The American term "liberal" is meaningless...

Humes fork

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Humes fork
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...because it is so very broad. Both Noam Chomsky and John Kerry are labelled "liberals" in the US, and the difference in opinion between them is wider than the political spectrum in I think any western European country.

Noam Chomsky wants wage labor abolished, as well as the state itself. I'm not aware of any left-wing political party with political representation in Europe that has these on its platform.

John Kerry on the other hand opposes universal healthcare. I don't know of any right-wing party with political representation that is opposed to universal healthcare.

From a European point of view, an American describing himself or herself as a "liberal" can mean damn near anything. European elections to Americans must all look like elections between different shades of liberals rather than between liberals and conservatives.
 
The word isn't meaningless in the sense Orwell is talking about here. Orwell is specifically talking about words that are thrown into lit-crit prose but don't actually assist at all in our understanding. However in some other essay he does talk about how the word "fascism" has become almost meaningless but not quite:

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.
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http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc

The word "liberal" retains at least some meaning in the sense that many people identify as liberals while for many "conservatives" (surely also an abused term) the word is used as a swearword (just look at Bill O'Reilly's face when he tries to say it).
 
angrysoba said:
Orwell is specifically talking about words that are thrown into lit-crit prose but don't actually assist at all in our understanding.
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You are wrong. Orwell begins that section talking about lit-crit usage, but then continues to apply the idea to political speech (which is the topic of his essay).

Here is the entire section (my bolding):

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.† Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in
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† Example: Comfort's catholicity of perception and image, strangely Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative hinting at a cruel, an inexorably serene timelessness . . .Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at simple bull's-eyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bittersweet of resignation." (Poetry Quarterly)
_____________

the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.
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Do you suppose class and science are more meaningless than liberal in political speech?

ETA:
angrysoba said:
The word "liberal" retains at least some meaning in the sense that many people identify as liberals while for many "conservatives" (surely also an abused term) the word is used as a swearword (just look at Bill O'Reilly's face when he tries to say it).
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And that fits with Orwell's characterization of words that have multiple meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. (See the list beginning with democracy.)

Remember, in this category there are words devoid of any referent, those words with multiple conflicting meanings or at least variable meanings which are often or usually used dishonestly.
 
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JoeTheJuggler said:
You are wrong. Orwell begins that section talking about lit-crit usage, but then continues to apply the idea to political speech (which is the topic of his essay).

Here is the entire section (my bolding):



Do you suppose class and science are more meaningless than liberal in political speech?
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Okay, you're quite right and I had missed that bit - which is strange because I did remember the bit about "Fascism" from the first few times I had read it and yet assumed it was in a different essay.

I think it is also true that Orwell is not saying liberal is completely meaningless but, as mentioned, it has been abused. He'd probably say that the word is similarly abused in Europe along with all the other words on his list.
 
Humes fork said:
...because it is so very broad. Both Noam Chomsky and John Kerry are labelled "liberals" in the US, and the difference in opinion between them is wider than the political spectrum in I think any western European country.

Noam Chomsky wants wage labor abolished, as well as the state itself. I'm not aware of any left-wing political party with political representation in Europe that has these on its platform.

John Kerry on the other hand opposes universal healthcare. I don't know of any right-wing party with political representation that is opposed to universal healthcare.

From a European point of view, an American describing himself or herself as a "liberal" can mean damn near anything. European elections to Americans must all look like elections between different shades of liberals rather than between liberals and conservatives.
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Amongst centrists it still has meaning but amongst those who think center right is now left, no.
 
angrysoba said:
I think it is also true that Orwell is not saying liberal is completely meaningless but, as mentioned, it has been abused.
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Re-read my first post.

Orwell didn't mention the word liberal in that section of "Politics and the English Language", but I think it fits into that category as he describes it.
 
Humes fork said:
...because it is so very broad. Both Noam Chomsky and John Kerry are labelled "liberals" in the US, and the difference in opinion between them is wider than the political spectrum in I think any western European country.
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My 17-year-old son, whose conservative mother (my ex) was calling him a liberal, asked me about the differences between liberal and conservative. He's pretty sharp, which is why he was confused (because shouldn't the words have more real meaning than they seem to when she bandies them about?).

