Everybody Wanted the Term "Liberal." No One Knows What It Means.
What happens to a political word when nobody is ever held accountable for using it wrong...? What does the word 'liberal' even mean, man?
Two weeks ago, I published something here about whether liberals have made themselves useful idiots for the world that’s coming, and it went pretty viral, at least for a piece like that. That’s a good setup for this piece, but not necessary…what’s below is a standalone.
But what was interesting (to me anyway) was the feedback and the questions in the DMs from subscribers and even some new folks. The feedback was mostly not about the argument. It was about the word itself.
In the piece I wrote:
Anyway, that day, we’d discussed the evolution of the term “liberal” (versus “Liberal” versus “neoliberal” versus…) in the context of political history. It is one of those terms that has been “postmoderned” to death, as I like to say, abused, conceptually stretched, and taken well beyond its initial meaning. The same word names a free-marketeer in Vienna, a progressive in Vermont, and a sellout in the quarters of the internet my student read. Jordan Peterson, who built a second career prosecuting postmodernism, presents himself as a “classic British liberal,” and the interesting part isn’t whether he qualifies. It’s that the word has been stretched past the point where anyone could check.
The point is that the “liberal” label travels now as a prestige badge, detached from the settlement it used to name. Hold that thought; it comes back.
But then the folks asking wanted to know more about this. Not just what I meant by “liberal,” either. Did I mean what the media means? Did I just mean partisan Democrats? Did I mean the free-speech and due-process people? Did I mean the thing most of the rest of the world means, which is closer to the opposite? The question kept arriving in different forms, and surprisingly from folks in different countries.
So, as one does (I guess), I sat down to explore what I knew about it, which was a decent amount from the political science/measurement of ideology and issues position, as well as some classical political theory. I was surprised how much I did not know, but also how what I did know integrates with what I don’t.
Isn’t learning great? :)
Because of that, (WARNING!) this will end up being the longest-ass post ever here at Sacred Cow BBQ. You asked for it.
I have almost guaranteed this one will not go viral, because this one is a haul, and will require great interest and/or multiple coffees.
First, let’s start with a comparative exercise with some things I already used in my class to demonstrate how words like “liberal” change around the world.
In Denmark, the main party of free markets and small government is named Venstre. It means “Left.”
This isn’t a translation glitch or some quirk nobody got around to fixing. Danes keep it straight without effort. There’s Venstre, the center-right party literally called Left, and there’s venstrefløj, the actual left wing, and nobody confuses the two. The name is just old. A hundred and fifty years ago the liberals were the insurgents, pushing against a conservative party of landed gentry and the state church, and “Left” was where the reformers sat in the room. The gentry lost. The world turned over a few times. And the word stayed bolted to the party that first carried it, now aimed in more or less the opposite direction from where it started.
Cultural artifacts are cool, eh? And once you catch it in Denmark you can’t stop seeing it. In Australia, “the Liberals” are what we could call the conservatives, the main center-right party, and they took the name on purpose in 1944 for its ring of nineteenth-century free enterprise. Cross the ocean to Canada and “Liberal” swings back the other way: Mark Carney’s party, the one that legalized same-sex marriage and built the federal half of public health care, sitting at the center or a little left of it. Same word, two Commonwealth democracies, and it lands in two different places. To a German, a “liberal” wants lower taxes and lighter regulation. In France, the word is mostly an accusation, thrown from the left and by now from nearly everyone, and the French entry for ultralibéralisme notes drily that no economist or philosopher has ever actually claimed the label. In Spain, the “libertarian movement” is the anarchists. In Colombia, the Liberal Party was founded in 1848 by anticlerical free-traders, and in 1999 it joined the Socialist International, where it sits today. Same party, same name, laissez-faire at one end of its life and social democracy at the other.
And then there’s us.
In the United States, “liberal” means almost none of that. It means bigger government, the welfare state, the cultural left, the people the other side calls the elite. That’s worth a beat, because it makes the American usage the strange one. The word that means free-market and small-government across most of the planet means state-and-spending here. We’re not the standard everyone else is deviating from. We’re the deviation.
Though “deviation” isn’t quite the right word either, and the better one is worse news. Every party in that list descends from the same nineteenth-century liberalism. Denmark’s, Australia’s, Canada’s, Colombia’s, ours. The word didn’t wander off from a fixed original in one country while everyone else held the line. It forked, everywhere, splitting along whatever fault line the local coalition happened to sit on. There was never a standard version for anyone to deviate from, and what Americans hear as our own peculiarity is just the branch we happened to end up on.
The historian Helena Rosenblatt points out that the word emerged in the wake of the French Revolution and only came to the United States in the 1910s, which is very late in the life of something we treat as our native political tradition. She’s written a book arguing that the version of liberalism that puts individual rights at the center and makes Locke the founding father is a fairly recent construction, and that the word spent its first century meaning something else entirely.
The easy move here is to throw up your hands. Words are slippery, politics is confusing, everyone bends “liberal” to suit themselves, what a mess. That’s true, and it’s boring, and it gets you nowhere. What I think is actually going on is a little unsettling once you follow it out.
