Why Liberal and Conservative Are Relative Terms, Not Fixed Identities
What I want to do here is unrigidify our relationship to two words. Unrigidify is a made-up word. It is also a good one, so I am going to keep it.
The two words are liberal and conservative.
Most of us hold some attachment to one of them. For a great many people that attachment has moved past preference and become identity. We do not simply hold a liberal or a conservative view. We have become a liberal or a conservative. That shift sounds small. It is not. It changes how we think, and it is the shift I want to examine.
If we use these terms structurally rather than tribally, they describe two different orientations toward how a system handles change.
Liberalism, in this structural sense, is an orientation toward flexibility. It asks how we might deregulate, open, and adapt so that the individual has more possibility available to them. The word itself carries this. Its roots run through liberty — freedom, openness, the expansion of individual choice. Liberal systems tend to favor autonomy and experimentation.
Conservatism is an orientation toward maintenance. It asks what structures preserve order, continuity, and predictability, and therefore efficiency. Its roots run through conserve — to keep, to protect, to hold something steady against rapid disruption. Conservative systems tend to favor coordination and shared stability.
Neither word, used this way, means good or bad. They are not moral castes. They are strategies. And like all strategies, they become coherent or incoherent depending on what they are being asked to organize.
Both Orientations, At the Same Time
Both orientations are useful. More than that, in most healthy processes they are already working at the same time.
Consider the scientific method. Imagine we are trying to develop a new treatment for diabetes — and imagine, fairly, that we are not yet as successful with diabetes as we would like to be. The idea itself, say some novel approach to regenerating pancreatic tissue, requires flexibility. It requires imagination. It requires us to think past the structures we already have. That is a liberal act.
But the evaluation of that idea is conservative. The protocols, the controls, the measurements, the replication standards — these are fixed on purpose. They exist to create reliability. The innovation is liberal. The validation is conservative. The two are not in conflict. The process needs both, at once, doing different work.
Swimming Pools
Swimming pools are the clearest way I know to show this.
If I ask whether you are conservative or liberal about swimming pools, the question does not quite resolve. There is no answer yet. It only becomes answerable once we add context.
So let us add some.
Picture a large public pool in a dense urban setting. It is open to everyone. Children, older adults, strong swimmers, people who can barely swim at all, families, people who have never been near a pool before. Apartment buildings surround it, and the people inside them live alongside it whether they use it or not. A great many people depend on this space functioning safely and predictably.
In that context, I become extraordinarily conservative. Almost fundamentalist about a few of the rules.
I want clearly marked depth signs, so that someone with limited swimming ability knows where the water is shallow enough to wade. I want rules about diving. I want no running near the water. I do not want glass containers anywhere near the pool. I want it to close at an hour that does not disturb the families living around it.
Every one of those is a conservative value in the literal sense. Each one limits the freedom of the individual in order to preserve the order and safety of the collective. And in this context, that limitation is appropriate. The consequences of a mistake do not stay with the person who made it. They spread.
Now change the context completely.
Picture a private pool in rural North Dakota in August. It belongs to an older couple. Their nearest neighbor is thirty miles away. The pool is powered by solar electricity. Almost no one uses it but the two of them, and they use it mostly to cool down.
In that context, I become radically liberal. I do not care whether they wear clothes. I do not care whether there are signs marking the depth. They can run beside the pool if they want to. They can leave it open all night. They can keep it cold during the day and warm it at night if that is their preference — the energy is theirs, the pool is theirs, the consequences are theirs.
Nothing here has changed about me. What has changed is the scale of the system and the reach of the consequences. In one context I am conservative about pools. In the other I am liberal about pools. Both positions are mine. Both are coherent. Neither is my identity.
When the Label Becomes the Self
This is the move I want to slow down on.
The moment we fuse our identity with one of these terms, we lose the ability to do what I just did. We can no longer be conservative here and liberal there, because the term is no longer a tool we pick up for a context. It has become a piece of who we are.
And once a label is part of who we are, disagreement stops feeling like a question about a problem. It starts feeling like a threat to the self. The emotional intensity rises fast — faster than thought. We defend rather than evaluate. We react to the word rather than examine the situation in front of us.
