Labels Are Killing Us

Labels will be the death of us. They strip away humanity. They cloud judgment. They are weaponized in a zero-sum quest for dominance. They are devilishly effective and dangerous. Because of this, label warfare must be vanquished.

America epitomizes this truth. The United States of America is fast becoming an oxymoron. We just celebrated a tense, politicized 250th anniversary. Society has suffered a collapse in civics. In this environment, Liberal, Conservative, Capitalist, Socialist, and Communist are pejoratives. They are linguistic daggers wielded in an amped-up fight between alleged good and evil.

Where does China fit in here? It is Villain No. 1 in America's Label War. In this framing, the People’s Republic of China is Socialist (bad), Communist (really bad), alien and unscrupulous (scary bad), and committed to dominating the world and us (bad bad). The Chinese Communist Party is the government; the government is the nation; the nation is its people. This is a civilizational clash, and the Rubicon fast approaches. It is existential.

National security is the label used to defend attempts to combat this threat. From bans on Chinese buying land to restricting domestic companies from licensing Chinese tech to blocking Chinese students from studying in our universities to now elevating birthright citizenship as ghoulish specter. There is even a Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party carrying out wide-ranging investigations in the U.S. House of Representatives.

If everyone other is nefarious, then common ground will be impossible, discrimination will continue to grow, and a retreat to the seductiveness of label certitude will deepen.

All of the above is enough to keep one up at night, a society on edge, and a nation at risk.

Ok. Wait.

Deep breath.

This misses the boat. The true threat is more insidious.

The threat, domestically as well as globally, is the descent to label warfare itself. It has led to silos, absolutes, contempt, and apathy. If there is no understanding, there can be no respect. If there is no respect, there can be no compromise. If there is no compromise, there can be no meeting of the minds. And if there is no meeting of the minds, there can be no harmony.

In such event, Mao Zedong may ultimately be proven prescient when noting long ago that “political power [and social order] grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

Here’s an academic exercise. For a moment, strip away politics and the desperate craving of leaders and elites everywhere to protect their exalted positions, power, and privilege. Instead, ask what the -isms, liberalism/conservatism, socialism, and communism, promote at their cores, not how they govern to get there. The goal is to re-inflate what the labels have flattened, to seek a possible thread of commonality.

Each ‘ism is a response to what its proponents see as a grave ill, either a) oppression of individuals by monarchs, b) oppression of society by individuals or c) oppression of everyone else by the wealthy. None of the three have proven capable of prevailing over the others, though not for want of effort. Thus, compromise, or as a 2025 RAND Corporation Report on “Stabilizing the U.S.-China Rivalry” terms it, collaborative coexistence, is a must. There is room to maneuver here, but it will require a willingness to jettison at least some label rigidity.

Liberalism/Conservatism – America’s Democracy

America’s raison d’etre has traditionally been individual freedom, liberty, and people power, i.e., no oppression by monarchs.

In Democracy in America (1835), Alexis de Tocqueville identified that “America the principle of the sovereignty of the people is not either barren or concealed, as it is with some other nations; it is recognized by the customs and proclaimed by the laws; it spreads freely, and arrives without impediment at its most remote consequences.”

Socialism

Socialism fears the overbearingness of individual rights at the expense of social welfare, i.e., no oppression by individuals.

In its Declaration of Principles (Section II, No. 21), the Socialist International proclaims that “Democratic socialism is an international movement for freedom, social justice and solidarity. Its goal is to achieve a peaceful world where these basic values can be enhanced and where each individual can live a meaningful life with the full development of his or her personality and talents and with the guarantee of human and civil rights in a democratic framework of society.”

Communism – China’s Socialism with Chinese Characteristics

Communism was a direct response to the human horrors attendant to the Industrial Revolution, i.e., no oppression of everyone else by the wealthy.

Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto that “The supremacy of the proletariat will cause [national differences and antagonisms between peoples] to vanish still faster….When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character….In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

What gets lost in the dissonance of label politics, and therefore governance, is the symbiotic relationship between individuals and society. You can’t have one without the other. Ignoring this, cloaking ourselves in code words, is a trap that the governments of both America and China fall into, albeit from different ideological poles.

Back to de Tocqueville. What makes a society? “Without common ideas, there is no common action, and without common action men still exist, but a social body does not. Thus in order that there be society, and all the more, that this society prosper, it is necessary that all the minds of the citizens always be brought together and held together by some principle ideas.”

This is as true for China as it is for America. Without it, union becomes disunion and prosperity a phantom. Behind the labels, promoting the welfare of individuals to benefit the society made up of those individuals is common among and within the -isms. We need to escape labels to be able to see this humanity. There is no substitute that will end well.