A political word holds a steady meaning only as long as people are fighting over it. The fight is the thing that keeps it taut. When the fight stops, when one side wins the word outright or everyone drifts off to a different one, the meaning doesn’t get settled. It goes slack. And a slack word will take whatever shape the last person holding it needs it to have. That’s the short version anyway, and one word in here is going to break it.
Even shorter: “Liberal” is a word an awful lot of people walked away from.
Almost everybody assumes “liberal” used to have a clear meaning and then lost it, and almost nobody checks. A golden age of precision, followed by a fall. It’s a comforting story and it’s backwards. The word was a frickin’ conceptual mess from the beginning.
Take Locke, who every American student learns is the founding liberal, the natural-rights, consent-of-the-governed man standing at the head of the whole tradition. He wasn’t called a liberal in his lifetime. He couldn’t have been because the political sense of the word didn’t exist yet. The Cambridge scholar Duncan Bell went looking for when Locke actually joined the club and found that it doesn’t happen until the twentieth century. “Locke became a liberal,” Bell writes, and dates the promotion to the twentieth century. Several generations of people who proudly called themselves liberals looked right past him and failed to recognize one of their own.
Not everyone buys this. Daniel Gordon has asked whether you can really write the history of liberalism by writing the history of a few words, which is a fair shot. But even Bell’s critics concede the labeling part, which is all I need here.
You can watch this happen inside a single book. George Sabine wrote the standard history-of-political-theory textbook that a couple of generations of students learned from. In the 1937 edition (that’s the one on my shelf), liberalism is a modest nineteenth-century British affair parked between socialism and conservatism, Sabine worries in print that it “was a diminishing force in modern society,” and Locke isn’t presented as a liberal at all. He shows up in that chapter twice, both times in passing.
Then Sabine revised it, and you can see the seams. In the 1950 edition liberalism has become expansive and confident, the “culmination” of Western history and more or less synonymous with democracy itself. But here’s the part I like. Rather than promote Locke inside the Locke chapter, which he left largely alone, Sabine moved liberalism’s starting line backward until it reached him. The opening sentence of the liberalism chapter in 1937 puts individualism as “the main strand of political thought in the eighteenth century.” That same sentence in 1950 reads “throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” And the sentence immediately after it, which is new, says the principles of the age were “first clearly stated by Locke.”
Same author, same book, thirteen years apart. What happened in between was a world war and the start of a cold one, and a sudden need for the West to have a proud, ancient tradition called liberalism to hold up against totalitarianism. So the tradition got built, fast, and it got built backwards, reaching back two and a half centuries to take Locke in.
If you want to see the word’s oldest meaning, though, you don’t have to dig for it. It’s printed on the brochure of nearly every college in the country. “Liberal arts” has nothing to do with politics. It comes from the Latin liberalis, “befitting a free person,” and in the fourteenth century it named the studies thought proper for a free man as opposed to the mechanical trades. That’s four hundred years before “liberal” meant anything political at all; the political sense doesn’t show up until around 1800. So the word that Americans now hear as a fighting term for the welfare-state left is sitting right there in the name of the thing you paid forty grand a year to give your kid, meaning something closer to “the education of a free person.” And notice which meaning that is. It’s the one nobody ever had a reason to fight over the name of, and so it’s the one that held still. The political sense, the one everybody wanted a piece of, is the one that got pulled apart.
So the word was already unstable when the fight Americans actually remember finally broke out. And here I have to take a wrecking ball to the version you probably know, because I believed it too until I went and read the history.
The story goes like this. Franklin Roosevelt, around 1932, grabbed the word “liberal” and pinned it to the New Deal, to big government and the welfare state, stranding the old free-market liberals who owned it. A clean theft. One man, one election.
The date is wrong, the intent is wrong, and the victims are wrong. What the story gets right is the ending.
Start with the date. The capture actually appears to have happened around 1916, not 1932, and it happened at a magazine. Herbert Croly, Walter Weyl, and Walter Lippmann, running The New Republic, switched from calling themselves “progressives” to calling themselves “liberals” while they were deciding whether to back Woodrow Wilson. The historian Charles Forcey, writing in 1961, called it “the piracy of a word that belonged rightfully to the Jeffersonians.” Ronald Rotunda, whose book on this is the best thing written about it, quotes that line and then refuses it: the word could rightfully belong to the Jeffersonians only if words can’t change their meaning, and words change their meaning constantly. To me, he’s right. I’m going to keep saying theft anyway, because that’s how every person in this story talked about it. Hoover talked that way, Friedman talked that way, Rothbard bragged in exactly those terms. “Theft” is wrong as history and exactly right as a record of how it felt to the people it happened to, and part of what’s interesting is why it felt that way to men who knew better. By the time Roosevelt got to it, the magazine had already packed the word with its modern meaning. Roosevelt inherited that meaning and made it a household word, and that last part matters: if you’re asking why “liberal” means what it means in America today, the answer really does run through him. He just didn’t do the thing he’s accused of.
