What am I?
I don't mean this in some grand philosophical sense. I just mean politically. Back in the day I was fond of calling myself an FDR liberal, but while that had the right vibe it wasn't easily understood.
Then for a while it seemed like everyone was consumed by Europe and I said, screw it, I'm a social democrat. That leaves plenty of scope and describes me pretty well, but again, it's pretty easily misunderstood, especially here in America.
So I'd say, it just means I'm a pragmatic liberal. Which is correct, but not especially descriptive.
Or maybe a center lefty. Also correct, but only for certain things and among certain crowds. And it's both boring and redolent of journalese.
Neoliberal shill? That really only means I'm a free-market capitalist to some extent or another, and anyway, it's just a joke.
Liberal but not progressive? That's only partly true, and even I'm not 100% sure what it means these days.
So what now? I'm tempted to say I'm a normie liberal, which suggests that I'm in favor of universal health care and abortion for all but distinguishes me from the ultra-woke Twitter lunatics. Unfortunately, this term is probably pretty well understood on Twitter but not necessarily anywhere else.
So what am I?
“If by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people-their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties-someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal", then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal.”
Still works.
These days, who knows? The right-wing extremists brand themselves as "conservative," a label gleefully repeated by the MSM. Which means they can label anyone to the left of St. Ronnie as a "communist," "socialist" or "Marxist."
Today, the GOP has no political philosophy or policy. It is simply Trump's Id. Labels like conservative, centrist or liberal are just quaint anachronisms.
Republican "philosophy" is the same as it has been for the last 50+ years. There are two components; favoritism for big business and finance through tax cuts and deregulation; and White Christian Supremacy. The second factor is so important to many people that they vote against their own economic advantage.
Trump has gained power and become a cult leader by replacing the somewhat subtle racist dog-whistles of Republicans like Reagan with more blatant racism and with patently hypocritical support for religiosity. Although he is absurdly called a "populist" by the media, his economics are traditional Republican plutocratic. Trump's ostensible attitude toward immigration is a break from standard big-money Republican economics, which favors immigration to keep wages down, but it remains to be seen whether he will actually do anything to reduce the influx of low-wage workers - he and Republicans have repeatedly passed on opportunities to do so.
So whatever happens to Trump, there is no reason to expect any change in Republican objectives, which are constant: dominance of big business and finance, and continued White Christian Supremacy.
Thank you for pointing out the idiocy of the "populist" label. David Brooks used this on Friday in the most baffling way, commenting that while he agreed with NBC firing Ronna McDaniel, he thought it important for the network to find another "pro-Trump populist who doesn't depend on lies."
Good luck.
In the US, the usage of of political terms, like "liberal" and conservartive", is so messed up that using them is always more misleading than informative.
Yes, and the media like to bring in more terms which are totally inapplicable such as "populist". One thing they have consistently done is minimize racism. They avoid using the term "racist" which definitely applies to the Republican party, and try to find other reasons why white lower-income people support Trump and Republicans.
Every Friday on my way home an intersection is Horse Shoe Theory central.
On one side we have the MAGA crowd with their flags touting Trump 2024, Stop the Steal, F Joe Biden, Let's Go Brandon, Blue Lives Matter*, and sometimes a POW/MIA. On the opposing corner we have Trans Lives Matter, Rainbow Flags, Stop the Genocide but rarely any Biden flags. And neither side has anything state or local.
I just drive straight down the middle ...
Anyone who unironically uses the phrase "ultra-woke Twitter lunatics" is probably just centrist-lefty, imho; did you also use the phrase "PC" a lot back in the day too? I feel if you were a "pragmatic liberal" you'd be listening to more people talk about their life experiences and wouldn't shoehorn all that into the insultive "woke."
Maybe "numbers- and cat-obsessed liberal"!
Centrist lefty? Nah, Republican is the word.
When other people label you, they are telling you who they are, not who you are.
I like to tell people that I'm an Olof Palme democratic socialist, but I do it mostly to force them to look up what that means.
How about just "human"? Tribalism may have had advantages for survival in the past, but it is easily the worst part of human nature in modern society, so let's just bin it.
Question: How does one know if they are tribal?
Answer: Take a DNA test. If it comes back Homo sapiens, they you are tribal. If it comes back non-Homo sapiens hominin, then you are not tribal.
Translation: Your "just bin it" suggestion requires using CRISPR technology. Alternatively, the only question is who is in and who is not in your tribe. Last count, there was roughly eight billion fellow humans in my tribe.
Think global ... act local.
That is just bulshit.
Humans learn to be tribal (from their parents and other adults).
