The Death of the Word "Liberal"

The Guardian has an article up praising a Democrat who manages to be just as unpleasant as the Republicans. Go him! But it also has an interesting phrase in it that really caught my eye:

Democrats have effectively allowed Republicans to elide the word "liberal" from an adjective into a smear.

Now, this piece of analysis is spot-on. The Democrats have allowed the Republicans to take the word "liberal" and turn it into a political curse. Most Democrats would be afraid of being classed as "liberal", since this creates images of a vast, intrusive state; of socialism, and the degradation of the American way of life. Liberal means a socialist or even a communist in the US political vocabulary. Which is, of course, not what the word means at all.

Yet the Democrats have opened up the word to the sort of abuse Republicans have heaped on it by trying to co-opt it as their own. They tried to make it a label for social democracy, for higher taxes and state intervention. They tried to make liberalism into their watered down version of socialism. That's why the Republicans have shat on the concept - not because of what liberalism actually means, but because the Democrats corrupted the word.

See, I'm a liberal - I believe in freedom. I don't believe in the corruption of the word espoused by the Democrats or by the Liberal Democrats in this country. Rather, I believe in maximising the freedom of the individuals in this country by respecting basic rights and limiting the intrusive government. I believe that "freedom from" will lead to "freedom to." I call myself The Nameless Libertarian because I am a liberal. However, I am not a liberal in the sense that the word has come to mean. That is why I have to clarify and call myself a Libertarian.

Liberal should be a great, evocative word that means something more than narrow, state-serving Social Democracy. Just as the word conservative should mean something different that the amorphous, soulless pragmatism of the Tory party in this country - a party that would be happily led by anyone from Ted Heath to David Cameron via Margaret Thatcher as long as the leader looks like they could win an election. Or the curious compassionate conservatism of George W Bush that involved a radical increase in state power and a crusade against other sovereign nations. Conservatism used to mean a particular attitude towards the development of the state, and a hostility to revolution. It has now been used by so many different people in so many different ways that it has lost that meaning, and become just another catchword used to score political points.

Perhaps it is the zeitgeist; that words that once had a political potency are now devalued to such a point that they are utterly meaningless. A "conservative" at once describes both Compromise Cameron and the Imperialist tendencies of Bush The Junior. A "liberal" describes Nick Clegg, Vince Cable and various other social democrats in the USA. The words no longer mean what they once meant. They have been co-opted by those who do not understand those words in order to add legitimacy to their spurious ideological claims. It is probably pointless to lament the debasement of a political label, but I wish I could describe myself as a liberal without making people think I am a Social Democrat. Just as I am sure that there are conservatives who wish that using that term didn't evoke images in the minds of many people of one George W Bush.