Was it at least deliberate? Apparently not. Rotunda concludes that Roosevelt reached for the word on instinct, the way he reached for “New Deal,” with no real plan behind it. Raymond Moley, who ran the Brain Trust, said the choice “was not arrived at with any premeditation or precision.” And Rexford Tugwell remembered asking Roosevelt once where he’d gotten the word. Roosevelt didn’t answer. He “laughed and asked if it mattered.”
Both come with a warning label. Moley and Tugwell each told their story in a personal letter to the same graduate student in 1966, thirty-four years after the fact, and both had a stake in how the New Deal’s origins got written down. Not the provenance you want for your two best quotes, so discount them. What survives the discount is that nobody involved, asked directly decades later, could produce an account of a deliberate capture, and one of them thought the question was funny.
The detail that really undoes the tidy story, though, is what the supposed victims were doing the whole time. They’d been giving the word away for years. The New York Times fretted about the word’s drift in 1922 and 1923, mourned outright “the expropriation of the time-honored word ‘Liberal’” in 1924, ran essentially that same editorial again in 1930, and each time resigned itself and moved on. Herbert Hoover, the great robbed party in the usual telling, stood on a battlefield in South Carolina in 1930 and gave it away in public. The American system, he said, was a thing we had “seldom tried even to name.” “Some have called it liberalism, but that term has become corrupted by political use.... it is just American.” He gave the word up as spoiled two years before Roosevelt ever reached for it. He changed his mind later and fought hard: a whole book in 1934 insisting on the “true” liberalism, and a run at the Republicans in 1936 telling them to become “the true liberal party of America.” But that fight started after the word was gone, against a sitting president who’d made it his own, and nobody was listening.
And the meaning Roosevelt supposedly loaded into the word, the big-government meaning, wasn’t even homegrown. He shipped most of it in from England. His people said they had in mind something like the British Liberal Party, the party of Gladstone and Lloyd George, which had already spent a generation arguing that an active state could enlarge a person’s freedom rather than shrink it. The English thinker L.T. Hobhouse had put it in print in 1911: the notion of the state as a kind of over-parent was, he insisted, “quite as truly Liberal as Socialistic.” Everything the New Deal would do to the word had been rehearsed in London two decades before.
After all of it, the public mostly didn’t follow. A poll in 1939, at the peak of Roosevelt’s identification with the word, found that four in ten voters had little idea how to define “liberal,” “conservative,” or “radical.” Among those who could, a majority called FDR a liberal, and a sizable minority called him a radical. The man had spent years driving the word into the center of American politics, and a large share of the country still had no idea what it meant, or thought it meant something he would have rejected. Phil Converse, were he still with us, would yell “Quelle surprise!” right about here. (Sorry, that’s an inside joke for the political scientists that I will come back to in a while.)
So that’s the theft: later than you think, planned by no one, half-invited by the victims, carrying a meaning imported from another country, landing on a public that mostly couldn’t define the word to begin with. Not much of a heist. More like a word left on a park bench that somebody eventually picked up.
Which raises the obvious question. What did the people who lost it do next?
The dispossessed did what you’d expect. They went looking for a new one. Watching three of them look is the best way I know to show how little control anybody has over this.
Friedrich Hayek had been calling himself a liberal his whole life, and by 1960 he was worn out from explaining what he meant by it. In a well-known essay, “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” he finally admits he can’t keep using the word. In America it had become impossible; “liberal” now named the thing he’d spent a career fighting. But he won’t take “conservative” either, because he isn’t one. So he goes hunting for a replacement and comes up empty, and the passage where he does it is almost funny in its frustration. He picks up “libertarian” and drops it on the spot: it carries, he says, “too much the flavor of a manufactured term,” a substitute, something welded together instead of grown. He wants a word for “the party of life,” and there isn’t one. He settles, with an almost audible sigh, on calling himself “an unrepentant Old Whig,” with, as he puts it, “the stress on the ‘old.’” A man reaching back two full centuries for a label because nothing on the shelf in front of him fit.
Milton Friedman, two years later, looked at the identical problem and made the opposite call. In the opening pages of Capitalism and Freedom he agrees the word’s been stolen. He even quotes Schumpeter’s dry line that the enemies of free enterprise paid it “a supreme, if unintended compliment” by helping themselves to its label. But Friedman won’t hand it over. He is going to keep saying “liberal” and keep meaning the old nineteenth-century free-market thing, and if that confuses people, that’s their problem. Partly principle, partly, he confesses, because he couldn’t find a better word either. Same trap as Hayek, opposite way out. Hayek ran from the word; Friedman planted his feet on it. Both lost. Say “liberal” to an American today and you get the New Deal, not Adam Smith, no matter whose side you were on.
There was a third move, and it’s the one that matters most for where we’re going, because it doubles back on itself in a way that should make you laugh at least on the inside.
In 1955, a few years ahead of the other two, a staffer named Dean Russell wrote a short piece for a free-market outfit, the Foundation for Economic Education, called “Who Is a Libertarian?” His logic was simple. The leftists have taken “liberal.” Fine. Let’s grab a different word and bolt it down before they get that one too. His actual proposal: “Let those of us who love liberty trade-mark and reserve for our own use the good and honorable word ‘libertarian.’” Trade-mark and reserve. He wanted to run a branding operation on the English language.