Except the design for a system that has the ability to learn, there is nothing in the DNA of humans that makes them tribal.
What?? No.
Go look up Dunbar's Number. We are wired to be able to recognize and work with something between 100 and 250 people -- our tribe.
You can layer on all sorts of social restraint just like you can make your dog eat vegan ... but the dog will never be a vegan. We are tribal, shit-flinging apes at our core and pretending otherwise doesn't create a better world.
> Go look up Dunbar's Number.
Gazillions of these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar_(surname)
> We are wired to be able to recognize and
> work with something between 100 and
> 250 people -- our tribe.
Another piece of nonsense.
Humans are obviously finite systems, so they will
always have limits of what they can do. Showing
such limits doesn't say much on the way humans
cognition is made.
The actual range is also much large than 100 - 250.
Something like 5 - 1000 probably more reasonable
to cover human limits.
So other than a quibble on scale you agree that your statement was incorrect!
Apology accepted.
No.
Saving you having to go back:
Another piece of nonsense.
Humans are obviously finite systems, so they will
always have limits of what they can do. Showing
such limits doesn't say much on the way humans
cognition is made.
Humans "learn" to be tribal? Who taught the parents' parents' parents to be tribal?
Of course, we are innately tribal! That's how our species survived in spite of being too weak, too slow, too hairless, and too big in the head. Collaborative actions with those who share most of our DNA. There's nothing wrong with it, except now it's become obsolete and counter to our continued survival. It's now something we have to overcome, as philosophers and prophets have been trying to tell us for millennia. But it ain't easy.
> Humans "learn" to be tribal? Who taught the
> parents' parents' parents to be tribal?
It was a long process of small changes in attitudes towards other individuals.
We can see some of the steps in the process in other apes.
The argument of "who taught the parent" is obviously logically invalid, because it can be used to prove that nothing is learned.
Don't know if we can bin it ... but as with much of our base instincts we can learn to not listen and respond to tribal appeals as they are among the most manipulative/least intellectual and scientific appeals. If we stopped reacting to political tribalism then it would stop.
I feel your pain. Pretty much all of the labels and identifiers can be and frequently are misused and misinterpreted. I can't keep up with it any more than I can keep up with all the musical sub-genres.
I guess I would describe myself as a "pragmatic liberal," but that would probably put me in the same camp with "neo-liberals" once a rather mild indicator but now mainly a term of abuse from those who consider themselves more purely progressive.
When a soi-disant "Conservative" asks me that question, I say: "To you, I'm a goddamn Marxist. To a Marxist, I'm a MAGA like you."
When a soi-disant "Progressive" asks me that question, I say: "To you, I'm Neoliberal scum, but to Neoliberals I'm a bomb-throwing anarchist."
Well said!
How about " a decent human being trying to make sense of life as it presents itself who is generous in sharing observations, thoughts and opinions for others to consider". I have given up trying to pound myself into a definition.
How about "complex."
On Breitbart I say I'm a Communist. That always gets a good response.
I think you're a pretty mainstream liberal. You're trending slightly small-c conservative on some things, which is sort of normal, aging - I am, too. Things I don't pay attention to keep moving while my mental context of them is stuck in the past. And I can't pay attention to everything.
What makes you unusual is (a) you are exceptionally well-informed compared to Joe Normal, and (b) you have the excellent habit of verifying your instincts, or not trusting your gut, or marking your beliefs to market, or however you choose to express that. And I tend to think having a head full of stats is a very useful thing, in terms of quick first-order reasoning about political things.
I also like 'social democrat', but earnestly using that in the US as a self-description is somewhere between communicatively useless and setting yourself up for grief.
I agree! Numeracy helps a lot in remaining reality based.
At the moment I feel politically homeless. My concern about males in women's prisons (in California prisons, right now, the solution is . . . distributing condoms) apparently takes away my "liberal" credentials?
Because I won't go along with a new seemingly religious belief that men can become women and should be allowed into women's spaces and onto women's sports teams, I'm an apostate and pretty much a Trump supporter. The fury with which I am attacked when I bring this up in lefty spaces just shows me how this is closer to a religion than a philosophy.
Probably a Biden voter, and right now that's good enough for me, cuz it means I can go find other people to vote for Biden.
"ultrawoke fanatic"
(eye roll)
That said, I agree that the smart play is to state positions on some suite of issues rather than waste time on a label, because the meaning of a label is constantly being co-opted by one side or the other.
Drum supports DEI, so he is a progressive. I don't know any liberals who support it.
Moderate Democrat. Sidesteps the woke vibe on the front end and the baggage thats in the cargo hold of Liberal on the back end.
