How labeling dumbs down American politics

There was a time not long ago when the labels we assigned politicians meant something. Moderate, liberal, Democrat, Republican, conservative—these descriptors generally reflected some underlying truth. No longer. Today, labels assigned to public officials—RINO, MAGA, socialist, “true” conservative, “sem-fascist”—often have no bearing on what anyone actually believes. And that dissonance, amplified by social media, has dumbed down the public dialogue. Labeling in politics is now something akin to cussing in an argument—we resort to it to distract from the issues at hand. And that’s a shame.

I can attest to the new power and the utter distortion of labeling because I saw the shift first hand. By the time I had been elected governor of North Carolina in 2012, my approach to governing was well-established. I’d been a Republican mayor of a Democratic city, Charlotte, for 14 years. And I decided to take the same approach to the governor’s mansion—a principled conservative who was also pragmatic and believed in bipartisan collaboration—that I’d employed as mayor. Working with the legislature, I both cut taxes and invested in the state’s universities and community colleges. I paid off over $2 billion in debt, balanced the budget, and still gave teachers a raise.

But then two things happened. First, I signed a bill designed primarily to overturn a local law that dictated to private businesses how they needed to handle who went in which bathroom—a choice I thought the businesses should get to decide for themselves. Suddenly people who weren’t paying close attention decided that meant I was “transphobic.” And so, after decades working with Democrats and Republican alike, I was reduced in the public’s mind to being little more than a “radical right-winger.”

Then, earlier this year, while running for the U.S. Senate, I was assigned a different label altogether—one coined by none other than the former president, Donald Trump. Endorsing my primary opponent, the former president called me a Republican in Name Only (a “RINO”), suggesting to the state’s Republican electorate I “didn’t represent ‘our’ values.”

So the same person who just a few years earlier had been deemed too conservative to serve as the state’s governor was now deemed to be too moderate to be one of the state’s U.S. senators. It didn’t make any sense. I’d served in government for decades. I’d taken positions on dozens of issues. But my record didn’t matter a lick. Rather than take issue with my ideas, my opponents took turns canceling me by saying I was just “one of them”—whomever the “them” was in any given moment. And the same thing is happening everywhere in our politics.

Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.), for example, may not be a Trump supporter—but she’s certainly not a RINO. Nevertheless, she lost a bid for reelection to another Republican. And among the Democrats, Oregon’s Rep. Kurt Schraeder might have been a bulwark for bipartisanship, but he was hardly a traitor to his party, as evidenced by the fact that President Biden endorsed him for reelection. Nevertheless, after being accused of being less than a true progressive, he was ousted in a primary early this year.

George Carlin had an old bit that I believe speaks to this moment. He said, “I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a ‘common purpose’. ‘Cause pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they’re going to visit at 3am.” And that’s exactly what labeling does in our politics. It posits that people are just mindless followers of some ideology, incapable of thinking for themselves, or defining themselves apart from a broader class of people.

The problem here isn’t that labels are bad in and of themselves—short descriptors have long played a role in defining candidates for office. The real issue is twofold. First, today’s labels have no real grounding in reality, and yet they stick today in ways that they did not before. A single viral post distorting a public official’s record with an inappropriate label can define a campaign. Calling a principled conservative a RINO can undermine their career. And “cancelling” someone over not being 100 percent aligned on every issue is a big problem.

Perhaps of more concern, labeling has come to distort the incentives that define public service. To avoid being labeled, officials are now afraid of doing what they think is in the public’s best interest. Even if the general electorate is eager for them to reach across the aisle, principled conservatives and principled liberals will avoid doing so for fear of being labeled a RINO or a DINO. And that shift is sure to burnish the entrenched notion that our politics is becoming increasingly disconnected from the problem-solving approach the electorate demands and, quite frankly, the country needs.

Pat McCrory served as governor of North Carolina from 2012-2016.