The joke is that the word he reached for already had a political owner, from the other direction. The dictionary sense Russell quoted, the free-will one, was harmless enough. But the political sense had been minted almost a hundred years earlier, in 1857, by a French communist-anarchist named Joseph Déjacque, who used it to mean roughly what it still means across most of the world: anti-authoritarian, anti-property, hard anarcho-left. Déjacque minted it in a furious letter to Proudhon, partly about Proudhon’s sexism, and named his New York newspaper Le Libertaire. For a century after, in France and Spain and pretty much everywhere that wasn’t the United States, “libertarian” meant anarchist. It still does. The Spanish anarchists called their whole program libertarian communism, and French now carries two separate words, libertarien for the American free-market kind and libertaire for the original, because the two meanings had to be pried apart with a crowbar.
So Dean Russell, fleeing a word the left had stolen, proposed to seize a word the left had invented. Not a perfect mirror, since Déjacque’s coinage was French and never took hold in American English the way “liberal” had. Russell was appropriating a foreign usage more than displacing a domestic one. But he was appropriating it, and he doesn’t appear to have known. His essay reasons from the dictionary and never so much as mentions an anarchist. But the man who actually finished the job knew exactly what he was doing, and put it in writing, gloating.
Murray Rothbard is about as close as the American libertarian movement has to a founding father, and in a memoir he wrote in the early seventies, published only after his death, he laid the whole theft out in one passage:
“One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy. Other words, such as ‘liberal,’ had been originally identified with laissez-faire libertarians, but had been captured by left-wing statists, forcing us in the 1940s to call ourselves rather feebly ‘true’ or ‘classical’ liberals. ‘Libertarians,’ in contrast, had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over, and more properly from the view of etymology; since we were proponents of individual liberty and therefore of the individual’s right to his property.”
In one breath, a movement founder admits the left took “liberal” from his side and his side took “libertarian” from the left, and he resents the first theft while savoring the second. This is the moment the whole story stops having a good guy. Everyone in it is a thief who got robbed.
And there’s a last turn that tips the thing from history into something closer to a law of nature. Leonard Read, who ran that same free-market foundation and did more than anyone to make “libertarian” the free-market word, lived long enough to watch it slide out of his hands too. Late in life he wrote: “I am sorry I ever did it. Why? Because the word libertarian has now been just as much expropriated as the word liberal.” The man who chose the replacement word watched the replacement word get taken. You flee a captured term, you grab a fresh one, and the fresh one gets captured while it’s still warm in your grip. A word ouroboros.
One word in this family is stranger than any of them. Every word so far had at least one camp that wanted it, that would fight for it, that stole it or dug in to defend it. There is one that nobody will claim at all.
That word is neoliberal. And its strangeness starts at the top, with the very people it’s supposed to name.
The Mont Pelerin Society is the group most often called the headquarters of world neoliberalism, the society Hayek founded in 1947 to defend free markets against the rising tide of central planning. Go read its founding statement of aims. The word “neoliberal” is not in it. It has never been in the society’s charter or in its description of itself, not once. Individual members used it in the early years, and some of the German founders wore it proudly. But the institution never did, and Hayek himself disliked the term. Asked outright in 1981 whether he was a neoliberal, he said flatly that he was not.
Milton Friedman used it in exactly one place. In 1951, in a Norwegian magazine, he published an essay called “Neoliberalism and Its Prospects” and laid out a careful definition of it. Then he never touched the word again, across the next half century of writing about this precise subject. He spent the rest of his career calling himself a liberal in the nineteenth-century sense and never picked the other word back up. The most famous free-market economist alive used it once, in Norwegian, and set it down.
None of this is accident, and you can measure it. In 2009, two political scientists, Taylor Boas and Jordan Gans-Morse, went through 148 academic articles that used the word “neoliberalism,” every one published between 1990 and 2004 in the nine development, comparative politics, and Latin American studies journals where the word turns up most, and counted. The results are about as clean as social science gets. Three percent of the articles used the word in a positive sense, and that figure is stubborn: throw out the single journal that supplies a third of the sample and the share of negative uses drops sharply, while the three percent positive doesn’t move at all. Sixty-nine percent never defined the word at all, and that figure was climbing over time rather than falling, from sixty-three percent in the early years to seventy-six percent by the end of the window. Even in the articles where neoliberalism was the very thing being studied, two-thirds of the authors never said what they meant by it.
And then the number that settles the matter. In all their research, the two scholars found essentially nobody using the word about himself. The one near-miss was a Thomas Friedman column that applied it to his own policy recommendations. Meanwhile a fifth of the articles used it about somebody else. The word only travels in one direction. It’s a thing you call other people. Nobody in the whole sample was ever a neoliberal in the first person.