Thoughtful people recognize Democrats are a multivariate coalition (with herding instincts akin to cats) and will assume you mean what they mean by the terms…
And anyone else who thinks your a (commy-pinko, tax & spend, white replacer, defunder, pedo groomer) based on it is going to be unmoved by even the most clever re-branding
I know it's inaccurate geographically, but I'd go for "Silicon Valley Liberal." (I would also accept "data wonk liberal" but I think that's become meaningless.) You aren't the libertarian variety, the ones who want widespread guns and don't want the government taxing them to pay for things, but who still express concern for certain social and environmental issues.
But you have faith in data and in trying to identify and solve problems by gathering a very specific sort of information and performing analyses on it. Fiscally you're both in the "socialist" camp (not that America uses that term sensibly with regard to politics) and on the moderate side, as evinced in your position on things like student loan forgiveness and welfare (right opposes both, left supports both, you are suspicious that they're in any way equivalent).
OTOH, socially you're liberal in some respects but still using "woke" unironically. You're suspicious about stories that support the idea of institutional racism in the absence of hard data. That's suggestive to me of a particular sort of life experience, especially working-life, that I'd characterize more with Silicon Valley than, say, Hollywood. I doubt you had conversations with Black coworkers about how often in a week someone used the "N-word" around them, and if you attended a Homeowner's Association meeting and someone suggested building a fence because he sees "those people" walking through the neighborhood in the afternoon, "those people" isn't a code for Black people. (It might be code for immigrants, or the unhoused, or maybe your neighborhood already has a fence and nobody needs to say anything.)
Your response to people overreacting to racism, then, is to wonder why they think it helps their cause to be so histrionic. You don't have the personal context to see that when someone is (metaphorically) punched in the face several times a week, they might seem to overreact when someone condescendingly pats their cheek in a sore spot because, for them, that was the last straw. (Of course if people keep ignoring and minimizing your pain, you will respond by getting louder and louder if you don't give up.) And you turn to data to look for evidence of the systemic racism at the heart of these complaints, not to people's stories about their lives, which is why I'm saying "Silicon Valley liberal." People's experiences become real if their claims can be substantiated. That's not as global a principle of present-day liberalism as you might think.
" I'd go for "Silicon Valley Liberal."
That is, a progressive.
I call myself "center-left" these days, or if I want to be more specific, "left of center but not woke".
"Pragmatic liberal" is another good one, I might start using that.
A voter.
All the politico-governmental identifiers, from "democrat" to "fascist" to "communist" and the whole magilla have degenerated into meaningless epithets in These United States. If you're talking to a Regular Joe, none of the careful distinctions and parsing and modifications and the whole yada yada will be anything but more of that dam librul blather.
Don't try to explain. As they say, when you're explaining, you're losing. And yes, the Enlightenment has failed.
Depending on the issue, I range between FDR Democrat and Eisenhower Republican, which I would say, these days, makes me center-left.
Old.
FDR is a highway, right?
You're a Democrat.
Until somewhat recently I called myself a progressive, but that label has mostly morphed from "someone who really wants universal health care" into "somehow who is singularly focused on identity politics".
I've been calling myself a "Labor Democrat" these days... basically an economic progressive who thinks MLK's mountaintop is a melting pot, not the Balkans.
I'm pretty sure I recall Kevin describing himself as more liberal than 90% of Americans. However, I tend to think of him as similar to Jonathan Chait (whom I have also long liked), who describes himself as center-left. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sing to "The Joker" Steve Miller band (modify as needed):
I'm a drummer
I'm a strummer
I'm a stunner
and I'm a bummer
...wait, WHAT!!!
For the most part, you seem to me to be openminded and skeptical, but less openminded and more skeptical. That makes you a conservative. If you were more openminded and less skeptical, then you would be a progressive.
Other times, you come across as cynical about some ideas and thus naive about other ideas. For example, you wrote: "I'll become religious man just as soon as everyone can agree on which religion it should be."
In this case, I'm the conservative. I'm very skeptical that you're not expressing cynical rhetoric and only a tiny bit openminded that it's a real challenge.
"My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness." - Dalai Lama
I tend to use the word "sensible".
Reactionary centrist seems most apt to be honest. In the mold of Chait. Yglesias etc. Claim to be center or center left but consistently only punch left. as you have in this post "
this
That just belies your own biases. Kevin consistently dunks on the right, you just don't see it. "Hack gap," anyone? How is this punching left?
Calling Kevin reactionary is pretty reactionary!
Flaming Liberal seems to have all the right connotations from this cat.