Liberal. Conservative.  These terms have lost all meaning in recent years. They are effectively political party names in terms of usefulness as a description.  We need new names.  But what should they be?

Many people have pointed out that American politics is over-simplified.  Two political parties? Two political philosophies? Nonsense.  I have come to agree with them.

So for the sake of this exercise I've devised 6 political philosophies that permeate the American politic.

• Moderate Libertarians (not the political party)
• Capitalists
• The Religious Right Movement
• Social Justice Movement
• Transnational Progressives
• Nationalists

Some of these political movements overlap considerably.  For the sake of our exercise (so that we can agree on terminology at least) here are some common political issues and their positions:

+ = favors, - = opposes, / = neutral, * = no consensus

Now we don't necessarily need to agree on the positions for the labels since the labels are arbitrary. I could have named them View #1, View #2, etc.  But hopefully the names roughly correspond with what you (the reader) think those of that view would favor/oppose on the various issues.  The shaded values are my positions on a given issue. In the event there are multiple philosophies with the same view, I shaded the one that I felt closest matched my reasoning for having that position.

Here's what I had in mind:

The Libertarians essentially are the group that believes that individuals should be in control of their destinies and that the government has no business interfering. The government's basic justification for existence is to keep people from resorting to violence.  If they had their way, the government would largely be basically the police, courts, and military. 

The Capitalists are the group that believes that capitalism can solve everything. The free market is king and whenever something -- anything -- goes wrong then "the market" will present a solution if left alone.

The Religions Right are the group that believes we are one nation, under God and want to ensure that we live in a moral (by their definition) society.

Nationalists are the group that believes that the United States has a special place in the world and a mission to make the world safe for democracy. American values and traditions should be spread aggressively across the world to make a better world.

The Social Justice crowd believe that life should be more fair for all of our citizens and that the government should play the role of social umpire.  The haves and have-nots should be kept within reason.

The Transnational Progressives see themselves as citizens of the world. In their mind, the future belongs to them as an international order will create a safer more civilized world.

Today's modern conservatives are often made up by people like Tucker Carlson who are essentially libertarians.  But capitalists and religious right get lumped in there as well even though they all have very different views from one another. Similarly, the nationalists are in there as well.  Today's modern liberals get the latter two groups lumped in mostly. 

Left vs. Right

In a recent article I argued that the liberal philosophy was dying in the United States because its proponents were not effectively advocating the legitimacy of their issues.  Those who disagreed with me tried to argue that both sides have their extremes and that I was basically just ranting about those who disagreed with my views.  And while that is true that some conservatives are intolerant and nutty the reality is that, overwhelmingly, regardless of where you look today, the ones who resort to violence or extreme tactics are almost universally on the left.  But which left?

It's no coincidence that my chart above is broken into six columns. While each group is not quite proportionally divided, I think it's grossly accurate.  That is, roughly 1/6th of the American population is "The Christian Right".  1/6th is Libertarian. 1/6th Transnational Progressives, and so forth.  

Since liberals tend to make up the left-two columns, that means their support is only, at most, 1/3rd with the other 2/3rd being conservative.  If you take the middle half of each group, you end up with 1/6th liberal, 2/6ths conservative, and 3/6ths (half) "moderate".  Incidentally, in the 2004 election, 21% of people described themselves as liberal, 45% as moderate, and 34% as conservative.  Which, if described in terms of 6ths comes out to what I just postulated.

I think one of the reasons why the modern liberal ideology is losing steam (in my opinion) is that they've not changed (I mentioned this last time) and as a result, have lost a lot of support amongst the Libertarian side of things.  Pure libertarians have a lot in common with liberals -- pro-choice, pro-legalized drugs, anti-death penalty.  I think what we've seen in American politics is the libertarians (not talking about the Libertarian party) have ended up siding more and more with the group lumped together as "conservatives".

Part of the reason that I think there are fewer liberals today is, like I said previously, many liberals have started treating their philosophy as a religion with no room for heretics. You either buy into the whole line or you're out. As many have written, modern liberals are often incredibly intolerant of opposing views because they see those who oppose them as being uncivilized, unenlightened and downright "evil".  And while there are conservatives that are the same way they don't make up anywhere near the same percentage of the conservative movement.  You can demonize Christians as being a bunch of "hateful bigots" all day but they only make up around 1/6th of the population (in the 2004 election, the CNN exit poll showed they were about 20%).

