The identifying terms we use (and the political history behind them)
Today's political climate has all sorts of terms being thrown around with varying meanings and history behind them. There are Liberals (political ideology for FREEDUM), and Liberals (foreign policy), and Liberals (economic policy), and Liberals ("conservatives"), and Liberals ("centrist, anti-absolute monarchists"), and Liberals ("democrats"), and Liberals (some other field that annoys the shit out of me). There are Progressives, and Conservatives, Nationalists, Socialists, Social Democrats, unreconstructed Monarchists, Reconstructed Monarchists, Anarchists, and I'm sure some other political identity that I've missed.
So, given the rather long list of ways to identify politically, and the just about as long history for those ways to identify politically, I thought we should have a discussion focused exclusively on the political history of the terms we used.
So, the questions:
1. What terms do you commonly use to describe yourself and others in your political environment?
2. What is the relevant history that informs the way you use common political terms to describe yourself and others?
3. Got any links, movies, books, etc., that delve into that history?
This has the potential to get hairy because of how broad it is, so I'm going to try to remind people of some best practices that I use when engaging in meaningful discussion:
- Understand before criticizing. - Be able to frame someone's view in a way that they can agree with themselves before critiquing their view. Questions are your friend, but make sure the questions are focused on better understanding someone's view, not on biasing reactions to a view.
- Assume good faith. - Calling people "trolls" makes me very angry. Don't do it. For any reason. To anyone. If your case is so bulletproof that you'd be willing to call someone out for it here, take it to @Deimos instead. I don't want to read it here.
- I Could Be Wrong - There is nothing wrong with having confidence in your view, but there should be some part of you that recognizes you can be wrong about whatever claim you make. Nothing is 100%. Absolutely Only Sith Deal In Absolutes, etc.
At the same time, the First world war led to a split between revolutionary socialists (communists, socialists) and those who belief in gradual reform without the need for violent revolution to restart society. In the Germanic languages, the term "social democrat" comes from German politics, where the SPD-party embraced that term and mainstreamed it.
The rise of labor-based parties building on workers' rights leads to the European historical split between "bourgeois" conservative parties that quite literally are intent on conserving the status quo. Antonymous to that are those who wish to liberalize first voting rights, then other rights, the liberals.
that the same time, the English-language books on the topic I've encountered are partisan to show either "yes this is good" or "no this isn't as good as people suggest" rather than delving into history or documenting how the current situation came about.
Marxist
I'd prefer to call myself a communist or a socialist but these terms have been so muddied that they're totally useless, at least in American political discourse. Bernie Sanders is not a socialist. Hillary Clinton is definitely not a socialist, nor is Barack Obama. Communism does not mean USSR 2: Electric Boogaloo. I'd also prefer if "liberal" could be used in the economic sense more often, the current use as a synonym for "democrat" obscures that the two main parties fundamentally agree on the economy.
I don't know too much about the history of the terms themselves, I imagine the cold war had a lot to do with conflating anything further left than the "mainstream liberals" with communism / socialism.
Can you explain to me why Clinton, Sanders, and Obama are not considered socialists even though they advocate for programs such as healthcare to be "socialized?" I have heard many people call Bernie a communist, or at the very least a socialist, and I tend to disagree with them although I can't articulate very well why I disagree, and I guess it might come down to how one defines Socialism.
In a simplistic sense, socialism means that workers own the means of production, rather than capital owning production. There are two main ways that workers could own production (such as a factory):
The factory could be owned by a democratically elected government, which represents the workers and owns the factory on their behalf.
The workers could directly own the factory they work in (be their own employers).
There's a lot more nuance to socialism, but that's the "TL;DR" version.
Merely suggesting that the government should pay for medical services which are provided by privately owned companies is not socialism. The name for that type of thing is "social democracy": basically it's a capitalist society with a strong government-funded welfare sector.
Socialism is "the people" owning and operating the means of production. If the means of production are in private hands, you don't have socialism. "The people" can vary by form, for example: the state, worker co-ops, some form of communal ownership/delegation, etc.
Hm. This is a hard one for me. I would use the term independent to describe my literal state of mind, but it doesn't seem to mean what I think it means. Is there a term for I'm-tired-of-people-fighting-instead-of-cooperating-and-compromising?
Is there a term for "We should help people but somehow that shyte needs to be paid for?" Is there a group for "Yes, I understand short term losses, but what about long term socio-economic health for the country?" Is there a phrase for "If you can't discuss differences politely, how about you insert your argument and ranting without lube?"
I seem to be considered moderately liberal as described in the US. I'm not sure what that is called elsewhere. Centrist? Crazy? Idealistic? Sane? I would rather be acknowledged as pragmatic. Movie/play wise re: Wag the Dog, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and The Lady's Not For Burning.
