One of the more unfortunate characteristics of conservatives, not just in America but elsewhere around the world, is that we’re so often a bit slow on the uptake when it comes to understanding who we’re up against.

And that failure to understand the enemy has been the cause of a great deal of political and cultural loss.

We think that because our values are more or less universally successful, they’re values everyone shares. After all, the basic conservative values are a civilization’s foundational values. You can’t really run a good society without things like individual achievement; the rule of law; public morality; charity; belief in, and accountability to, a higher power; free enterprise; freedom of expression; and some form of accountability to which public leaders must be held to by the public, whose consent to their rule is fundamental.

It’s so obvious that you must have these things. Without them, there will be tyranny. Or, at least, chaos, which leads to tyranny.

So when there are people who differ with conservatives, the natural assessment will be that surely the values are the same; it’s just that the debate is over methods for achieving and satisfying those universal values.

And, therefore, it’s a common trope among conservatives that those on the other side are not enemies but opponents.

If you’re Generation X or older, that trope had some value once.

American politics until not so long ago mostly consisted of a debate between William F. Buckley conservatives and Daniel Patrick Moynihan liberals over the means by which social goods agreed upon by everyone as desirable might be achieved. The Buckley crowd wanted to maximize the delivery of those social goods through the market; the Moynihan crowd wanted to maximize that delivery through government.

But, for the most part, both sides agreed on the contours of what that universe of social goods should be. We wanted everybody in a society to have access to education and health care; we wanted a social safety net to keep people from starving to death; we wanted to enforce the rule of law, whether through a hard or soft tactical presence by law enforcement; and so on.

About 15 years ago, as I describe exceptionally well in my new book Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama — which, by the way, the estimable Jack Cashill informs you he cannot recommend highly enough — that entire debate came to a close.

Because the people we’re still – erroneously – calling liberals generally speaking are not liberals.

At all.

And we should stop calling them that.

There are very few liberals left in American politics, and the citizens who espouse those old principles have largely been routed out of public prominence — so much so that those who hold to the old John F. Kennedy/Great Society worldview are often more appreciated on the right than on the left.

Some examples?

Elon Musk would generally be described — and perhaps might describe himself — as a liberal. He’s been savaged as a far-right lunatic by the legacy corporate media and Democrat activist mob for the sin of permitting conservatives to express thoughts on X/Twitter after he bought the platform.

Joe Rogan, Bari Weiss, Dave Rubin? Liberals, albeit liberals enduring a slow-motion mugging by reality.

And perhaps the best example in American politics now, if you want someone whose relevance is arguably more evident than, say, Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema, is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Just look at how Kennedy, who is somehow a hero to some on the right simply for taking positions that used to reflect those universal values enumerated above, is being treated by the Democrat Party’s current establishment. They won’t even consent to giving him Secret Service protection as a presidential candidate, despite the fact that there have been multiple attempts on his life so far.

This is someone whose views on climate change are nothing short of far-left ridiculous, who clings to affirmative action and racial set-asides as something of a political sacrament, whose promotionalist views on abortion are wildly out of the American mainstream. Kennedy is anything but far right. But he happens to believe in the First Amendment and he’s a vaccine skeptic, and so he’s been savaged by the Left.

But not by liberals.

About a decade and a half ago, a new group of people blew into power, first inside the Democrat Party and, shortly after, into practically every political and cultural institution in America. That was the Obamunist/hard Left faction.

We don’t really have a great name for them. They’re certainly leftists, they’re socialists for sure, and they call themselves progressives.

What they really are is neocommunists. Kind of.

The current active ingredient in left-wing politics in America believes that the government should control the means of production, as an old-line communist might, but not necessarily through government ownership. They’re perfectly happy with a series of public corporations owned by stockholders (and thus susceptible to ownership and influence by useful institutional capital entities like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street) controlling the economy and subscribing to things like ESG and DEI.

By any real definition, such an economic system is fascistic, if not outright fascism.

Or maybe it’s more akin to a modern Chinese Communist/corporatist tyranny model, in which, by whatever means it’s promoted, there’s a ruling elite who enforce social compliance through a Potemkin private sector.

Is neocommunism actually fascism? I’ll leave that question for others to debate. What I can say is that it’s not liberal. It seeks and finds no liberty whatsoever, at least not in the classic sense of the term. And it engages in no debate with the American Right on what means might be best utilized to produce those social goods upon which everyone is supposed to agree.

All that is out the window now. That old debate isn’t even relevant in America these days.

A liberal would look at Richard Levine, the man in a dress who the Biden administration made No. 2 at the Department of Health and Human Services, and say he’s far too heavy a lift to appoint to such a lofty position, particularly given his record as the head of the Pennsylvania Department of Health. Levine, after all, can be said to have killed thousands of nursing home patients by introducing COVID carriers into their midst.

But a neocommunist would allow Levine to fail up to DHHS for the specific reason that he’s a man in a dress.

A neocommunist does these things because it isn’t about producing social goods. It’s about accumulating and brandishing political power.

They’re not trying to persuade you. They’re trying to dominate you. Liberals were never so barbaric; in fact, one of the abiding characteristics of the old-school liberal was his naivete and soft heart, and the liberal would engage in hours of debate in an effort to prevail on the question of using taxation as a means of charity.

Or on the question of producing equality.

But today’s neocommunists aren’t into charity. In fact, they hate charity just as Antonio Gramsci taught them to. Charity is a pillar of a functional, free society.

They don’t like equality, either. Equality, properly understood in a traditional American context, doesn’t product equal outcomes; it produces equal opportunities, and what people do with those opportunities will run a gamut from terrible to great.

Instead the new concept being forced down your throat is equity — which is an enforced equality of outcome. This meme showed up around the time Barack Obama made his rise to political power, and it says everything about the modern American Left:

It might be the most instructive image you’ll ever see, because what that meme takes for granted is that it’s perfectly OK for the three people it depicts NOT TO BUY A TICKET TO THE GAME THEY’RE WATCHING.

It’s openly hostile to the idea of commerce. It’s openly hostile to the concept that goods and services should be exchanged for things of equal value. Instead it promotes theft as a social good in itself.

And in that, it’s utterly divorced from the old conversation that conservatives and liberals used to have.

We don’t have liberals anymore. Liberals are today’s political outcasts in America. They’ve been routed out of the universities, the pop-culture institutions, and the Democrat Party. Most of them have changed their spots and now exist as neocommunists, with Joe Biden as a chief example.

And it’s time for conservatives to stop calling progressives/Obamunists/fascists/neocommunists “liberals.” They don’t deserve the consideration, and the label is no longer descriptive.

Call them something else from now on. Giving a thing an accurate name is crucial to understanding it. And “liberals” is no longer an accurate name for the other side.