"Diversity is not our strength": Cincy's own Ramaswamy 2024!

[Dill]

(08-09-2023, 05:21 PM)Synric Wrote: While some Democrats supported war "Liberals" and "Left" were considered pacifists and were against fighting
Reasons like this is why words like Liberals Left Conservatives Right etc do not work.

Don't recall any "liberals" who were pacifists and against fighting. Some could have been, sure. Not common though. But all pacifists were not liberals or leftist, either. Think of Jehovah's Witnesses and the Amish.

Terms like "liberals," "conservatives," "left," and "right" work pretty well when we define them with a bias towards conceptual clarity and traditional usages. And when we carefully contextualize them, keeping in mind they may usefully describe majority behavior without assuming "no exceptions." E.g., "liberal" ideals and behavior in 1776 could very well be "conservative" in 1880. Bill Clinton, Hilary, and Obama are not Leftists, but liberal centrists. (or maybe "neoliberal").  

When I came of age in the '60s, post McCarthy, I recall hearing no one calling liberals "leftists" except the fringe right (e.g., John Birch Society, and  segregationists who often called Civil Rights protesters "Communists."). I never saw anything like that from a national platform until Limbaugh and Gringrich in the late '80s and early '90s.  Now we see the terms "liberal" and "leftist" frequently conflated. One major accomplishment of the New Right has been to shift perception of the spectrum so far rightward that the term "leftist" now routinely includes even neoliberals. And the goal was not greater analytic clarity. 

One consequence of that is that people may be more inclined to project present (conflated) labels into the past. 

If you think of liberals and conservatives in the '60s as much more similar than now, and both major parties suffused with each, it might be easier to see why I remember "liberals" not simply supporting the Vietnam War but leading the nation ever more deeply into it. It was not only Johnson, but the majority of the Dem party until 1969--a party against whom the Left (no quotation marks) protested.