Redefining our political shorthand

By Ned Andrews

In today's fast-paced, media-oriented world, we need some sort of political shorthand that will allow us to classify a broad array of views with a single term. The terms that we've chosen, "liberal" and "conservative," do a good job of reflecting the political alignments and viewpoints that our legislators tend to hold. Under the umbrella of these terms, however, they conceal the hypocrisies inherent in the inconsistent positions of the so-called "pure liberals" and "pure conservatives," and legitimize these inconsistencies by making them part of the institution that the terms represent.

SHAWN CHENG/YH

First of all, both "liberal" and "conservative" are misnomers. Liberals don't always stand for liberty, and conservatives don't want to conserve the existing social and moral order. But the contradictions extend far beyond the names. In fact, these "pure" terms denote ideologies about as impure as you can get.

I'll begin by criticizing the conservatives. Because of their attempts to play toward certain interest groups and voting blocs, their contradictions don't follow any overarching pattern but rather concern individual instances in which they sacrifice ideology for mass appeal. Today's conservatives detest health-care subsidies but favor subsidies for farmers. They support the absolute protection of the Second Amendment, yet they advocate the dilution and suppression of the First, pushing a specific religion into schools, and attempting to institute Internet censorship and prohibit flag burning. They trust the citizenry with weapons but not with drugs that harm only the users. In the case of drugs, there's also the question of why conservative drug policies do not apply to tobacco. The list goes on.

Now for the liberals. Their self-contradictions may not be as point-by-point or as blatant as are those of conservatives, but they're still present. Under the guise of an attempt to ensure equality and "social justice," liberals unjustly employ the arms of our government. They oppose attempts to reinstitute religion in schools but at the same time attempt to force conformity to the preconceived moral agenda of the lower-case "great society." Liberals supposedly believe in care for the individual, but advocate stripping others of their individuality with massive social programs doling out benefits according to formulas and statistics. Liberals' support of affirmative action denies both the 14th Amendment and the corresponding concept of equality that their policy pretends to maintain. The Social Security system, intended to make retirement better, is a ballooning pyramid scheme that severely impairs our own ability to save now by returning our money only after it is decimated by inflation and loss of investment opportunity if it doesn't self-destruct before it pays any benefits at all.

The inconsistencies of these political shorthand terms are a major basis of the public's view of the government as convoluted and inscrutable. Instead of standing around and sniping, however, I would like to propose an alternative. I advocate the realignment of today's political dipoles into "libertarian" and "socialist" (or maybe "populist"). On the one hand, you would have the "libertarians," individualists who want the government out of their lives from both economic, social and moral perspectives. On the opposing side is the "socialist/populist camp," that believes that government can dictate a desirable moral and socioeconomic order and can use legal and financial means to back up these goals. True, these terms may carry some negative connotations for many people. However, this new terminology would help expose the inconsistencies in today's policies and restore a proper perspective to the political dialectic.

Ned Andrews is a freshman in Saybrook.

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