Words matter; they have meaning.
I’ve ranted before about the way terminology can change over time and leave people confused or misled. Now, I want to focus primarily on the left-to-right political axis and how it relates to the current incarnations of the political parties.
Probably the most abused term these days is centrist. While it has a legitimate meaning, it’s almost exclusively used instead as a slur by the far left against anyone who’s not far enough to the left to satisfy their pathological need for ideological purity.
First, the legitimate meaning. A centrist is someone who’s neither left- nor right-wing on the whole. They might have views that are fairly neutral or weakly held, or a spread of positions scattered on both sides of the line, or maybe they’re rocks and don’t have opinions at all. You never know with those inscrutable centrists and their bizarre neutrality.
None of this accurately characterizes American modern liberals, as they are left of center. So when the extreme left calls liberals “centrists”, this is hyperbole. More bluntly, it’s a lie that verges on false equivalence. They’re basically admitting that they’re so far to the left that they lump everyone else together.
Liberals are also correctly described as being center left, which just means that they’re moderate. They’re to the left of center, but not all the way to the left. To put it another way, they’re the part of the left that’s nearer to the center than to the extreme. But while liberals are center-adjacent, they’re not centrists.
So where do we draw the borders? Well, liberalism has room in its big tent for anyone left of center, so it’s pressed up against the center on one side. On the other, it can go as far to left as it likes, just so long as it doesn’t cross the line into radicalism. What specifically defines radicalism is the refusal to cooperate with those who think differently.
Because a liberal is moderate, they’re willing to team up with almost anyone, at least on issues where they find common cause, and to the extent that they do. So while a liberal might not agree with someone who’s centrist or far left or moderate right on most matters, they’re usually willing to at least try to work with them where they do agree, to find a compromise, when one is possible, so as to get things done.
It is this ability to cross the center that allows democratic government to work. So long as there are moderates in power on both sides of the center, there is bipartisanship, so things keep running smoothly. Without overlap, there is just partisanship, hence either gridlock or winner-takes-all radicalism. Moderates can work together because they respect competence and pragmatism, whereas extremists do not.
So what defines the left border of liberalism is not how far to the left they go, but how unwilling they become to cooperate with anyone else. Liberalism ends where ideological puritanism begins. One consequence is that some liberals are considerably to the left of extreme leftists on key issues.
While there are no issues where liberals are far to the left, they can be more consistently to the left across all issues than the extremists because the extremists’ populism leads them to pick and choose what matters to them. Extremists either care too much or not at all, with nothing in between. And when they do care, they take an all-or-nothing, no-compromise approach.
An example of this would be civil rights, which liberals are deeply committed to but the far left disparages as mere “identity politics“. This is not just a theoretical divide but a practical one. The far left is apathetic about a woman’s right to choose, and doesn’t want to help refugees and other immigrants. It’s also lacking in commitment to gun control or protecting minorities against police violence.
Zooming out, all liberals are leftists, but not all leftists are liberals. Pretty simple, but what really confuses things is the term “progressive“. Skipping over its history, progressive, as an adjective, means left-leaning. We can talk about whether single-payer is more progressive (further to the left) than ObamaCare is. This is very similar to using liberal as an adjective.
As a noun, its meaning is ambiguous and is still shifting. Back in the days of Reagan, it became another label for a liberal but, lately, it has come to refer to just the extreme left, not liberals. So, for example, while Obama’s policies were progressive, Obama is not a progressive; he’s a liberal. Moreover, while the people who identify as “progressives” today are far left, they’re also populists.
Briefly, populism is a style of politics which is based on the conceit that the numerical minority it represents consists of the citizens who truly matter; the real people. Its leaders likewise claim to be independent-minded outsiders who are “authentic” and will lead the good guys (it’s always guys) to victory over the “establishment” elite, which consists of everyone who’s not one of them. Those people are seen as the enemy, and therefore inherently “inauthentic” and “corrupt”.
Populism is often right-wing, such as with Trump or various European fascists, like Le Pen. It can also be left-wing, such as Sanders or the so-called Justice Democrats. Despite being on opposite extremes in one dimension, they share a great deal in common, not only in style but substance.
Among these elements are demagoguery, nationalism, and pandering. Put simply, populists promise the impossible, which is why their positions are so extreme. They also demonize everyone who’s not as extreme, which is what creates the insatiable demand for ideological purity.
What’s fascinating is that populism is a second political dimension, allowing the extremes of left and right to come together to form a horseshoe.
The far left and far right are united by populism against their common enemy, which they call “centrists” but really mean everyone who’s anywhere near the center. In other words, all extremists hate all moderates. They hate them even more than they do the opposite extreme.
When populism moves people away from the center, it also shifts them from conventional to radical views. On the far left, this means Marxism, which includes democratic socialism and outright Communism. On the far right, this means Fascism, which includes Christofascism and neo-Naziism.
Switching away from populism and back to the left/right spectrum, I only have a little bit more to say because there’s just not much left of the conservatives. These people are (were?) center-right, which is to say moderately to the right. They often opposed progress and were casually bigoted, but they weren’t monsters.
Many conservative politicians, like Eisenhower, were competent, honorable, and had positive accomplishments. Moreover, it was possible to work with them productively, and while they did drag us down, they weren’t an anchor to sink us. They even served the useful purpose of keeping the radical left in check and being a buffer against the radical right.
I miss them, but they’ve lost power and faded away. Their last gasp came when the Tea Party movement took over the RNC and left them without political representation. Some of the more moderate ones occasionally vote for Democrats, but while we welcome them, they’re just not ever going to be comfortable with our liberalism.
The left faces the same risk, as a constellation of far left people and organizations, such as the Justice Democrats, Our Revolution, Bernie Sanders, The Young Turks, Jacobin, and The Intercept, are all working to do to the DNC what the Teabaggers did to the RNC. They are the Herbal Tea Party, and the herb is toxic populism.
Hopefully, this rant will help you set the political table in an orderly fashion. Remember, the spectrum starts on the far right with fascists, moves towards the moderate center with conservatives, transitions to the moderate left with liberals, and then goes back off the deep end with Marxists.
Addendum:
A favorite talking point used by both the American far left and some Europeans, is that American liberals would be center-right in Europe, and that America therefore has no true left. It’s really hard to take this seriously.
Foreigners have great difficulty mapping the issues that distinguish political stances across national divides because only issues that are controversial in that country serve as useful measures of political orientation. So, for example, the NHS has broad support in the UK, across parties, whereas support for M4A in the US is strongly correlated with party affiliation. In this case, Europe leans more to the left, but there are other issues, such as immigration, where Europe leans more to the right.
What further complicates such cross-cultural comparisons are differences in political systems, where parliamentary governments allow for small factions to be considered full political parties. In such systems, you can vote for a fringe party which then joins a coalition, whereas such a vote in America is wasted as an empty protest. As a result, the major parties represent the compromise that the coalition has settled on, and the most extreme views are intentionally lost in the shuffle.
Of course, when the American far left claims that there is no left wing in America, this is telling on themselves. They’re bragging about their ideological puritanism, admitting that they’re edgelords who refuse to recognize any distinctions among those who fall short of their impossible standards. They’re basically claiming that everyone to their right is right-wing and that only card-carrying Marxists should count as left-wing.
This sort of both-siderism erases the distinction between the moderate left and the far right, which is absurd.