Far from fading from neglect, the word was spreading faster than almost anything in the language. The historian Daniel Rodgers, writing in Dissent, pulled the counts: under two thousand uses of “neoliberalism” in the ProQuest database between 1989 and 1999, and over thirty-three thousand between the 2008 crash and the day he sat down to write. It had become, in his phrase, the linguistic omnivore of our times, stuck onto architecture and film and feminism and Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and almost anything a writer wanted to flag as bad. A word that meant everything, belonged to no one, and functioned, nearly always, as an insult.
The clincher, though, is what happened to the only people who ever volunteered for the word. They gave it back. In 2017 a crowd of young, wonky, market-friendly people online started a forum they named r/neoliberal, taking the slur on purpose, mostly to needle the people who’d been aiming it at them. It grew into something real: eighty-odd chapters, a popular podcast, a berth at a Washington think tank. And then, in 2022, after nearly five years of building a whole identity on the word, they took it off the door. They renamed themselves the Center for New Liberalism, keeping the old name only on the subreddit where it started. The reason they wrote down is almost too perfect: the mission, they said, is “too important to be distracted by arguments over nomenclature.” Even the people who wanted the word concluded that fighting to hold it cost more than it was worth. And look where they landed. “New liberalism” is what “neoliberalism” meant in the first place, back when the people using it meant it kindly, and it’s the exact phrase Boas and Gans-Morse had proposed as the salvage operation when they wrote the word off. The reclaimers ran the entire circle and came back to the meaning, having given up on the word, which had been sitting there untouched the whole way around.
And if you’re wondering who coined it, and whether it began life as a compliment or a slur, get in line, because nobody can agree on that either. Two of the most-cited papers on the question reach opposite conclusions. One dates the word to the 1930s and a circle of German free-market economists who wore it proudly. The other finds it already in use in the 1920s, among German Marxists and proto-fascists who spat it, and aimed at a different set of economists entirely. The word that now means “something bad” has an origin story that is itself contested down to the root. We can’t even settle where the word for our disagreements came from.
So why does it go this way? Why does one word rot into a slur nobody will touch, while another gets fought over for two centuries and is still worth arguing about?
The best answer I could find comes from a philosopher named W.B. Gallie, in a lecture he gave in 1956. Some concepts, he argued, are essentially contested. They name something good, something valued, and something complicated enough that decent, reasonable people will disagree forever about what it actually consists of. His central case, and the one he called the appraisive political concept par excellence, was democracy. Everybody wants it, nobody can write a definition that ends the argument, and the argument never ends. The part people usually miss is his conclusion: that this endless arguing is not a breakdown. It is the normal, healthy condition of that kind of word. The disputes are, in his words, “perfectly genuine,” backed by real reasons on every side. They are what a living political idea looks like from the inside.
Set that beside neoliberalism and the contrast starts to do some work. Notice first what Gallie is not saying. He isn’t saying democracy has a crisp meaning. He’s saying the opposite: the disputes aren’t resolvable by argument of any kind. What democracy has is not precision but life. People still argue with the word, and the arguments still get somewhere, because everyone wants the label and therefore everyone has to make a case about who deserves it. Both ends pull, and the pulling keeps the rope in play. Marxism runs on the same engine. It’s a fighting word, and it has defenders as well as attackers, people willing to stand up and say yes, that’s me, and here is what it really means, which is why it stays worth arguing about.
Neoliberalism had almost nobody in that role. Its critics took the word outright, and most of the people it described declined to fight for it. They stepped over to a different one. Called neoliberals, they answered “orthodox,” or “classical liberal,” or “neoclassical,” anything but the word that had been thrown at them. And once only one side is pulling, nothing holds the far end. With no one there to argue the word down to a fine point, it fills up with whatever its only remaining users need it to carry. Boas and Gans-Morse have a name for the result: a “conceptual trash heap,” able to hold any bad thing at all, precisely because no one is left to argue that this or that bad thing doesn’t belong.
There’s an obvious objection here. Nobody calls himself a populist either, or an orientalist. Some words are just built for the third person. But “neoliberal” was claimed: the Freiburg economists used it about themselves and meant it well, and eighty years later a few thousand people online picked it back up on purpose. A self-description that got abandoned twice is a different thing from a category that was never anybody’s to abandon.
A political word does not lose its meaning because people fight over it. It loses its meaning when they stop. The fight is the thing that holds the word in place. Take the fight away, by winning it or by wandering off, and the word goes slack, and the last hand on it decides what it says.
That was the extent of anything even close to my understanding anyway, and I’ve still learned a lot in going down this rabbit hole. It’s mostly right I think, and the part that’s wrong took me two more writers to find.
Three fates so far, then, and there’s a fourth coming from Orwell. “Neoliberal” got dragged to one end and dropped there, because only one side ever pulled ye olde conceptual tug-of-war rope. “Liberal,” the big one, the prize, got fought over hard and then let go of, one hand at a time, until the American left was holding it nearly alone, not by conquest but by being the last side still in the room when everyone else wandered out. And “liberal arts” sat still for six hundred years because nothing was ever at stake in the name, so nobody bothered to pull at all.
