Pop, What's a Populist?

By Thomas Griffith

There is no truth-in-labeling act to ensure that the press correctly describes people in public life. Politicians used to be called by riper names than they are now, but even in these more discreet days labels can hurt. Gerald Ford is conservative, yet in his confirmation hearings preferred to style himself conservative fiscally, but "moderate on domestic issues."

Jimmy Carter? His acceptance speech, he said, "not inadvertently shifted back and forth between liberal and conservative, but I think it was uniformly populist in tone." Is he a populist? "I think so." But what's a populist? "I'll let you define that."

These days most politicians are happy to call themselves conservative, and liberalism has become the sin that dares not speak its name. The September issue of Commentary in a symposium called "What Is a Liberal--Who Is a Conservative?" provides a useful guide to the semantic bedlam. Most of the 64 contributing intellectuals were once content to call themselves liberal. Now they fastidiously invoke qualifiers. They speak of early and late liberals, paleoliberals, center extremists, tough-minded liberals, of "rad-libs" and "trad-libs."

The difficulty lies in the two drastic sea changes the word liberal has undergone. In the 19th and early 20th centuries it meant laissez-faire. One of the Commentary contributors, William F. Buckley, quotes Woodrow Wilson as saying that the history of liberalism is the history of man's efforts to restrain the growth of government. Franklin Roosevelt, of course, gave liberal its new meaning: the use of what has become Big Government to redress society's inequities. Herbert Hoover objected not only to F.D.R.'s policies but also to his theft of the word liberal. Barry Goldwater was the first presidential candidate to glory in the label conservative.

The second sea change came in the 1960s when the angry New Left, convinced that liberals and conservatives were alike in their Viet Nam-cold war complicity, trashed the liberal scene. The Commentary crowd, including men like Pat Moynihan, recoiled in shock from leftists who extolled the totalitarian "social justice" of a Cuba or a China. To Irving Kristol, 20th century liberalism has become neo-socialism, a creed "more interested in equality than in liberty." Critic Alfred Kazin concludes that liberal and conservative are "fraudulent and intellectually useless terms." Why not, asks another, declare a moratorium on both words, since both have become dulled, "even as insults"?

But more of Commentary's intellectuals consider liberal and conservative "necessary shorthand" and, though imprecise, indispensable. Out of their individual contributions emerges a rough consensus:

Liberals often seem to think that powerlessness makes right; conservatives, that power makes right. Originally, Philosopher Sidney Hook argues, liberals believed that man was inherently good but had been corrupted by defective social institutions that could and should be changed, while conservatives thought man inherently evil and were more suspicious of change. Liberals are optimistic, pragmatic and, says one Commentary intellectual, Editor Walter Goodman, "relatively unburdened by doctrine, can be more open to lessons of experience." Conservatives are less accepting of "progress," more concerned with order. A conservative, writes Lawyer and Educator David T. Bazelon, "relies fundamentally on the better elements of the ruling group" and, adds Yale Law School's Joseph W. Bishop Jr., "is slow to change institutions he doesn't like until he has a pretty clear idea of what will take their place."

Such definitions have a sounder ring than Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo's simple view that "a conservative is a liberal who got mugged the night before." As Commentary suggests, there is life in the old terms yet. Liberal and conservative still represent valid distinctions between how differing temperaments respond to change. Ford is conservative, even if less so than Reagan. Carter, for all his convoluted cautions, is committed to change. Both candidates prefer to blur their identities to suit a volatile public mood that calls itself more conservative than liberal, yet votes more Democratic than Republican. But in such confusion, editorial writers and commentators are free to discover that the old-fashioned labels are not really all that out of date.

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