Rethinking How We Talk About the Political Spectrum

Recently I remarked the unsatisfactory way in which we discuss political ideology in America.

Having done so it seems to me fair to offer a possible alternative that has seemed to me useful.

In explaining it I think it best to start by saying that, contrary to what some seem to think, the concepts of "liberal" and "conservative," "radical" and "reactionary," "right" and "left," and their various synonyms and derivatives deriving from the Enlightenment and its subsequent controversies remain entirely relevant to the discussion of American politics today. However, there is a significant gap between the labeling and the actualities that causes a lot of confusion. What people conventionally call "conservatives" tend to actually be reactionaries, desirous of restoring a past state of society (somehow going back to before the New Deal, or the Progressive era, or the counterculture of the 1960s, for example); what we call "liberals" and might more usefully call "centrists," who are really conservatives; and what people conventionally call the "left," insofar as this is identified with identity politics, is a conservative or reactionary politics which differs from the others in being the conservative or reactionary nationalism of groups which have been marginalized. Thus do all of them broadly embrace the neoliberal-neoconservative economic and social vision, domestically and internationally, with this at most being adapted in an age of ascendant economic nationalism and geopolitical shifts (above all, related to the rise of China).

Considering the picture of conservatives who are really reactionaries, centrists who are conservatives, and a left that is not really farther to the left than the others, it has seemed to me fair to, following Richard Hofstadter's precedent, refer to conservatism today as "pseudo-conservatism," and extend this to the others by making "pseudo-liberalism" a synonym for today's centrism and so-called "liberalism," and label what many rush to call the left the "pseudo-left," respectively--with the pseudo-liberal, in line with their centrism, giving a good deal of ground to the pseudo-conservative in such areas as the economy and foreign policy, and making concessions to the pseudo-left's demands in the cultural sphere.

Of course, other tendencies exist. There are old-fashioned liberals--reformists eager to redress what they see as the problems of capitalism out of genuine social and economic concern rather than merely "upholding consensus" in the fashion of the centrists in those days in which their equation with liberalism was most justified, and supportive of much more reform than the minimalism toward which centrists tended even before the neoliberal turn. There are classically class-minded leftists interested in deeper change. But while one may speak of liberal or left individuals, media outlets, even political parties, and even argue that the associated sentiments are widely held among a large part of the population, none is an organized and significant force at the level of national politics. That is a very different thing from those tendencies having somehow disappeared, and anyone who writes them off totally makes a profound mistake (just as mid-century centrists made a profound mistake when they thought the "pseudo-conservative" right finished)--but there is no question that, as things have generally stood in recent decades, they have been very marginalized, so much so that those who would like to pretend they did not exist anymore have been able to get away with it (at least, in the muddled mainstream mind).