The liberal-arts case needs a caveat, because the difference between it and “liberal” isn’t obvious. Nobody is pulling on either word now, so why did one keep its shape and the other lose it? The best answer I have is that a word which was never contested was also never stretched, while a word that got hauled in four directions for a century and then dropped keeps the stretch marks. Being abandoned is not the same as being left alone. And even “liberal arts” only held still in a limited sense: the label stayed put while the contents were swapped out completely. The trivium and quadrivium are long gone, and what sits under the phrase today would be unrecognizable to the people who coined it. A word can hold its shape and lose everything inside it, which is its own kind of drift and maybe the quietest one.
Two footnotes to Gallie, because the history has a nice symmetry in it.
Ten years before that lecture, in 1946, George Orwell wrote “Politics and the English Language” and noticed the identical fact about the identical word. “In the case of a word like democracy,” he wrote, “not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides.” Same observation, same example, same city, ten years apart, and the opposite verdict. Orwell thought he was describing a disease. He read the resistance to definition as motivated and a little crooked: people block a definition because a settled meaning would cost them the use of a praise-word. Gallie looked at the same resistance and called it the sign of a concept that was alive.
But Orwell also hands me a problem, in the sentence directly before the one I just quoted. “The word Fascism,” he writes, “has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”
Read that against everything above: that’s the conceptual trash heap, described sixty-three years before Boas and Gans-Morse got there. And nobody abandoned “fascism.” It gets thrown constantly, by people who care enormously, and it gets argued about ferociously, mostly over who deserves to get called it.
But look at what fascism has in common with neoliberal. What neither word has is anybody standing up and saying yes, that’s me, and here is what it really means. Two words, no first-person claimants, same destination. Which tells me that argument by itself doesn’t save a word, and attention by itself doesn’t save a word. Something narrower does.
Orwell supplies that too, in the same paragraph, and it’s about democracy. “The defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy,” he writes, “and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning.” That’s a fight in which neither side wants a definition, because a definition would exclude somebody and everyone at the table would rather stay in than be exact. So democracy never gets sharp. It also never dies, because everyone has a reason to keep using it and therefore a reason to keep arguing about who qualifies. Precision and life turn out to be two different things, and a word can have the second without ever getting the first.
A word can sit unclaimed, the way “liberal arts” did, and hold its shape because nothing was ever at stake in the name. Everyone can claim it at once, which is democracy: permanently alive, permanently imprecise, because nobody at that table wants a boundary drawn that might leave them outside it. One side can throw it while nobody at all claims it, which is “neoliberal,” and which is also, on Orwell’s evidence, “fascism,” until the word is nothing but a place to put bad things. Or everybody can want it, fight hard over it, and then set it down one at a time, which is what happened to “liberal.”
Orwell and Gallie are both right, then, and they were looking at different patients. Gallie’s is a word alive with argument. Orwell’s is a word that argument has worn smooth. What Orwell got wrong was only the cause: he assumed bad faith, people being deliberately slippery. Bad faith is real and it’s in the story, but most of the damage here was done by people acting in perfectly good faith who simply found the fight too expensive and stopped showing up.
There’s a political scientist’s version of this too, which I’m partial to for obvious reasons. In 1970, Giovanni Sartori wrote a paper (that most everyone in a good grad program reads) about what happens to a concept when a field stretches it to cover more and more cases. He called it conceptual stretching, and he put the trade-off in a single line: we “can cover more,” he wrote, “only by saying less.” He was worried about this in 1970, when the pace was gentle. I’d love to know what he’d make of a word that went from two thousand uses to thirty-three thousand in twenty years while three-quarters of the people using it declined to say what it meant.
The shortest statement of the problem belongs to Nietzsche, quoted approvingly by the historian Reinhart Koselleck: “only that with no history can be defined.” Which accounts for that sixty-nine percent rather better than laziness does. Those scholars are up against a word with too much history packed into it to be pinned to a sentence.
Now I have to give some ground to people I usually argue with. There’s a whole industry of writers who blame all of this on postmodernism, on the doctrines that meaning is unstable, that truth is constructed, that nobody has a privileged view from nowhere. I’ve spent a lot of words pushing back on that industry. But on this specific point, about words, they aren’t wrong. Words really are constructed. There’s no experiment you can run that settles what “liberal” means; nothing in the world pushes back when you use it badly. In the narrow matter of what our political vocabulary means, the constructivists have the better of it.
Where they go wrong is the dates, and the dates are not close. Look back at what’s here. The New Republic switched vocabularies in 1916. The Times gave up in 1924. Hoover walked away from the word on a battlefield in 1930. Rothbard’s side was already reduced to calling itself “true” liberals in the forties. Dean Russell tried his trademark in 1955, and Hayek surrendered in 1960. All of that was underway or finished before Derrida set foot at Johns Hopkins, and a full two decades before The Postmodern Condition appeared in English. Herbert Croly was not a constructivist. Herbert Hoover was not troubled about the view from nowhere. Whatever emptied these words, it wasn’t a French theory that hadn’t arrived yet.