This also makes us remarkably easy to manipulate. If someone knows which label you have fused with, they do not need to make an argument. They only need to attach their position to your label, or attach the position they want you to reject to the other one. Your reaction does the rest. You will defend something, or oppose something, without having looked at it.
It is worth asking why we fuse in the first place, because the fusion is not stupidity. It does something for us.
Identity creates belonging. To be a liberal or a conservative is to have a group, a set of people who recognize you. Certainty reduces anxiety, and a fixed label offers certainty — it tells you in advance what you think, so you do not have to keep deciding. A label simplifies a complicated world into a manageable shape. And a firm position protects against ambiguity, against the discomfort of not yet knowing.
None of that is trivial. Belonging, lowered anxiety, simplicity, a steadier sense of self — these are real needs. The difficulty is the cost. What we purchase with the fused identity, we pay for in contextual intelligence. Thinking by context asks us to tolerate not knowing our position until we have looked at the situation. It asks us to hold the question open a little longer than is comfortable. That tolerance is the actual capacity underneath all of this, and it is more emotional than intellectual.
When Either Orientation Hardens
There is another reason not to fuse, and it is structural rather than psychological. Neither orientation survives being absolutized.
A public system that becomes purely conservative stops adapting. It over-controls. It suppresses anything new, mistakes novelty for danger, and slowly stagnates inside rules that once made sense and no longer do. A public system that becomes purely liberal loses its coherence. It can no longer coordinate. Shared expectations dissolve, and the very stability that made freedom possible erodes underneath it.
The same holds in private life, at private scale. A private life governed entirely by conservation becomes rigid, and eventually airless — controlled past the point of being livable. A private life governed entirely by flexibility becomes chaotic, and often self-destructive, with no structure steady enough to hold a person through anything difficult.
So neither orientation is a destination. Each one, taken all the way, undoes itself. They are corrective to each other. They are meant to be held in tension, not chosen between.
When the Labels Stop Clarifying
Once we see them as strategies rather than identities, our political language starts to look strange.
The idea that aspects of healthcare should be directly regulated by government — not by the medical community, but by the government itself — is structurally conservative. It is centralized regulation, oversight, standardization, coordination imposed for the sake of a shared outcome.
Many people who identify as conservative argue for a highly liberal approach to firearms — minimal regulation, maximal individual freedom, the least possible interference from the state.
The state regulating reproductive decisions is, again, structurally conservative. It is institutional control placed over individual choice.
So we arrive somewhere odd. People who call themselves liberal advocate conservative structures in some contexts. People who call themselves conservative advocate liberal structures in others. Often the two issues sit side by side — firearms and reproduction — and both are argued, frequently by the same person, on the stated grounds of reducing harm. One conclusion is to deregulate. The other is to regulate. The label did not predict the position. At that point the label has stopped clarifying reality and started obscuring it.
This matters because the confusion is not only linguistic. It interferes with our ability to solve anything.
If we could hold the tension long enough to think dialectically — and this is the work I keep returning to, in dialectic and in deconstruction — we would not begin with the label. We would begin with the context. We would ask, within this particular situation, with these particular consequences at this particular scale: what balance of freedom and structure best serves the goal we say we care about?
If the goal is to reduce harm, then the question is simply whether, here, harm is better reduced by more structure or by more freedom. That is an answerable question. It has a different answer in the public pool than in the private one. It may have a different answer for firearms than for healthcare. The answer is allowed to vary, because the contexts vary. That is not inconsistency. That is the orientation working as it should.
A healthy system already contains both conservative and liberal processes. It always has. The only real question is whether those processes fit the reality they are being asked to organize.
The same is true of a person. We are not being asked to choose a side and defend it for the rest of our lives. We are being asked to stay flexible enough to read what is actually in front of us — the scale of it, the consequences, who shares the risk, who carries the cost — and to let that reading, rather than our identity, decide how much structure the moment needs.
A more mature public conversation would not ask whether a position is liberal or conservative. It would ask what kind of structure best fits the reality in front of us. The goal was never ideological purity. It was contextual coherence — and that is a capacity, not a side.
