Pinning Down Political Labels : If Mao Was a Conservative, So Was F.D.R.
In Beijing, we are informed, it is conservatives who have bloodily crushed liberal attempts to add an alloy of democracy to the iron communist governance of China. In Moscow, other conservatives, also die-hard defenders of a rigid status quo, bitterly oppose the liberal glasnost and perestroika of Mikhail S. Gorbachev. And just who are these conservatives? Why, they are the old-line communists, the loyal heirs of Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-tung.
Meanwhile, here at home, editorialists have taken to describing such politicians as Sen. Jesse Helms and Rep. Newt Gingrich as “radical conservatives,” truly a memorable oxymoron, while lifelong conservatives such as Supreme Court Justices Harry A. Blackmun and John Paul Stevens are described as “liberals.”
The confusion dates back to the time many years ago when our news media tacitly agreed to apply the austere word conservative to a far more giddy breed of political cat, and went on to construct a sort of linear classification of the political orders. Reading from “staunch conservatives” on the extreme right, we glide smoothly across the spectrum, past “conservatives” and “liberals,” until we arrive at “ultra-liberals” on the extreme left. Neat enough, but totally misleading. Political beliefs and affiliations in the modern world run in no such simple linear pattern. There is as little of the conservative in radicals of the extreme right as there is of the liberal in the extreme left. Could Stalin possibly be described as an ultra-liberal, Adolf Hitler as an ultra-conservative?
Former Secretary of the Interior James G. Watt, who prices his helpful phone calls in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, is routinely described in the news media as a “staunch conservative.” But before the Reagan Administration eased him out to graze in the golden pastures of private life, his most vehement critics were the conservationists, who he publicly (and not very conservatively) likened to Nazis. Both words grew from the same root, each meaning “one who conserves.” So which was the true conservative, a James Watt who favored looting our environment, or, say, Russell W. Peterson, the former Republican governor of Delaware, who, as president of the National Audubon Society, was strongly committed to preserving the environment?
Consider the most renowned “conservative” of them all, former President Ronald Reagan. In referring to his regressive political agenda as a “second American Revolution” and vowing to “change America forever,” he borrowed the language of radicalism and matched his radical words with equally radical actions. He consistently subordinated the rights of the individual to imagined “rights” of the government. And he engaged in unilateral military adventurism: He violated both his own announced policy and the law by selling arms to terrorist Iran; and, without consulting diplomats, arms-control experts, the scientific community or even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he tried to force on us his Strategic Defense Initiative in space, which most sober analysts believe to be scientifically unworkable, financially ruinous and militarily destabilizing.
If conservatives are dismayed by today’s semantics antics, liberals can find satisfaction, and even glee, in noting that, at least in Moscow and Beijing, the bad guys are the conservatives and the good guys are the liberals. It has been a long time since liberalism has been crowned with the white hat. Something that has been unclear to some of us since the infamous days of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities may now come to be better understood: that liberalism and communism are completely antithetical terms.
The greatest achievement of the quintessential liberal politician, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was to save American capitalism. It remains to be proved what some liberals believe, that conservative Ronald Reagan’s policies have once more endangered it.
If the “conservative communists” succeed in throttling democratic reform in the Soviet Union and China, so much the worse for those unfortunate countries. And if “radical conservatives” here at home succeed in turning back the clock to pre-New Deal days, so much greater the chance that our own liberties will become endangered.
But there is now real hope that in Moscow and Beijing, in Warsaw and Washington, a fire has been lit and a new liberal spirit will illuminate the hearts and minds of people everywhere, whether they call themselves liberals or conservatives--or even communists.