POLITICAL LABELS!

Yes, political labels. The little verbal signifiers we give ourselves in order to identify ourselves as part of a greater political whole. Whether you’re a liberal, conservative, libertarian, fascist or communist, you’ve adopted the label in order to show that you hold to a set of core principles.

Except, that’s not quite true, is it? Long gone are the days when identifying yourself as a liberal aligned you with the ideas exposed by liberal philosophers. If a modern liberal went back and had a discussion with the likes of John Locke, John Stuart Mill or Ludwig Von Mises, they’d sooner identify you as some kind of socialist than a true liberal. 

If you’re a conservative, it’s very likely you’ve never even heard of Thomas Hobbes or Edmund Burke, much less considered their ideas and if you’re American the very idea of protecting traditional state institutions probably seems laughable to you. Yet, nonetheless, those are conservative positions few conservatives actually believe in. 

Are you maybe a libertarian? If so the alignment with founding libertarians is a lot easier for you because it is a relatively young ideology. Yet even then there are a shocking number of libertarians who have never even heard of Murray Rothbard, Hans Hermann Hoppe, Martin Friedman, or Rose Wilder Lane, much less identify with their ideas. 

The only ideologies that seem to fully engage with their founding philosophies are those at the political extremes. Communists won’t shut up about praxis and first principles, even if many of them haven’t picked up a book in their entire life. Fascists too also have a much higher percentage of adherents well-versed in the writings that birthed their beliefs. Perhaps political extremism breeds a desire to delve deep into the philosophy of your chosen position, maybe because there are so few adherents relative to the more popular positions that being able to argue your case becomes a necessity. Maybe political extremism is just very attractive to autists. Who’s to say really?

Regardless, there does seem to be a rather balanced set of pros and cons when it comes to political labels. Today, we will explore a few of them so that we might gain a better understanding of political labels as a concept and decide for ourselves if we want to keep using them or unshackle ourselves from the concept and move forward as political lone wolves. First, we’ll start with the pros. 

So it goes without saying that human beings are social creatures, with brains that work out issues by compartmentalising them into different categories. I think it is safe to say that on a human level, this is the origin of political labels. Liberal, conservatives, libertarians and more are all labels we have created to describe groups that we in our minds have sorted certain political policies and philosophies into in order to have an easier time describing certain beliefs to each other and understanding them ourselves. 

When you say to someone “being against immigration is a conservative policy” you are ascribing a label to that belief for the sake of collectivising that belief into a group category of beliefs to make it easier to understand. The label itself has its own philosophical and political connotations, and so by putting that label on a particular belief or policy you are linking it to that label with said connotations. 

In this sense, one could easily come to the conclusion that political labels are a very natural expression of political belief. One may even say they are inevitable, as without them communicating one's beliefs becomes a lot harder and goes against our natural ways of communicating as human beings. If this is the case then surely political labels are positive, because for the reasons above they make political engagement easier for everyone and allow even the most uneducated person to have a basic understanding of politics and the implications of supporting or rejecting a political party or regime. 

However, this does not mean that political labels cannot be warped to mean something in the realm of politics that it does not mean in the realm of philosophy. A great example is describing yourself as a liberal. If you are describing yourself as a liberal in the modern western political paradigm, it is very likely you support at least some of the policies and belief systems that inform the current status quo. In contrast, if you were to be a liberal as described in the philosophical works that formed the ideology it is very unlikely you are happy with the current status quo.

This is because political liberalism and philosophical liberalism have become two very different beasts, and thus the political label of liberal has come to mean something very different from what it once did. As a result of this difference, if you are aware of it, describing yourself as a liberal if you are one in the philosophical sense may be somewhat difficult as it will bunch you in with a lot of political actors with whom you may very well disagree. This is not untrue for other political ideologies either. 

As a result of these differences between philosophy and pure politics in describing one's beliefs in the political realm, these parent ideologies have often begun to fracture into sub-ideologies to differentiate themselves from their counterparts who exist within the same parent ideology but with some key differences in terms of the policies they support. Neo-Conservatism and Paleoconservatism are two very good examples of conservative ideologies that are quite different in the politics they promote despite both being nominally conservative, their supporters often hating each other as much as they do any liberal, libertarian, communist or fascist. 

In this sense, political labels can be seen as negative, as they have been shown over time to fracture as differences that begin minor start to expand over time due to a shift in the alignment between the political and the philosophical. This fracturing is potentially limitless and eventually will lead back to the individual standing alone in their own belief system separate from everyone else, effectively making political labels useless. 

So what do you think, are political labels a net positive or negative for political engagement? I will leave that up to you to decide. But whatever you decide, understand that even if you do not put labels on other people, others will almost certainly put labels on you. This is the truth of politics, it's best to understand and accept this going forward.