What postmodernism did, arriving late, was supply an explanation (perhaps even a justification?) and remove one of the remaining reasons to resist. If you’ve been taught that fixing a meaning is an exercise of power rather than an attempt at accuracy, you will not spend much of your life defending a definition. The tenets didn’t pull the rope apart; they persuaded a lot of people the rope was imaginary, and nobody keeps pulling on a rope they’ve decided isn’t there. That’s a real contribution, and it’s a second-order one. The hollowing was already a going concern, done by ordinary people walking away from words that had gotten expensive to defend.
The concession has a hard edge on it, though, and this is where I get off the train. Constructivism about the word doesn’t buy you constructivism about the thing. “Liberal” may be up for grabs, but the real consequences of a state-run health system versus a market-run one don’t dissolve because we can’t agree what to call them.
An objection, and a fair one. What about the people who abuse these words on purpose? The consultant who cuts a “Massachusetts liberal” attack ad, the cable host who brands everything he dislikes neoliberal, the activist who stretches a word until it covers whatever he’s angry about this week. Isn’t that what emptied the words out?
Mostly those people arrive after the hollowing rather than before it. A word is harder to stretch when it has defenders who can make an objection stick, which is a narrower thing than having defenders at all. “Liberal” had defenders the whole way down, loud ones, and it got hauled in four directions anyway, because objecting in print is not the same as making the stretch cost anybody anything. The consultants didn’t find a word without defenders. They found a word whose defenders had no way to charge them.
Mostly, though, not always, and “woke” is an interesting one. That word came out of Black American English, where “stay woke” had meant alert to racial injustice since at least the 1920s, and it went mainstream around 2014 with Ferguson. By the end of that decade it had become a general-purpose insult for anything left of center. Five years, maybe six. And nobody had walked away from it while that happened; people were still claiming it the whole time.
The cleanest illustration I know of is sworn testimony. In late 2022, in a federal courtroom in Florida, Ron DeSantis’s general counsel was asked what “woke” means. He didn’t flounder. He said it was the belief that “there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them,” which is, near enough, what the word meant in 2014 before anyone made a campaign out of it. The governor’s own lawyer, under oath, handed the word back its original definition, at the same moment the administration was running on it to mean something else entirely.
So a determined campaign can do to a word in five years what neglect took a century to do to “liberal.” Attack is usually the second act in this story, and occasionally it turns out to be the first.
The drift doesn’t stop at the pundits, either. It reaches into the work I do for a living.
If you want to measure how liberal or conservative Americans are, the standard instrument, the one that’s been running in the American National Election Studies since 1972, hands people a seven-point scale from extremely liberal to extremely conservative and asks them to place themselves. The measure assumes the words mean something stable and shared. We’ve known for decades that they don’t. The finding, associated most closely with Ellis and Stimson, is that Americans tend to be symbolically conservative and operationally liberal: they cherish the conservative label, preferring it to “liberal” by nearly two to one among those who pick a side, while wanting government to do and spend more across a whole range of specific problems. Only about a quarter of self-identified conservatives hold consistently conservative policy views. Something close to thirty percent of them hold liberal ones and simply like the label. The label and the contents came apart, and the gap sits right there in the discipline’s own data. There are other explanations for that gap, and good ones: labels as group identity rather than policy summaries, elite cues, the difference between how people answer abstract questions and concrete ones. And Converse, whose 1964 paper on belief systems is the founding statement of the case that most people don’t organize politics the way our scales assume. Those 1939 pollsters found four in ten who couldn’t define the words; Converse spent a career explaining why that wasn’t a fluke. Word-drift isn’t the whole story. It’s in the story, and it’s the part few build into the instrument.
Political science has a partial fix, and the fix is the interesting part. At least for legislators, we just mostly stopped asking. The rigorous measures score members of Congress off their roll-call votes rather than anything they say about themselves. Ideology gets read from behavior, from the record of what they actually did, because the words couldn’t be trusted to sit still. Not a clean escape, mind you. The dimension those methods recover is just the one that best accounts for the voting, and it’s we who decide to call it liberal-to-conservative, which drags the word back in at the end. But it’s anchored to something a member of Congress actually did on a Tuesday, which is more than the survey can say.
The roll-call fix only works where there’s a record, though, and ordinary voters don’t take roll-call votes. For them the best available move is to stop asking what they call themselves and start asking what they want the government to do, which is better, and is still only a different survey question. There’s no behavior to anchor it to. So the measure firms up exactly where a consequence is attached and stays slippery exactly where none is. Nothing pushes back on a survey answer, and it shows.
The second place the drift reaches is visible on television every night. In American usage “liberal” has become a synonym for “Democrat,” and that shorthand does a great deal of work it never announces. I’ll take some credit for that I guess, going back to my Journal of Politics piece in 1998 with Abramowitz.
But it also covers over the fact that the Democratic coalition isn’t one thing. It holds actual proceduralist liberals, the due-process, free-speech, constitutional-rights kind, sharing a label with a left that openly disdains them, and for which “liberal” and “neoliberal” are the preferred insults. Some of the sharpest anti-liberal argument in the country right now is happening inside the party the word supposedly names.