One thing I explained to him was that the reason the Fox News Channel folks she watches will call Obama a liberal or "far left," is that the candidates FNC is hoping will win the elections are generally not threatened in the elections by the actual "far left." So they make sure they get the message out that they are one and the same, or at least close enough that you should fear them all.

Yeah, I'm a little biased...
 
It has a tendency to be used in the broadest sense to link left-leaning moderates to the beliefs of those that follow a far more narrow version.

The purpose of its flexibility is so it means what you need it to for that particular discussion. Milking a fallacy of equivocation that works just fine to get votes.

The most persistent and useful definition of "liberal" I have heard (where it applies to American politics) is the viewing of government initiative and regulation as either good or bad depending on the quality of the proposal, as opposed to a conservative viewpoint which considers it to be a necessary evil to be avoided by default. Libertarians question the "necessary" part.
 
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Ahh, but referring to all of the right this way is sort of doing the same thing in reverse.

Believe it or not, there are some conservatives who don't want theocracy or to repress gays or ban teaching evolution or think liberals are communists. Plenty come about their beliefs as sincerely from their ideas of liberty and the constitution as I come about my somewhat liberal beliefs.
 
gnome said:
Ahh, but referring to all of the right this way is sort of doing the same thing in reverse.

Believe it or not, there are some conservatives who don't want theocracy or to repress gays or ban teaching evolution or think liberals are communists. Plenty come about their beliefs as sincerely from their ideas of liberty and the constitution as I come about my somewhat liberal beliefs.
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then, from what i have gleaned, they are not right, but 'american left'.

heck, i'm a communist, and i'm called liberal often, by american right wing-nuts.
 
bikerdruid said:
then, from what i have gleaned, they are not right, but 'american left'.
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They would think of themselves as right-leaning and distinct from the American left.

heck, i'm a communist, and i'm called liberal often, by american right wing-nuts.
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The extreme right wing that you refer to considers the two to be equivalent, erroneously. To them a liberal is just a communist pretending to not be radical in order to implement communism incrementally instead of by revolution.
 
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gnome said:
Ahh, but referring to all of the right this way is sort of doing the same thing in reverse.

Believe it or not, there are some conservatives who don't want theocracy or to repress gays or ban teaching evolution or think liberals are communists. Plenty come about their beliefs as sincerely from their ideas of liberty and the constitution as I come about my somewhat liberal beliefs.
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Conservatives get stuffed into idelogical boxs as badly as everyone else. As long as moderates from all political points of view can hold the power we should be okay
 
How about as used in the phrase, "the liberal media"? Does anyone talk about the "progressive media"? The "conservative media"?

I think it's just a pretty meaningless term for "news media I don't like".
 
BenBurch said:
Those of us who make progressive media do. My former employer was billed as "Liberal/Progressive Talk Radio."
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Except that's not a news program, is it?

I thought talk radio referred to the politico-tainment programs like Rush Limbaugh and Randi Rhodes.

ETA: Though I guess the term doesn't have to be limited to the news media, but the way, for example, Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin use the term, that's what they're talking about.
 
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JoeTheJuggler said:
How about as used in the phrase, "the liberal media"? Does anyone talk about the "progressive media"? The "conservative media"?

I think it's just a pretty meaningless term for "news media I don't like".
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I don't know what distinction you have in mind between the "liberal media" and the "progressive media" (It seems to me that the word "progressive" has emerged as some kind of subconscious re-branding attempt by those who don't like being called "liberal" because of its perceived negative connotations) but I do think there is largely a consensus among the majority of large media outlets in the US - NYT, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Time, Newsweek, CNN, MSNBC - that certain political stances are not acceptable and to the extent they tend to agree there is something of a "liberal media". They won't be pushing Tea Party views or calling for Creationism in schools, an isolationist foreign policy, anti-gay marriage legislation, etc... The exceptions are FOX and the hysterical talk radio hosts.
 
Actually, I find a distinction between "liberal" and "progressive" - to me they are not the same. Liberal means willing to change and to look at other points of view. Progressive implies a direction, what we in business call "continuous improvement".
 
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