Truth in Labeling

Conservative? Liberal? Radical? Right-wing Reactionary? Socialist? Communist? Fascist?

From Primary Election Day a month ago here in Missouri, now heading into the election season, these words will continue to be bandied about more and more.

Here’s my problem with trying to label people, especially with the goal of either demonizing or lionizing them. You don’t get to provide both the label AND the definition, because there is no single definition. In the same way you can’t cherry pick your quotes from the Founders (and retain any claim to intellectual honesty), you can’t label me AND provide your own personalized (or, even worse, rehashed from some polarizing group) definition of me.

Want to call me a liberal? Okay, but I get to say what “liberal” means, because YOU don’t really know what I believe, in all its complexity.

Labeling is just one more attempt to reduce civil discourse to simple bumper sticker slogans. My dad used to quote a boss who said, “When you find the solution it will be simple.” I would add, “…and at least incomplete if not wrong.” Even going back to the Founders (with their diverse points of view), society and life was far too complex to be etched so simply.

Cases in point. Thomas Jefferson, occasional hero to the conservative political wing in the United States. Never mind that he was feared by the then conservatives as a dangerous radical, whose skepticism about Christianity made him a heathen in the eyes of most of the devout. Would it have been accurate to label him, “Thomas Jefferson, the rapist”? Offended? Could Sally Hemmings, his slave, have said, “No”? Simple, and simply biased, ignoring inconvenient evidence, like most of the memes you find on Facebook.

I’ve never understood why the Tea Party crowd has allied themselves with what today would be considered acts of terrorism. Tarring and feathering was not a harmless pastime. Burning the governor’s house, certainly an act of terror. Destroying private property in the form of tons of tea, criminal vandalism at its most generous appraisal. (Did you know the tea being shoveled into Boston Harbor, which remained polluted for all its citizens for a long time, piled up so high it actually starting spilling back into the ship from whence it came?) Remember, at this point the colonies had not declared independence, were not at war.

Had the British won the Revolution, certainly a realistic possibility, THEY certainly would not have celebrated such thuggery. 

Neither can you grab a label and make it a positive. Conservative? Lovely. You get Alexander Hamilton, the big government advocate and pet of George Washington, who sided with him against Jefferson on virtually every big issue. You were on the wrong side of history when it came to the American Revolution (Tories were, and are, conservative), the Constitution itself (Conservatives of the time feared the encroachment of a too powerful national government), abolition and slavery, women’s rights and suffrage, civil rights.... Proud of that are we? Liberal? Do you really want to be associated with the anarchists and Communists of the late 19th and early 20th century? Thought not.

I don’t have answers to the incredibly complex problems that face our increasingly complex society. However, I am certain that simplistic labels are not going to help us find those answers.

I would have sworn I had published this previously (I was looking for a different piece), but only the draft version exists on my "posts list." Apologies if this is a repeat.