Check the label.

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.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

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 the polls; it makes us all feel better if we can claim that our ideology wasn't the problem so much as the failure of our political leaders to implement it.

I'm sympathetic to the argument that George W. Bush betrayed conservatism. But that argument only adds to the confusion. Because he is the most powerful and famous conservative in the world at this moment, whatever President Bush does will, inevitably, come to define conservatism for millions of people.

So here's a modest proposal: Let's use names. Of course, in reality names and labels are interchangeable terms. But politics is more about perception than reality, and personalities convey a set of discernible actions better than a bunch of neos, theos, and isms. Nobody ever says, "I don't believe in names." When presidential candidates say they would appoint conservative justices to the Supreme Court, eyes usually roll. We want names! Like who? When they say Scalia and Thomas, we say ahh, gotcha. When someone says, "I'm a conservative," that doesn't give me enough information. After all, even Kevin Phillips says he's a conservative. And if someone told me he was a "Kevin Phillips conservative," I would respond, "Ah, so you mean a liberal who's afraid to admit it."

NR's Jay Nordlinger often makes this point when people ask him what kind of conservative he is. He says, succinctly, "I'm a Reaganite." The clarity here is obvious and commendable. Similarly, "Buchananite," "Clintonite," and "Rockefeller Republican" all have the benefit of conveying an approach to politics devoid of excessive abstraction. Of course, this will only spark huge arguments along the lines of: What Would Reagan Do? But that has a nice ring to it.