. Their objections reduce to misrepresentations and distortions, combined with a variety of ad hominem accusations of nefarious ‘isms,’ and do not advance understanding.

This Orwellian distortion of our language uses false labels to keep public servants in power over a citizenry unwilling to think for themselves; but for those who want to build a truly better society, it offers only a foundation of quicksand.