🔗 Why I no longer say “conservative” when I mean “cautious”

As you can guess from the title, this piece is about politics and language. Still, I need to preface it with a disclaimer. I was very deliberate about my title: I am not telling you how to use language, I am only telling you how I use it. I obviously understand the implications of the previous sentences, given that telling others how to use language has become a sticking point in political discourse. The very way I am approaching this paragraph is itself insinuating a certain position, one that is perhaps against the so-called language policing of the so-called identity politics. But don’t get me wrong: while I do have contentions with regard to identity politics, they come from a place of finding them not misguided but insufficient. I feel that the interests of liberalism have been well-served by the superficial treatment of oppression shaped instead as identity politics kept in a vacuum. In plain words, in case it’s not obvious, yes, we must continue and strengthen our defense of transgender rights; not just in a self-serving “if we tolerate this then who might be next”, true as that may be, but because this is another instance of treating people as people. In the recent past, those in power were happy to accomodate this into an “identity issue” and add pronoun boxes to their user interfaces to keep their well-paid transgender programmers content and productive, along with other watered-down displays of Corporate Pride. But even by the late 2010s that was already a contention strategy to delay the inevitable: the growing solidarity among the struggle of the oppressed. Once the conversation progressed from pronouns and rainbows to systemic discrimination, unionization, and ultimately the concentration of economic power, then there was no longer accomodation and they came crashing down. Power found the threat to be real and decided to act; this is where we are as of 2025.

But that doesn’t mean that language isn’t important. I am not saying that language, or even identity politics, are a distraction. The right tried, and to a big extent succeeded, in making identity politics into a distraction—and here, in the grand scheme of things, it helps to perceive the American liberal left as part of the right, heartbreaking as it may be to so many well-meaning Americans. The fact that they made it into a distraction does not take away that identities are part of politics: we must not throw the baby with the bathwater because our adversaries succeeded in shaping the discourse for so long. And as I proceed closer to the point I actually want to make, I feel the need to dispel in the reader the focus on the transgender topic. I used it as an example of the relationship between power and the oppressed because I knew it would come to people’s minds as soon as I started talking about politics and language. So I chose not to walk around it, even though it’s not really my theme to discuss. Identical points as the above could have been made instead replacing the example to racism in the US and the Black Lives Matter movement, or to the treatment of immigrants in Europe, or to women’s rights anywhere in the world, ultimately the largest oppressed group of all. All of these are stories of oppression which have had a period of liberal containment through language and accomodation.

This containment broke apart as soon as the oppressed groups themselves became able to bring their own narrative to the forefront, and now that the hypocritical appeasement is gone, I can finally arrive at the point I want to make, which is that the shaping of language as done by the right has been a lot more effective than we give it credit for. It happens in three fronts: they shape the language of the right (in both radical and mainstream varieties), they shape language of the mainstream left, and, most invisibly, they shape the language of the public in general.

At first it may seem odd to make that third distinction, especially in a time where everyone seems to have been fit into a “right” or “left” bucket. But first, this bucketing is in reality far from being the case, even though it doesn’t seem so within our politically-engaged bubbles. And second, what I mean by shaping of language for the public in general, I mean that which crosses the barriers and spreads into the vernacular of people both in the left and in the right. And no example of that is more amazing than that of “conservative”.

In recent years, I have observed a phenomenon, which, thanks to my own age, I am pretty certain that has not been the case since forever. All the time, I see people, from the left, from the right, and everything in between, using the word “conservative” with the meaning of “careful, cautious, well-measured”, especially in non-political contexts. And, by extension, “liberal” adopts the opposite meaning of “not careful, lavish, unmeasured”.

When I pointed this to people, they were quick to disagree, but then I gave them an example: if you’re baking a cake and the recipe says “apply cinnamon liberally on top”, what does that mean? If I told you I was making a soup and say “the recipe didn’t specify how much pepper to put, so I went conservative about it”, what does that mean?

You might now say that well, these are just the meanings of the words, but — really? What does a cinnamon topping on a cake has to with liberalism? Where is the liberty? Is it because you’re at liberty to put how much you want? Not really, because that liberty would mean you’re free to put a little, or a lot. But if I tell you “add sugar liberally”, does anyone ever understand it to “add just a little?”. No, any person will understand that as “add quite a bit”. People understand “being liberal” as meaning “don’t be sparing”.

Likewise, what does the spiciness of a soup has to do with conservatism? What are you conserving? When one says they were being conservative about adding pepper, everyone understand that it means that the person didn’t want to add too much pepper. But that wasn’t about conserving pepper, even though putting not too much pepper would save pepper in the end. It is clearly understood as being careful about not making the food to spicy to whoever will eat it. People treat “being conservative” in everyday language as “being careful about the end-result”.

