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We Need a New Name for Liberals — Jon Gabriel
Earlier this week, liberals forced out the CEO of tech company Mozilla for privately holding common but unfashionable political views. Liberals continue to hound the owners of Hobby Lobby for defending their religious liberty, and also harass the libertarian Koch Brothers for supporting liberty-friendly causes.
Every week it becomes more obvious that liberals are not liberal in any way shape or form.
The word “liberal” comes from liberalis, the Latin word for “freedom.” Politically speaking, the Oxford English Dictionary defines “liberal” as “favoring maximum individual liberty in political and social reform.”
Understandably, the Founding Fathers were called liberals since they reformed the status quo to vastly increase personal liberty politically, economically, and religiously. Today’s “liberals” are the fiercest defenders of the status quo, desperately clinging to outdated economic theories, educational policy and governing models.
This gives lie to their attempted rebranding as “progressives.” The original progressives were passionate reformers, pushing novel, idealistic solutions to society’s most vexing problems. Progress was the aim of TR, Wilson and FDR, if rarely the result. But today’s so-called progs are mostly reactionaries who insist no one alter the flawed models introduced generations ago.
Obviously neither “liberal” nor “progressive” properly defines the modern left, but what should they be called? We don’t need another insulting epithet, but something that accurately describes their political outlook. Best of all would be descriptive term they themselves would embrace.
I’ve employed “illiberals,” but it’s a bit clunky. “Socialists” and “collectivists” are accurate, but carry some nasty Cold War baggage. “Statists?” “Leftists?” “Jacobins?”
Help me out here, Ricochetti — what should we call American liberals?
Published in General
Have a few candidates, not all funny or original, but neither am I funny or origianl!
1 – NeoSocs (pronounced: neo-sucks)
2 – NeoFacs (as in NeoFascists, pronounced: neo-fox)
3 – PoS: Plain old socialists (pronounced: puss)
4 – PoF: Plain old Fascists (pronouned: puffs)
5 – Beverly (why not)
“Self agrandizing children of Goth”? Too long? SACOG?
Tyrants, dictators, and despots are already taken…”Takers”?
ILL…intolerant leftist liberals….
Proglodytes.
I know, too inside baseball. Which I think is a lot of the problem with the Right’s political lexicon.
An effective label needs to be immediately comprehended. Notice how the Left has coopted words that sound positive (“liberal,” “progressive”) while the policies they back are neither liberal nor constitute progress. Their party is called the “Democratic” party although they seek to control more and more of society through the judiciary or the expansion of the Federal regulatory apparatus. They get a lot of mileage referring to the “far right” or “extreme conservatives” whenever they want to paint someone as outside acceptable discourse.
So for public consumption, why not call them what they are: the “far” or “extreme” left. Anti-democrats.
I just remembered a term I used on Twitter a few times: “The Tolerati.”
I would like to nominate the term “Inevitablist”.
The liberal/progressive is one who believes their vision for the organization of humanity is inevitable, and therefore might as well be implemented sooner rather than later.
By contrast, the conservative believes that humanity will always find ways to self-organize in defiance of the vision of planners.
Dreaming up neologisms is a fun parlor game, but you can’t control the evolution of language, and your chances of injecting a clever new word into common usage is pretty close to nil.
I tend to avoid the term “liberal” because it linguistically implies liberty, which makes it a misnomer. “Progressive” is pretty accurate, as it ties modern leftist to the Progressives of a century ago. “Leftist” has the advantage of being intrinsically content-free, a pure name without any pre-existing baggage. When I want a noun that refers to the entire blob of people on that side of the political spectrum, I prefer “the left”, although “liberaldom” has a nice ring; there is no comparable noun based on “progressive,” though.
When I want to describe what leftists are in other terms, I tend to go with “fascist” if discussing their political and economic vision, or “Utopian” if describing their more general mindset.
Progressivism – the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be better off than you.
I dunno. I coined the term “misthiocracy” and so far all the cool kids are using it.
Ok, maybe they aren’t. However, a phrase I invented and posted to Urban Dictionary has received quite a few ‘likes’. That’s gotta count for something, right?
;-)