- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
It's honestly troubling to me that there needs to be a debate over what left-center people should be calling themselves based largely upon what neocons have done with the sound of a word. By pronouncing "liberal" with a sneer they have reduced the very-well-intended left-center worrying about what term will most effectively describe his or her orientation on the idealogical spectrum. This is sad, and no matter the outcome (just like "colored", "Negro", "Black", "African American", "Negro" ad nauseum), the remaining Greek chorus of neocons will latch onto it and flog you with it.
But consider for a moment what it is like to be an earnest conservative at this point in our history! Jesus, I can't even use the "C" word anymore! Someone earlier mentioned "communitarian", which works for me, but Erich Fromm's dissertation (contained in his landmark work "The Sane Society") describes a "communitarian socialist", and I find that falls neatly in the middle of liberal/progressive and earnest conservative. While I really liked William S. Burroughs' "Factualist party", it doesn't quite get the job done, but "communitarian socialist" should piss off everyone equally, which is my goal in life, I'm beginning to believe.
"Socialist" has such a grim stigma attached to it it's bound to cause seizures and possible death in neocons, which is OK with me. "Communitarian" has that tenuous connection with communism, another neocon swearword, so all of a sudden I think I've found my new place in the world. Nobody loves even an earnest conservative anymore, and all labels currently are backward-looking anyway, so, since virtually no one ever adopted Fromm's "communitarian socialist" label, that's what I'm gonna be from now on. No, better yet, an agrarian communitarian. There. That works.
Let the carpet bombing of the suburbs begin!
