[This post was published in the 11sep26 edition of The Union.]
George Rebane
Some among us treat the act of naming people by their publicly declared ideological tenets as an uncivil discourtesy—something to be avoided in polite debate. These people almost uniformly sit on the left side of America’s political spectrum. Their preferred mode of discourse is not the reasoned defense of their own policy beliefs, nor the accurate identification of the Right’s tenets. It is the castigation of people like me.
One wonders what news they consume, which national polls they read, and what history they have studied. These are the neighbors who insist we are a pure democracy, that President Trump is a low-life engineering a fascist regime, and that the United States is the chief international pariah responsible for untold human misery.
They have no difficulty flinging daily epithets at conservatives—imperialists, genocidal, greedy capitalists, Nazis, profit-mongers, racists, fascists, oligarchs, religious fanatics, homophobes, woman-haters, anti-Black, anti-immigrant, and on and on. They treat the simple requirement that voters be verifiable American citizens as both undemocratic and un-American.
We are terminally divided, and at a turning point last seen in the 1850s when the Democratic Party defended slavery to the point of secession. Today’s Left does not seek to secede. It seeks to “fundamentally transform” the United States into a socialist country. Large fractions of Democrats now poll favoring socialism over capitalism and view communism as a potential improvement on the constitutional democratic republic we have sustained for 250 years. These are not partisan smears. They are statements drawn directly from the platforms of the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Yet in this climate most on the Left instinctively understand that the country as a whole is not ready to march to the polls under the collectivist banners of Marxists, communists, or even the rose-fisted flag of socialists. They—and many lightly-read independents and some on the right—treat those labels as pejorative, denigrating, and therefore forbidden in civil discussion.
So let’s examine the actual business of labeling.
Socio-political ideologies do not magically appear and advance themselves. They are conceived by individuals, embraced by individuals, and promoted in the public square by organized individuals—specific, identifiable people. There is no rule that a political label may be attached only to someone who checks every box of an ideology’s published literature. Embracing and promoting several key tenets is sufficient to categorize a person in debate. When the categorical label can be reasonably attributed, its use is not pejorative; it is descriptive.
What purposes do such labels serve? First, they are efficient transmitters of a wider set of attributes audiences already understand. Second, they are useful predictors of future behavior—what public policies the labeled individual will support. Third, they brand the individual by connecting him or her to an established movement whose aims are known. Branding allows the audience to decide whether the debater can reasonably be identified with that movement and therefore whether to support or oppose him.
When we debate and label an opponent in these pages, we should supply a reasonable basis for the label. If I call someone a Marxist, the reader should be able to see that the ideas expressed match tenets found in the published platforms or historical definitions of Marxism. The individual need not have checked every box; a sufficient subset of necessary tenets justifies the appellation.
In technical terms, the tenets of an ideology can be treated as fuzzy sets—along with the fuzzy logic developed by Berkeley computer scientist and AI researcher Lotfi Zadeh—in which partial membership is the normal condition. Most thinking people hold belief systems of discrete concepts in which they enjoy, at best, partial or fuzzy membership. Nevertheless, attaching the label has always communicated unambiguous support or opposition to the underlying ideas that form the real basis of the debate.
Names matter. Refusing to use them when they fit is not civility. It is evasion.
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