Those are interesting plays you reference. I know Wag the Dog, (presidential comedy poking a great deal of dark fun at the first Gulf War and the presidency of George HW Bush), but I'm not familiar with the other two. From reading up on them, it seems like you have rather unflattering views of how the ideologues go about exercising their power. Is that right or am I missing another component that those plays help ground for you?
Those two plays also have a great deal of dark fun. If you have the chance to see R&G soon after Hamlet, please take the chance!
I think that the sum of all three productions might be that there are people trying their best as they see it, people who are not, and people who are all in for themselves. It results in a gigantic chaos - like a computer you get out what you put in, of course. So I make what sense of it I can, vote, express my opinions...and laugh. :)
I've always struggled with labels, political or otherwise. There's far too many (for me) to find the one best suited to me, especially if one doesn't have a fully understanding of all the nuances within a belief system. For example, a lot of the complexities of global economics are lost on me, so that limits how accurately I can apply any given ideology to myself, as they all have their own stance on global economics.
Generally speaking, I call myself 'Liberal'. If I'm in an environment in which I need to be more descriptive, I'll use 'Progressive'. If we want to really try and nail down how I identify, the closest I've found so far are 'Techno-Progressive', or 'Singularitarian', but those border more on philosophical than explicitly political.
No media behind any of these labels come to mind, which could be a factor in why I have time committing to any of them. But, I also find labels limiting at times. There isn't always the flexibility within a label that reflects outside factors or exceptions.
Dirty hippies (i'm only half-kidding). I'm Dutch, voted the past few times for a leftist party (GL). If wiki should be believed it's left-wing, green, etc. My 'political environment' is quite diverse, i.e. not only like-minded people, so I'll just describe myself: I'm leftist in economic terms, with some internal struggle on the libertarian-authoritarian scale (if we're using the political compass at least). Using that site I place bottom left (i.e. libertarian/left), but in practice and when using who-should-you-vote-for tools I end up not-quite-as-left and more centrist wrt lib/auth.
I guess the easiest way, and a neat way to pull away slightly from the left-right dichotomy while not being completely alien is the political compass I just linked (I'd highly suggest it! It only takes like 10 minutes, and gives some cool insights). But in practice, also due to knowing people all over the political spectrum, I stay away from any cliché political terms, because like you showed there's twenty ways to interpret each one, and everyone assumes everyone else is using their definition. So I try to taboo myself (quote: "When you find yourself in philosophical difficulties, the first line of defense is not to define your problematic terms, but to see whether you can think without using those terms at all.").
I try to think of myself as not set in stone (while knowing vaguely in which area I fit), so I'm not sure. I'm trying to read up on things more, but I've got little time/motivation, tbh. I guess it tends to be less books, and more the type of people and their thoughts that draw me towards certain labels? Any cool recommendations would be much appreciated, though!
I'll answer the first two questions simultaneously.
I often have to take a long, deep breath before I say that I see myself as a Liberal. Then I have to qualify it saying something to the effect of preferring for institutions to work, policy to be based on evidence, and for change to generally be incremental unless there is a damn good reason to go fast (and I have high standards for what a "damn good reason" is). The long breath and intensely qualified answer is precisely for a little of what I've signaled already about the term "liberal": there are only a few more definitions for the term "liberal" than there are people who interact with it.
I typically see the term "Liberal" has having its roots in representative democracy, the enlightenment ideals of rationalism, empiricism, value for individual rights to free speech, freedom to choose how to make a living, freedom of association (within reason; but see: terrorism), and an increased reliance on markets as a primary tool for resource distribution (while also being aware of its most common pitfalls and weaknesses).
I am emphatically not a Progressive in the way I've seen the term used in American politics. I have no desire to ever tell anyone what relationship they should have with alcohol, assuming they aren't driving while inebriated. I have little desire to preach state-enforced answers to moral questions. Progressives, in my mind, are defined by the long history of moral prescriptivism that the term has been used to promote since the 1880s. Yay for women's voting rights, increased rights even within a marriage, and bodily autonomy generally, but you didn't need to be a Progressive to necessarily come on board with the idea that women are people too. You could just as well have been a secular humanist with other political preferences, which is probably a better way to describe my default.
I am emphatically not a socialist. I believe in property rights. The market is, and should remain, the default preference for how to solve most resource distribution issues fairly. The market is prone to consolidation. The market is prone to manipulation when information imbalances are in play. The market is prone to exploiting the vulnerable so that the powerful can get an extra leg up. These are truths that any good government can have a meaningful role in addressing, but the market is the appropriate default until proven incapable.
To the third question! (Edit: And still a bit of the second question, now that I re-read this.)
A lot of how I see "Progressive" as a term is tied up with the history of the Prohibition, women's suffrage, eugenics, child labor laws, and general moral prescriptivism that I see echoing still within the rhetoric of modern Progressives even today. This idea that the government's role is to enforce a moral code, and specifically this moral code. I'm not a big fan of that, so I end up being a pretty unreliable ally to Progressives. Kevin Burns' and Lynn Novick's "Prohibition" miniseries is a good starting point if you want the broadstrokes overview of this period in US history.
