An Unofficial History of Political Name-Calling

At some point, people who called themselves Liberals from the time America was hatched (individualism and self sovereignty were very liberal ideas) came to realize that they couldn't call themselves Liberals any longer because that name had been stolen by American Socialists, Socialism being the exact opposite of what Liberal originally stood for.

So some former Liberals began calling themselves Classical Liberals, sort of like trying to distinguish between Classic Coke and New Coke. This didn't work well since Classical Liberal sounds like Socialists who listen to Brahms. So some former Liberals began calling themselves Conservatives.

This seemed to work for a while, except that different kinds of Conservatives kept taking over. There were the Christian Fundamentalist Conservatives who wanted to use government to forcibly establish God's Kingdom on earth, or else. There were the Traditionalist Conservatives who were opposed to each new idea, until that new idea became a tradition, at which point they accepted the tradition but opposed the next new idea. There were the Slow-Liberal Conservatives who were willing to go along with everything the Liberals did if only they could just get them to do it a little slower.

From time to time a modern facsimile of ye olde time concept of Liberalism popped its head up, called itself Goldwater Conservative or Reagan Conservative, and disappeared again.

Finally, the Neo-Conservatives, using the snappy nametag "Neocon," came along.
While nobody seems to be able to clearly define this ism, this "new conservatism" seems to consist of the worst of Old World Socialism - support of the welfare state, massive public spending of other people's money - and the worst of New World Jingoist Conservatism - that old wet dream of Manifest Destiny, which declared that America was ordained by God to rule the North American continent from ocean to ocean until it ran out of continent, and then continue to rule every other land it could sight its gunboats on, and in general create a globe-spanning American Empire designed to impose their brand of Coercive Democracy on everyone even if it meant killing everyone in order to impose it.

While that was going on the old style liberals and the more recent Classical Liberals and the free-market conservatives more or less coalesced into a once-again resurrected freedom concept that calls itself Libertarian.

Meanwhile...

People in the newly hatched America who hated individual freedom (because free people are so damnably difficult to rule) but knew that Monarchism was doomed began looking around for another ism that would allow their superior intellects to rule over the great ignorant masses eventually discovered European Socialism.

But they knew almost from the start that Socialism would not be popular in America if they called it Socialism, so they called it Progressivism.

This worked very well for a time until people started to catch on that Progressives were really Socialists in disguise. So they looked around again and decided that since the great American institution of individualism and self-sovereignty was called Liberalism they would just up and confiscate that name and hide their Socialism behind it while continuing to contort its meaning into groupthink collectivism.

At some point people caught on again that Liberal was just a cover name for Socialist. It became such an unpopular name that anyone identified with the Liberal name had a very hard time getting elected to political office. There were, and sometimes still are, attempts to hide Socialism behind the cloak of Mainstream, as in "Mainstream Politics," in an attempt to pretend that Socialism is just natural and normal and all peachy fine, but the phrase has never really caught on.

So American Socialists looked around again and, lo and behold, rediscovered the old Progressive moniker. And that's where we are today. Socialists call themselves Progressives because, well, Progressive just sounds so darned superior and zeitgeisty, and it slithers right across the surface of what's really going on beneath it. And Conservatives call themselves Conservatives under the false pretense that they're conserving something, like individualism and self-sovereignty, while actually supporting a welfare state at home while chasing a globe-spanning Manifest Destiny empire-building wet dream abroad.

So after all the saying and doing is said and done, here's what we end up with in reality: the political nametags mean nothing because mainstream politics today consists of Left Collectivists vs. Right Collectivists, collectivism being any theory from Nazism to Fascism to Communism to Socialism to Monarchism to Theocracy that declares a small ruling class of power addicts should treat all citizens as nothing more than a termite colony to be used as the ruling class sees fit.

And the only people left on the planet who really do believe in individualism and self-sovereignty call themselves Libertarians.