Are you a liberal? [View All]

Corporate media users the terms liberal and conservative, so I tend to think they're meaningless terms, or rather, using those terms are what the corporate owners and media controllers want. Especially since conservative means both socially conservative, like the majority of conservatives, as well as fiscally conservative, like a small minority of conservatives who run the Republican party and other conservative institutions. I don't even think the majority of people who call themselves conservative are for NAFTA and things such as that. As far as liberal, I don't know how many Teamsters would call themselves liberal even though many of them are very pro-labor. Milton Friedman says he is liberal - a "classical liberal" whatever that means (Noam Chomsky disputes that Friedman and his ilk are classical liberals, he thinks progressive movements are heirs of the old liberals).

If I had to describe myself I'd say I was pro-working class. On one hand, this tosses out another buzzword or phrase that exists to muddle thinking as far as I'm concerned - middle class. It also uses the word class, which the right does not like to talk about.

The only problem is that, like so much else, I think it would be easy for the right to come in and say that they're pro-working class as well. I suppose you could put a fine point on it and ask why changing laws for inheritance taxes for people with over $1 million who've never worked like Paris Hilton has to do with the working class, but they have total control of the public airwaves (except for Pacifica and some public access cable shows) so that could be muddled.

Then one could say they are socialist, which they would not claim they are. Then again, they have always taken great pains to equate socialism with big government, mostly because socialism doesn't have much to do with big government. Maybe social democrats or even New Deal Democrats do. Or all of the corporate welfare and money to military contractors the conservatives do (with military being very broad - interstate highways, R&D for the Internet and much infrastructure was called military expenditure, whether it was or not). The ultimate aim of socialists has always been to do away with government - something I've never heard conservatives or liberals suggest. Spanish socialist workers called themselves libertarians before and during the Spanish Civil War, but libertarian is another word whose meaning has been twisted while crossing the Atlantic.