The Nomenclature of "Liberal" in the Context of the Psychological Well-being of the American People

     Nowadays liberals are oftentimes bashed by both moderates and conservatives for being too extreme. Perhaps the name lends itself to a more radical overtone; compare its nomenclature to that of "conservative" or "moderate," which sound inherently cautious and well-reasoned. As aforementioned in a previous post, people are more likely to identify as conservative or moderate as opposed to liberal even though many of their subsequent choices fit more into that category. But for such a shallow difference to have such a profound effect on the choices of the American people in general shows just how desperately there needs to be an amelioration of the system, including the public fields of politics, media, and education. Politics is the most obvious: politicians need to stop polling certain words that mean the same thing but have more support due to different societal associations. Tricking up people to vote against there own economic interests is arguably evil, especially when one considers that the representatives are supposed to be public servants that help their constituency as a whole, not a small group of elites. In addition, politics need to be focused less on emotion and more on hard facts. What has no effect statistically on a certain group of people needs to be implemented if another group of people require it for the guaranteeing of their own liberties. Similar to politics, media needs to stop focusing on jingoistic banter and start fact-checking. If one side is clearly and demonstrably wrong, having a history of horrible mistakes, then it is okay to point that out and not treat everything as equal when doing so is fundamentally disingenuous to the American people. In particular, the media needs to stop being so intimately involved with the government and function more as the watchdogs on the side of the American people, something that is actually beneficial to society. Indeed everything has its liberties, but if people can reason giant oversteps of limitations on government regulation of freedom such as the Patriot Act, then surely the people can allow a small concession so that news stations are penalized for straight-up consistent lying. But most important is the reconstruction of the educational system. People have lost faith in their schools and for good reason. Much of the engagement is short-term memorization with very little critical analysis. American society is far too focused on test scores and needs to transition to a more student-friendly hierarchy that actually prepares and engages the student in relevant and interesting source material. Of course not all classes are so redundant, but the fact remains that the majority of the population has internationally sub-par education, especially the South which is unfortunately used as a stepping stone so that a few provincial elites maintain the status quo while the majority of the citizenry suffers relatively medieval conditions. It is unlikely that any of these measures will be implemented in the foreseeable future, though the continued and fervent espousing of actual common-sense reforms is critical to make sure the nation as a whole does not descent into a new paleolithic era.