Some of my friends and family don’t understand why I like Obama. They say that he’s too liberal.

Too "Liberal"? If so, the word has become seriously inflated in recent years. I largely blame the polarization of American politics for this shift. For the last 20 years the Dems and GOP have been increasingly at each other’s throats, and I think they have felt the need to magnify the differences between the parties in order to keep their "base" firmly in their respective camps. As a result, people become blind to the historical significance of the labels that they use -- and when a word becomes detached from its meaning, it stops being a tool of reason and becomes a weapon suitable only for emotional manipulation.

For some perspective, I refer you to The Political Compass, a website that has been run by British political scientists for about the last ten years. They rank the political candidates along two axes, economic (left/right) and social (authoritarian/libertarian). As they point out in their commentary, even an "extremist" candidate like Kucinich is only a moderate social democrat when examined from a historical perspective. As a point of comparison, take a look at the migration of the British political parties from 1972 to the present.


In the Republican primary, Romney and Huckabee were considered two of the more "conservative" candidates -- yet they called for a national health care plan and increasing services to the poor, two causes that have been considered "liberal" in my lifetime.

At the same time, we have a "liberal" candidate -- Obama -- calling for the reinstitution of the "Pay As You Go" rules of budgeting, which state that the government must balance new expenditures against spending cuts or tax increases. This concept of not spending money you don’t have was long a bedrock principle of fiscal conservatism. What’s more, in his second book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama states that his guiding philosophy in government is as follows: "That we will do collectively, through our government, only those things we cannot do as well or at all individually and privately. In other words, we should be guided by what works." Who was his inspiration for that concept? None other than Abraham Lincoln, one of the biggest heroes of the Republican Party.

These examples illustrate a simple fact: the two major parties in this country are really not very far apart on substantive issues of policy. If any Democrat were out there actively calling for the sorts of policies and initiatives that defined the Progressive/liberal movement of 80 years ago, they’d be laughed out of Washington. Ditto for any Republican calling for radical economic deregulation. Huckabee severely damaged his credibility just by calling for the replacement of the income tax with a flat consumption tax.

The true economic liberals and true economic conservatives are both endangered species in this country. As the Political Compass demonstrates, nearly everyone in American politics today is in a relatively narrow band of being moderately authoritarian on social issues and moderately free-market on economic issues. The real differences that separate politicians from one another now are questions about administrative competence, integrity, honesty, and the practical approaches to doing the things that most people seem to agree need to be done.

There’s plenty of room for difference of opinion on those practical concerns, as well as on issues that aren’t really liberal or conservative in nature (such as the question of what to do about the Iraq war). But I will no longer be scared away by someone slapping a label on a politician, be it "liberal" or "conservative" or whatever. I’m going to look at that person as an individual and see what they’re proposing and whether their life matches up with what they say they believe.

’Cause when you get right down to it, labels ain’t worth as much as they used to be.