Socialism has a more distinct connection with 1800s history for me, outside of the red scares that dotted the American landscape in the early 20th century. I typically associate Socialism, for better or worse, with French revolutionaries (and other European ethnicities in 1848, but who can resist focusing on the French?) who broke with their liberal compatriots and helped ensure that neither political group would permanently wrestle political control from conservatives for generations after that. But to Socialism's credit, I also associate socialism with union movements, and attempting to establish a better balance between workers and the people who give the workers their paychecks. Mike Duncun's "Revolutions" podcast has a good collection of episodes that deal explicitly with the efforts of the earliest moments of Socialism as a movement.
Liberalism for me tends to get wound up in the writing of people like Adam Smith (about as liberal a guy as existed in the 1700s), Alexander Hamilton (and Madison, Jay, and the federalist papers more generally), deTocqueville, and Isben's play "Enemy of the People."
We tend to label people by the political party they vote for: he's a Liberal voter, she's a Labor voter. More generally, we group the various parties as "right-wing" (Liberal Party, National Party, One Nation, Australian Conservatives, Shooters & Fishers, Christian Democrats), or "centrist" (Nick Xenophon Team, Derryn Hinch Party), or "left-wing" (Labor Party, Greens, Reason Party).
Huh?
See above.
I consider myself a politically informed person, but I think I failed this test about political terms.
I don't think you failed; you seem very well versed in political terms. I just don't know what the terms mean when applied to a non-US country.
Are you a centrist? Australian conservative? Which party do you identify with, and is it concerned with welfare? Big business models or smaller entrepreneurs? I'm kind of curious what platform you would run on if you ran for office?
I tend not to explicitly label my personal politics on these forums. It's a habit from when I moderated political subreddits and had to avoid even the perception of bias. And, given that this is the same username I use on Reddit, and it's possible I might end up moderating those subreddits again at some future time, I'd rather not share my labels. I created a whole separate account on Reddit through which to share my political views; "Algernon" reflects the part of me that's interested in the machinery of government and the operation of politics, rather than the partisan political activist part of me (I am not only a paid-up member of my preferred political party, but have previously been involved as a branch secretary and so on).
I will say that I'm in favour of social welfare (but won't say to what degree).
As for big business or smaller entrepreneurs, I don't see these as mutually exclusive options: "porque no los dos?" Capitalism is capitalism, whether the capital comes from a single person or from a large group of people. I'm not sure what the distinction is here. Here in Australia, the political divide is more between employers and employees, business and labour, than between different types of business. Our right-wing parties advocate for all business, large and small, while our left-wing parties advocate for the employees of those businesses (large and small).
Oh...
Now I'm confused. To me, the thread was asking what party you or I personally identify with, what that means for those not from the same political area, and examples in media of some of the ideals: news, fiction, or otherwise.
So I'm not sure why you posted to this topic if you don't want to say, but I'm glad you did. I don't know much about politics in Australia, so your explanation was very interesting to me. :)
To me, the thread was about what political labels we use in my country, and why:
Sure, the OP wrote a big long screed about their personal political opinions but, in my perception, that wasn't the question that they asked.
It was part of the question I asked.
And that was followed up with a political-history tie-in too. The history of the term "liberal" for instance, is so specific to the political environment that we're talking about that it is basically pointless to talk about being a liberal devoid of that backdrop. People seem generally familiar with the idea that an American liberal can also be a socialist because of the weird political union that Democrats, Progressives, Unionists, and outright communists made in the early 20th century, but maybe they don't know so much about that particular union being the reason why the US understanding of "Liberal" is so distinct from, say, Germany where the liberals turned on their socialist compatriots and both sides ended up hating one another.
I suppose I read that sentence grouping myself in with the others: "What terms do you commonly use to describe yourself and others in your political environment?" - as in, I'm just part of the group of politically engaged people here in Australia. Especially seeing as the focus of your question seemed to be the political terms we all use in discussion ("the identifying terms we use"), rather than our individual political views. If you wanted to know my personal political views, I would have expected a more direct question like "What are your personal political views?"
Exactly. Here in Australia, the term "liberal" has been owned by the Liberal Party since it was created over 70 years ago. If you call someone a "liberal" here in Australia, you mean "a voter for the Liberal Party", rather than anything else. And, the Liberal Party is so called because it supports a liberal, or free-market, economy. It's economic liberalism, rather than social liberalism. Further to that, over the past 30 years or so, the Liberal Party has moved towards a very conservative stance on social issues: it is socially illiberal.
We Aussies therefore have to mentally translate the American "liberal" into something like "progressive" to make sense of what you're all referring to.