To which I reply: what is the effect of introjecting that concept in people’s minds? Are conservatives, now in a political sense, really careful about the end-result? When the left pushes for environmental policies, deeply concerned about the immediate future of our planet in the face of climate effects, and the conservatives resist these initiatives, which side is being cautious and which side is being reckless?

In politics, what conservatism really fights for is conserving the status quo of their power relations. That’s where their name really comes from. They will adopt cautious positions when they serve that goal, and they will adopt reckless positions when that is the one that promotes the perpetuation of their power. That is why you hear today people talking about a “conservative left” when groups defend more egalitarian economics alongside social policies that throw minorities under the bus; it is a way to appeal to the majority’s vote by means of their own prejudices.

But the widespread use of “conservative” to mean a well-measured approach and “liberal” to mean a carefree aproach makes a strong subconscious argument that the conservative approach is that of the “adults in the room”.

A second-order effect is perpetuating this false dicothomy between “conservative” and “liberal”, on which so much of the American perception of mainstream politics is founded. By framing them as opposites, it sounds like the spectrum has been covered, when in reality, true leftist politics are left out of mainstream discourse.

This is so much the case that one can perceive the difference across languages. Due to the vast cultural influence of the US in the Western world, I do see the same phenomenon with the word “conservative” happen in the Portuguese language, here in Brazil. However, because here the political establishment of the left is different from that of the US, we do not have the same linguistic phenomenon happen with the word “liberal”. I could translate my conservative/soup example word-for-word into Portuguese and that would sound idiomatic, but I couldn’t do the same for my liberal/cake example. This is because here, “liberal” is an adjective that is not considered to be part of the left, but instead of the right: in Latin America, the people who label themselves liberals are those aligned with what the global left would call neo-liberals¹. In this context, it is common to find people labeling themselves as “conservative liberals”, which might at first blow minds in the US, but which makes perfect sense once one thinks of those Americans who label themselves “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” — a milquetoast position that comes from a position of comfort, defending a watered-down appeasement in social politics that fails to admit that truly dismantling the systems of social oppression will inevitably require fighting the forces of the economic status quo defended by conservatives. Consider now a mirror form of “conservative liberal”, which is how the term is most used in Brazil: those who are socially conservative, defending the maintenance of the existing systems of oppression, and economically liberal, defending unregulated laissez-faire markets that preserve the powerful in power. In the US, that is just what one calls a “conservative”.

One might argue that this commonplace meaning of “cautious” is that regular meaning of the word, and that the political conservatives are the ones who hijacked the word’s meaning for the sake of their ideology. I disagree, given that the word itself is somewhat recent, and their ideology is not so much about being careful as it is really about conserving (their power). Etymologically, the political meaning matches the word better. And if word frequency in book corpuses is anything to go by, the expression “conservative estimate” appeared a few decades after the word “conservatism” itself.

That is why I decided to stop using “conservative” in that non-political sense: it is essentially a very effective form of propaganda that has gotten ingrained the language. But the reason why I am not telling you stop using it is because that would be a very weak form of activism: changing reality is not changing the language. This is what the liberal establishment wants you to believe: change your language and that’s sufficient, you’ve made a change. This goes back to the “political correctness” movement of the 1990s, which was a form of institutionalized hypocrisy. Saying “you shouldn’t use racist language” is very different from “you shouldn’t be a racist”. The former is a way of preserving racism by hiding it from plain sight. The latter is about changing human relations, of which a change in the language is just one consequence. Changing the language is not a way to change reality. If the reality of oppression itself doesn’t change, the change in the language just accomodates the reality underneath, and over time the new term becomes loaded with the oppressive charge and people decide to change it again, in an inflationary chain of euphemisms or neologisms.

What needs to happen is not a change in the language, but a change in perception. Racism is shattered not by political correctness, but by perceiving other races as equally valid people. Changing perceptions changes reality, and that then changes language. My evolving perception of what it means to be conservative affects how I use the word.

But didn’t I say that the right is effective at shaping language? Isn’t that changing language to change reality? No, Language as propaganda is a way to change perception, and from there then change reality. And this is done is a much more subtle way than just saying “don’t call it X, call it Y”, which just leads to hypocritical euphemism. When they succeed at associating the idea of a “conservative approach” with that of the “adults in the room”, or when they use terms such as “private initiative” or “intellectual property”, they are using language as a means in their advocacy to affect the world, and not making their advocacy as a means to affect language. We need to understand the power of language. We need to change language. But most importantly we need to change the world, otherwise they will keep conserving their position of power in the world, while they keep us busy changing language.

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¹ - It is interesting to note how much “neo-liberal” is a term strongly derided by the neo-liberals themselves, to the point that one of them once told me that “neo-liberalism doesn’t exist”. They know the power of language and they want to frame their position as being the true liberalism: they want to normalize their stance as a naturalized “love of freedom”, and not as the particular strand of reckless economics that it is.