By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.)

I’ve been writing about Somerville’s place on the bleeding edge of a growing societal trend. We increasingly substitute name calling for listening to each other, identifying what we have in common, and understanding our legitimate differences.

Among the names that we call each other are “liberal” and “conservative.” No longer terms that accurately describe any consistent or mutually understood political philosophy, these words are increasingly insults used by one group to dismiss the concerns of another.

Their usage has always been somewhat vague and self-contradictory. But over the last two decades, self-described liberals’ and conservatives’ respective responses to historic change have been hypocritically inconsistent. So much so, that these inconsistencies can best be explained by opportunistic pursuit of narrow self-interest, or clinging to narrow ideological bias that is impervious to exhaustive evidence of changes in the world.

What we in the United States historically called “liberalism” and “conservatism” were both the children of classic Enlightenment liberalism. That political philosophy emphasized individual rights, the social contract, a market economy, and equality of opportunity.

American conservatism’s concept of ‚Äúliberty‚Äù was that of ‚Äúnegative rights‚Äù-freedom from coercion by others or the state-noninterference. Conservatives saw state economic regulation as coercive power that undermined individual freedom. By extension, they opposed the welfare state and progressive taxation. American liberalism held that the coercion of great economic power could be as corrosive of freedom as political coercion. The state should ensure ‚Äúpositive rights‚Äù to education, the vote, healthcare, a living wage, and more recently, a healthy environment.

Conservatives believed that the state should be minimal in size, it’s scope limited to punishing crime and defending the nation. Changes in institutions, culture, customs, and religious beliefs should be minimal and gradual.

Liberals believed that, since no individual had the power to affect potentially devastating economic forces, protecting individual freedom required state intervention in those forces. Liberals thought that social practices should adjust with changing conditions to provide the greatest benefit to humanity-social progressivism. For them, the law’s purpose was not to regulate morality, but protect citizens.

Conservatives’ and liberals’ political practices always contained contradictions to their stated philosophies. A majority of right-to-life advocates favored the death penalty. They opposed killing fetuses, but resisted programs to reduce infant mortality. Self-identified fiscal conservatives seemed blind to gross financial mismanagement by the Pentagon. They opposed single-payer health care, despite unequivocal evidence that it is most cost effective. They supported a costly twenty-fold increase in the prison population to ‚Äúprotect the public,‚Äù but opposed less costly regulatory agencies that save lives.

Liberals deplored poverty while supporting welfare programs that encouraged dependence and discouraged entrepreneurship. They were all for minority advancement, but supported busing programs that destroyed the communities that nurtured minority children.

Historically, liberals’ political practice has been less contradictory to their stated principles than that of conservatives. But liberals’ insight into (‚ÄúOne is tempted to say ‚Äúhonesty regarding‚Ķ‚Äù) their own shared worldview is shallower than that of conservatives, when not wholly absent.

Politicians whose own actions repudiate their stated philosophies now lead both liberal and conservative forces. The Reagan and Bush I administrations tripled the national debt that had accumulated since the founding of the Republic. Bush II has been working hard to break this record. Although conservatives have always condemned foreign entanglements, they support an interminable war that has wrecked our nation’s reputation in the world, multiplied our enemies, damaged our fiscal health, and caused lasting harm to our military, our combatants, and their families.

Liberals purporting to be champions of labor and friends to the world’s poor gave us NAFTA, which has destroyed living-wage jobs in the U.S., increased misery among the world’s poor, and brought a wave of illegal immigration from Mexico. These friends of the poor have increased poverty.  They presided over the destruction of a deeply dysfunctional welfare system without replacing it with meaningful incentives and supports for self reliance and self development.

Vast historical forces, most notably, globalization, have made it imperative for political leaders to redefine what “liberal” and “conservative” mean in this new context, or to acknowledge that institutional transformation is required on a scale that makes these terms irrelevant. They have failed to do either, using the terms, instead, to manipulate the loyalty of voters who perceive themselves as liberal or conservative.

I believe that we as citizens must look at our shared situation with fresh eyes, abandoning the ideological lenses that increasingly distort clear vision. We must share our experiences, and our understanding of what shapes those experiences. We must reject leaders who use political labels primarily to invoke loyalty to themselves. Instead, we must insist that they show us the world through their own eyes.

Is it the same world that we live in? Do the policies that they propose fully come to grips with this new world’s reality? What verifiable evidence can they offer in support of those policies? What in their own experience has led them to embrace those policies?

We would be able to do this more effectively if we stopped using words like ‚Äúliberal‚Äù or ‚Äúconservative‚Äù as a blanket identification of others whom we imagine to be bad people. What’s really in such a name? Very little.  What relevance does it have to the management of Somerville city government? Even less.