Levers of Power

So where's the evidence or at least the sound analysis proving that liberals are less effective at advocating their philosophies? Is there some sort of "bad gene" that makes them less capable of making the case for their philosophy? Of course not.  Instead, I argue that in a broad sense it comes down to conservatives holding the levers of power in the real world and the liberals looking in from the outside.  Because liberals rarely are running the show in the real world anymore, their criticisms are more likely to be empty.  That is, it's easier to bitch about what the guy in charge is doing than to actually provide a workable solution.

To illustrate that, I'll generalize broadly some typical jobs based on philosophy. Obviously this is by no means complete but I'm just providing some examples to illustrate the point.

Feel free to disagree but only if you're disagreeing with the generalization. Of course there are engineers who favor social justice and there are journalists who are amongst the religious right. If you are one of those people who hate generalizations then you're probably in the social justice crowd.

Source of frustration

To recap where we are at: I believe that "liberals", as a broad group, are less effective at debating because their philosophy now encapsulates a much smaller percentage of the population today than it did even 10 years ago.  Besides anecdotal evidence to support that, exit polls seem to support that as well. Fewer and fewer people describe themselves as being left-wing in the United States.  While conservatives and liberals have their share of kooks, because liberals are fewer in number, the kooks represent a larger %.  That is, if 10% on each end of the population are basically nuts, then the side the has fewer adherents is going to have a larger share of them that are just plain nuts. 

As a result, while the conservatives are saddled with religious extremists who go around bombing abortion clinics and have leaders who say stupid stuff, that's only representative of a fraction of the religious right and the religious right only make up a small percentage now of those who today find themselves throwing their lot in with the group that widely calls themselves "conservative".  By contrast, the kooks on the left may be roughly the same in number in absolute terms but because they represent a larger percentage of their movement, their voices get heard a lot more and carry more weight within the movement.

That is why people the right find loathsome like Michael Moore or Cindy Sheehan can go to a college campus and give a speech without incident while people on the right such as William Kristol (of the Weekly Standard) or Ann Culter can expect to be physically assaulted or have their speeches interrupted or disrupted by protesters. 

My frustration with the left starts there -- their intolerant elements seem to be in control of the entire movement.  The ones who like to call people fascists and compare people to Nazis seem to be unaware that in action, they resemble their epitaphs much more closely than their targets. 

But the frustration doesn't end there.  In the past, the social justice crowd had a pretty firm lock on the media.  But the rise of blogs and conservative media has helped break that hold.  As a result, the left has lost more and more influence on the American public and in turn, lost control of more levers of power in American society.  In the past few years, this has transformed the liberal movement from the philosophy of new ideas to the philosophy of idle bitching and moaning and perpetual victimhood.  

What good is a new idea if you're not in a position to implement? It's as if subconsciously, the best and brightest progressives have given up on putting together solutions to the worlds problems and decided to join the chattering class. Instead of proposing new ideas, they seem content to just bitch about "the man" and how "the man" is keeping them down.  The man got us into Iraq. The man is doing a bad job there.  The man is outsourcing jobs to India.  The man is bringing in products from China.  The man is destroying the environment.  Without the burden of having to implement ideas, the left has found itself free to just complain about the solutions "the man" is implementing. 

If someone demands an alternative from the left, the result is usually some half-baked idea.  "You can't drill in ANWR!"  "But we need more energy." "Then we should switch to alternative energy sources and conserve energy."  And voila, the pesky part of how to implement such a massive proposal is left to others.  And when those others even try to implement an alternative, the nitpicking continues "Oh you can't put a wind farm there. It obstructs our view/kills birds/looks ugly" "Oh you can't use nuclear power, it's bad, man. Bad!"). 

Conclusions

The combination of the left being more represented by its extremists and no longer being in a position of power has created a negative feedback cycle. Frustrated with their lack of power, the extremists get more shrill, more totalitarian which in turn drives more people into the conservative tent which in turn makes the left even more frustrated with even less power and so on.

What would be most beneficial, and something that may happen in the next few decades, would be the split up of the major US political parties.  Either the Republican side will get so big that it'll split into new parties or perhaps the Democrats will jettison the left-wing fringe and move more to the center.  The Democrats used to have a significant chunk of the nationalists and many libertarians for instance.  Or perhaps something else entirely such as the Libertarian party getting rid of its kooks and becoming more mainstream and siphoning off a lot of conservatives turning the Republicans into a religious right party. 

What I'd like to see happen would be for the Democrats and the left in general to move a bit back to the right so that the fringe elements aren't so much in the spotlight.  We'll see. What do you think?