Beware: semantic crime is on the rise. Thieves steal perfectly respectable words and reverse their meaning, while still expecting to keep their erstwhile respectability.
Take ‘liberalism’ and its cognates for example. When the word first gained currency in Britain, it was associated with the Whigs. Their programme was based on limited government, personal freedom, laissez-faire economics at home and free trade abroad. In other words, all those things many Brits today call ‘Thatcherism’.
‘So is this what that word means?’ asks the perplexed Martian student of English. Not at all. In America, liberalism means, not to cut too fine a point, socialism: replacement of individual responsibility with collective security, as much government control and as little personal liberty as is achievable without repealing the Constitution. In Britain, it means the platform of the Liberal Democratic party, which stands for roughly the same, plus the negation of Britain’s independence.
In this aspiration the Liberals go even further than the Conservatives, who used to swear by God, King and country but now tend to support multiculturalism, classlessness and European federalism. For the nineteenth-century liberal, the 10 percent of the nation’s income the government was then spending was too high. For today’s liberal, the almost 50 percent it spends now is too low. So if one wishes to use ‘liberal’ in its proper sense, and it is after all a cognate of ‘liberty’, then one must either modify it with ‘classic’ or replace it with ‘libertarian’, thus dumping the word straight into the garbage heap of lexicology.
At this inauspicious site it’s piled on top of other cognates of liberty, such as ‘liberation’, as in ‘national liberation’. When applied to places like Rwanda, ‘national liberation’ means a transitional stage between colonialism and genocide. When applied to the ‘former Soviet Union’, it means, in most instances, a shift from de jure to merely de facto Russian control. When applied to Asia, it means Mao, Ho and Kim. Thus modernised, ‘liberation’ and its cousin ‘liberal’ go the way of ‘conservative’, which incidentally means Burkean Whig in America and, these days, Stalinist in Russia.
Of course, today’s Liberals aren’t descendants of the nineteenth-century Whigs. They are a splinter group of Old Labour, which in turn traces its roots back to the Luddites, Chartists and other trouble-makers of yesteryear. More important, it’s umbilically linked with certain continental doctrines, a link Labour do not mind emphasising by adopting foreign tunes like the Internationale and Bandera Rossa as their party songs, and the foreign red flag as their party banner.
New Labour, so called because the unmodified term is a historically compromised election-loser, hang on to the symbols but feign to renounce the substance, claiming they represent the middle classes rather than the unions, aka labour. In other words, Labour isn’t labour. They stake a claim to the plot owned in the past by the Liberals, who used to be Whigs but aren’t any longer.
If such specific terms have lost their meaning, we shouldn’t be unduly surprised at the confusion with more amorphous concepts, such as ‘right wing’ and ‘left wing’. For instance, strident adherents of Old Labour don’t mind describing Lady Thatcher ‘as extreme right wing’. This designation is also applied retrospectively to the likes of Hitler. One infers that the political spectrum, as they see it, starts at the extreme right exemplified by Thatcher and Hitler and ends up at the extreme left represented by… well, nobody. Only the right can be extreme, never the left. In today’s parlance, ‘left wing’ is always synonymous with ‘moderate’.
But we’ve already seen that Lady Thatcher is an out-and-out Whig, even though she confusingly led the Tories. If A equals B, and B equals C, then A equals C. Applying this proven logic to the task in hand, we have to assume that Hitler, Lady Thatcher’s fellow ‘right-wing extremist’, was a Whig too.
But then we look at Hitler’s economics (omnipotent government, nationalised or at least subjugated industry, wage and price controls, strict tariffs, cradle-to-grave welfare) and realise that, on top of everything else, he was a socialist. And socialists are undeniably left wing. Then we remember that Hitler’s party was called National Socialist Workers’ and ask the inevitable question: So who’s the right-wing extremist then? And what does the term mean?
Perhaps other countries can give us a clue. In America ‘extreme right wing’ usually describes Ku-Klux-Klan types. Importing the term here, we wrap Lady Thatcher in a bed sheet with slits in the hood and find the picture unrealistic, though white is definitely her colour. In Russia, right wing means communist and left wing means a Whig-Socialist mongrel. Thus, no help is forthcoming from abroad; yet again Britain has to rely on her own resources to straighten out her mess.
The first step would be to realise that all modern politics in the West is socialist to one degree or another, and socialism’s semantic mendacity starts from its very name and proceeds to its proclaimed goals. Thus, in modern political cant, ‘protecting the less fortunate’ really means expropriating the more fortunate, ‘investing in healthcare and education’ really means expanding state bureaucracies and increasing taxes, ‘investing in industry’ means crypto-nationalisation, ‘tolerance’ means intolerance, ‘diversity’ means uniformity, multiculturalism means hostility to the historically dominant culture and so forth.
The language of politics has been destroyed by the politics of language. Only the naïve among us will believe that the underlying concepts can remain intact.