The same trick runs on the right, before anybody over there gets comfortable. “Conservative” has become a synonym for “Republican,” and it stretches over free-market people, religious traditionalists, nationalists, and populists who agree on considerably less than the shared word suggests. Both parties are running a one-dimensional label over a coalition that stopped being one-dimensional decades ago, and the looseness in the words is what makes it possible. When the label is vague enough, the argument it’s covering never has to happen out loud.
Which brings back the man from the top, and the thought I asked you to hold. Jordan Peterson built a second career prosecuting postmodernism, the claim that meaning won’t hold still, and he once announced, approvingly, that a magazine writer who had previously filed him under “far right” now described him instead as a “classic British Liberal.” A Canadian reaching across an ocean and a century for a word that means free-marketeer in Vienna, welfare-state progressive in Boston, and the main conservative party one country over in Australia, all to name his objection to the idea that words drift. That’s the prestige badge, detached from the settlement it used to name. I don’t raise it to score on the man. I raise it because it’s the most compact demonstration I know of how little any of us gets to stand outside this. Myself included.
Every time I’ve written “actual proceduralist liberal,” or “the real meaning,” I’ve made a bid, fixing one sense of a contested word and presenting it as the true one. The political theorist Michael Freeden has a name for that maneuver, decontestation, and his point is that it’s what every ideology does for a living. I’m not hovering above the fight, reporting on it. I’m pulling on the rope with everybody else, and telling you that pulling is good for the rope.
So what do you actually do with a word like this? I do love unsatisfying endings. A friend of mine, and consistent reader of this here BBQ, is going to give me shit about this piece for sure, because landing this plane is going to be done the hard way.
Retiring it isn’t on the table. You can’t run American politics without “liberal,” and any replacement would be captured inside a decade anyway. Ask Leonard Read.
The obvious advice is to stand and fight for your words. But everyone here tried that, and look at the scoreboard. Hayek fled the word and lost it. Friedman dug in and lost it. Russell went out and got a fresh word and lost that one too. Read built the replacement and ended up apologizing for it in print. The reclaimers volunteered for the most toxic term on the shelf, built eighty chapters on it, and handed it back inside five years. Five people, four strategies, five defeats, and the outcome didn’t track the strategy at all.
Whatever governs this, it isn’t the courage of individual writers, and I’d be selling you something if I closed by telling you to be braver about vocabulary.
The defeats have one thing in common. In none of them did anybody ever pay a price for using the word “wrong.” That’s the engine, and it’s the reason contestation mattered wherever it did: a live opponent is a machine for making imprecision expensive. Remove the opponent, or leave him there but strip him of any way to make the cost land, and precision turns into a hobby.
Other fields have machinery for this. A company that misstates its earnings meets an auditor. A drug that doesn’t work fails its trial. Nothing of the kind exists anywhere in political language, and the closest thing to a fix anybody has built, those roll-call scores, works by giving up on the words entirely. Which is why the same story could be told about “liberal” in 1930, about “neoliberal” in 2009, and about “woke” the day before yesterday.
What’s left is the small version, and it is really small. When a word is carrying weight in your argument, say what you mean by it. Not every word, every time; that’s a recipe for paralysis and for the least readable prose on earth. Pedants unite!
But for the two or three your case actually rests on, stipulate. Put the definition on the table where somebody can take a swing at it. That won’t save the word. Nothing you do will save the word. What it does is smaller, and it’s the same machine. If the trouble is that nobody ever pays for using a word wrong, then stipulating is you volunteering to pay. You put the definition down where somebody who disagrees with you can pick it up and hit you with it. You can’t build the auditor. You can hand one person the ruler and stand still for the measurement, and that turns out to be the only part of this you control.
I don’t have a tidier ending than that, because there isn’t one. The word isn’t going to get fixed. It will go on meaning small government in Berlin, conservatism in Canberra, social democracy in Bogotá, and whatever the last speaker needed it to mean in Washington.
Humpty Dumpty got there first, as usual. When Alice objects that you can’t make words mean so many different things, he gives the whole answer. “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
That’s the mechanism, and that’s the warning. The word doesn’t go to whoever holds on hardest. Everybody in this story held on hard. It goes to whoever is left in the room.
Yeah, that was a long one. I learned a lot doing this. I hope you found it worth your time. Would love to hear what you think about it though.
If you want these to keep showing up, you can subscribe. And if you’d rather attach a literal price to it, there’s a coffee button, which at least has the virtue of a price you can see. :)
Earlier in the stack:
Are “Liberals” Useful Idiots for the World to Come?, the piece that started all the questions, and the one this grew out of.
The Other Pillar, Part 3 of the Reality Bats Last series, where “approval-optimized versus reality-optimized” first got a run. That’s the same engine as the one above: what happens to a thing when nothing checks it.
Why Are the Humanities Missing the AI Moment?, on the reality-correction differential, which is this argument pointed at a set of disciplines instead of at a word.
Gad Saad’s Empathy Alibi?, a much shorter case of the same disease, this time with “empathy” doing the covering.
Reality Bats Last, the start of the series all of this comes out of.
Worth every cup of coffee!