The art of building consensus out of the “vague and confusing medley” of individual opinions, Walter Lippmann wrote in The Phantom Public, consists in narrowing issues to a few simplified alternatives that can be reduced to “symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached from their ideas.” It would be hard to go any further in that line than the slogans the current administration wallpapers across the backdrops for presidential appearances: “Jobs and Growth” when the president pushes for his tax cuts, “Compassion in Action” when he speaks about AIDS, or, most ambitiously, the “Mission Accomplished” banner aboard the USS Lincoln in May of 2003.

"The masquerade is over; it's time to ... use the dreaded 'L' word, to say the policies of our opposition ... are liberal, liberal, liberal."


-- Ronald Reagan, 1988

Since the 1930s, the landscape of American political discourse has been framed by the words liberal versus conservative. In this era, U.S. commentators first began to speak of American politics in terms of the spectrum of left, right and center, words previously used chiefly to describe foreign politics or the factions of radical movements. It was in the same New Deal period, too, that liberal and conservative were settled on as what Franklin Roosevelt described in 1941 as the "two general schools of political belief" of representative government.