One of the most fascinating concepts in politics is the concept of gaps. It is a difficult concept to put into words, but it is a natural phenomenon that occurs in any number of areas. Essentially, there is a gap between perception and reality. Occasionally, there is a gap between how people feel about something depending on what it is called. If you simply describe the Affordable Care Act you’ll find that the individual planks that make up the law get very high approval ratings. Usually, the law itself gets solid marks for favorability if you use the specific label of the ACA. If you call it Obamacare then it suddenly tanks. We’ve seen this for years. It isn’t a new thing.

There are countless examples of people screaming “keep the government out of my Medicare!” Either way, the favorability for the ACA is at nearly 60 percent presently. Yet, many of those same people are screaming at their representative to repeal Obamacare and replace it with something better. We can dwell on this and I could be mean here, but we will just leave that here as an example of what we are talking about.

Liberals, progressives, and leftists have been dealing with this for years. The greatest example would be the scourge that is socialism. Most people would tell you they hate socialism and think that everything evil is socialism. Yet, when you break it down brick by brick you suddenly find that they support the individual aims that many socialists support. Even when we aren’t talking about socialism itself, the challenge is fighting against the overwhelming perception of what we (whatever you want to call all of those groups collectively) support. For one, we* are not the same. We do not support the same things no matter how often right leaning politicians want to paint us that way.

The challenge for the Democratic party in general and for each of those groups specifically is to find a way to convert people’s approval of the ideas into approval of the platform in general. If you support a majority of the aims within the platform then you support the platform. That seems overly simplistic, but sometimes we need to make things simple.

All politicians label their opponents. It is blood sport in Washington and at the statehouse. Yet, conservatives have been better at it. Somehow a collection of common sense suggestions have become socialism. Socialism has somehow become a Venezuelan hell scape where everyone goes hungry and all of your freedoms get suspended. Most of Western Europe is socialist. The only thing happening there is that people have a robust safety net. Their college education is paid for. Their health care bills are taken care of. They get help with family leave. Their retirement benefits are better. It sounds like hell on earth.

I am not an expert on messaging and that sort of thing. Maybe I could have become a speech writer if I had gone another direction in graduate school. What I know is that we got here through a very targeted and purposeful campaign by conservatives and right wing media. They played the long game. I know that people left of center tend to look at these faulty perceptions and assume that the folks are just stupid. We have to start the slow and painful process of repeating the truth over and over again. Maybe people will start waking up and supporting the things they actually say they support.

Labels have ruined our politics. I could parcel out which side does it better or more often, but what would be the point exactly? The general problem is that I can throw a label at you and immediately brand you as something positive or negative just based on the connotation that the label has. In many instances the definition in people’s minds aren’t even accurate. So, following are a group of statements that fit as definitions for terms thrown around in public.

1. Different races possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities, especially so as to distinguish them as inferior or superior to one another.
2. Men should hold the power and women should largely be excluded from it.
3. Most of the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
4. A political system headed by a dictator in which the government controls business and labor where opposition is not permitted.
5. The enforced separation of different racial groups in a country or community.
6. People should be able to marry whoever they want regardless of race, gender identity, religion, or age.

If I spent enough time focusing on it, I could likely craft a series of statements that those on the left would subscribe to and those on the right would subscribe to. It would be interesting to see how many statements we could get people to agree to. Would people that consider themselves as progressive or conservative actually continue to support progressive or conservative ideals?

I’m sure many of you recognized fascism and socialism above. Obviously, the first issue is that many in the political sphere know that the common person has no earthly clue what those things actually are. So, they can throw that label at anyone and have it stick because the label can fit anything. Since the label is harmful then using the label becomes a weapon.

This is also unfortunately where we descend into questions of good and evil and what those terms really mean. Does the mere belief in something make someone good or evil? Or, do we have to wait and see how those beliefs manifest themselves to determine if the individual is good or evil? Certainly, I think we can acknowledge that numerous people believe numbers one, two, and five.

We could throw number six in there too, but I added a little something extra to six to make it a much more difficult statement to support without qualification. I suspect a lot of these statements have “yeah,,,but” thoughts attached to them. That’s what makes politics so difficult. The world is rife with “yeah…buts”. No matter what personal moral code one follows, they all would agree that what we do is far more important than what we say. I have a sinking suspicion that if we allowed people to openly accept or reject such simple statements we’d see much more agreement overall and many of our politicians would be left in the cold looking for a place to land. Then again, I could be wrong.