Check the label.(liberals)

THERE are few liberal tics I hate more than the pronouncement "I don't believe in labels." Liberals seem not to like being tagged and marked for what they are because they don't like to be hemmed in. This reflex has a long intellectual pedigree, but its most recent direct antecedent is JFK's "new politics," which revolved around his claim that most of the ideological questions of the day had been settled and all that was left was for technocratic brainiacs--like him--to work out the details in some government office somewhere.

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Since then, liberals have employed versions of this locution whenever they have gotten boxed in by labels. They are "post-partisan," they claim. Many liberals refuse to admit that liberalism means anything more or less than "the right thing." This is essentially the definition preferred by Jonathan Chait at The New Republic. Hillary Clinton is fond of saying, for example, that we need to move "beyond" labels and ideology and get down to problem-solving. Translation: Stop objecting to my ideas and help me implement them.

This sentiment is dismayingly undemocratic. In democracies labels matter because words matter. And words matter because democracy is about disagreement, not agreement. To say "Let's get beyond labels" is to say that disagreement itself is illegitimate.

With that said, who can deny he is suffering from label fatigue? Compassionate conservatism, crunchy conservatism, paleoconservatism, neoconservatism, progressivism, liberalism, neoliberalism, etc.: The labels proliferate like kudzu. Conservatives have started playing the same game, as if conservatism were never wrong. This is partly the inevitable consequence of the thumpin' the GOP recently received at ...