By William C. Shelton

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

Those who call themselves “conservatives” attack those who call themselves “liberals” with a sustained hatefulness that I can’t recall from any other period that I’ve lived through. Yet if you ask a self-described “conservative,” or for that matter “liberal,” or “progressive,” what his or her chosen term means, you will be hard pressed to get a clear definition.

One reason is that the policies that each group advocates and practices are contradictory with that group’s stated philosophy. Conservatives argue that there is a “right-to-life” for the unborn, but favor the death penalty. They oppose killing fetuses, but resist programs to reduce the nation’s shameful infant mortality rate.

They insist that government should tax and spend as little as possible, but Ronald Reagan, their poster president, doubled the debt that the nation had previously taken 200 years to accumulate. The elder Bush’s administration continued mushrooming the deficit, and Bush Jr. outspent both of them.

Conservatives opposed single-payer healthcare, even though it would be the least costly system that keeps healthcare enterprises privately owned—far less expensive than “Obamacare,” a Frankenstein system invented by the Republicans who now demonize it.

Conservatives rage against government infringement on individual freedoms. Yet they prosecute individuals for victimless crimes. The financial burden of imprisoning more people than any other empire in world history is arduous. Conservatives justify the prison-industrial complex as protecting the public, but defund agencies that actually save lives.

They condemn foreign entanglements. You might remember George W. Bush’s ridicule of “nation building.” Yet they continue to support interminable war that has wrecked our nation’s reputation, multiplied our enemies, savaged our fiscal health, and done lasting harm to our military, our combatants, and their families.

“Liberals,” on the other hand, deplored poverty while supporting welfare programs that encouraged dependence and discouraged entrepreneurship. They were all for minority advancement, but instituted busing regimes that destroyed the communities that nurtured minority children.

Purporting to be champions of labor and friends to the world’s poor, liberals gave us the World Trade Organization and NAFTA. Together, they destroyed living-wage jobs in the U.S., increased misery among the world’s poor, and brought a new wave of illegal immigration from Mexico.

Then liberals helped lock in domestic 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, thereby trapping people in a lifetime of working poverty.

Modern liberal ideology holds that concentrated economic power can be as dangerous as concentrated political power. But it was liberals who led the repeal of Glass Steagall and the other financial industry regulations that had protected Americans from the reckless greed that melted down the world economy in 2007-2008.

We don’t have to indulge conspiracy theories to see that the interests most consistently served by liberals’ and conservatives’ departures from their stated philosophies are those of concentrated wealth. Whether deregulating the financial sector, feeding the war machine, slashing social programs, genuflecting to pharmaceutical and insurance cartels, building a prison gulag, or undermining fair trade, the richest get richer when liberals and conservatives betray their core principles.

That suggests the second reason why self-descriptors like “liberal” and “conservative” are increasingly meaningless. The world has changed so much that the assumptions that liberals and conservatives cling to no longer accommodate reality.

We are blessed with the democracy and protections provided by our Constitution. But those who wrote it did not know concentrated power, other than the state and a faded aristocracy. Almost all Americans then were farmers, merchants, tradesmen, or slaves.

They did not know that the very economic system that spawned democracy, individual freedom, and more prosperity for more people contained internal dynamics that would, over the centuries, threaten each of these values.

One such dynamic is that at the end of every profitable transaction, investors must either reinvest profit to gain even more profit, or consume it and cease to be investors. This expand-or-die competition produces winners and eliminates losers.

Over time, fewer and fewer winners remain in any industry, and they have more and more concentrated power, wealth, and influence. They are the largest corporations.

Only about 20% of U.S. businesses are corporations, and most are small in scale. They make important contributions to our lives. They bring us new technologies, develop life-saving drugs, keep us entertained, and provide jobs.

Senior corporate managers and shareholders with whom I have worked are decent people who have no particular desire to harm others. They merely accept the institutional rules and play hard by them.

But those rules give corporations characteristics that enable them, even compel them, to do harm. Corporation law separates management from ownership and shields owners from liability for corporate misdeeds.

It requires directors and managers to act in the “best interest of the corporation,” which case law most often interprets as maximizing shareholders’ value. Investment flows to those companies that sustain the absolutely highest rate of profit, whether or not they harm their community, employees, small businesses, and future generations. Shareholders can sue managers who do not pursue such opportunities. Mainstream economists call these injuries “externalities”—other people’s problems.

Corporations enjoy protections that the Constitution’s framers intended to apply only to human beings. This has been used successfully to strike down laws that limit corporations’ influence on politics.

Of the world’s 100 largest economies, 53 are corporations. Exxon Mobil is larger than 180 nations’ GDPs. Corporations are growing stronger as states grow weaker. They have replaced the self-organizing market with the corporate equivalent of central planning.

Governments remain focused on short-term election cycles, corrupted by money, and poorly informed. In so many matters, they are little match for giant corporations. In 1968, there were fewer than 1,000 Washington lobbyists. Today there are 35,000. Of the 100 largest lobbying efforts between 1998 and 2004, corporations and their trade associations conducted 92.

Meanwhile, the same trend that is intensifying economic inequality is increasing money’s corrupting influence on government. After a sixty-year interlude during which the rate of return on capital was less than economic growth, the relationship between those two factors has reversed back to its historical norm. The continued hollowing out of the middle class is only one outcome. The soaring amounts spent on campaign contributions and lobbying are trivial in comparison to the rising profit available to those who can buy public policy.

Neither conservatives nor liberals offer solutions to Americans’ most pressing problems because they take the institutional arrangements that they still call “capitalism” as a given. Progressives decry both corporate capitalism and state socialism, but they have not offered an alternative that is persuasive of its efficacy.

The economic system that we live and work in today has lost capitalism’s virtues while acquiring additional flaws. John Roderick, a thoughtful libertarian and periodic poster to the Somerville Times blog, calls it “corporatism.”

I believe that we as citizens must look at our shared situation with fresh eyes, abandoning the ideological lenses that deform clear vision. We must reject name callers who use political labels primarily to invoke blind loyalty and incite hatred.

We need, as John Roderick has done, to reject the obsolete names that distort rather than illuminate, that separate people with shared interests rather than unifying them in what Martin Luther King called “the beloved community.” We need new names for how the world actually works and how it can be made to work better.

And we need a name for ourselves.