Every student of French or German is familiar with the phrase “false friends.” False friends are those words one comes across that look enough like some English word that the unwise student will assume that they mean the same thing. For instance, ‘aire’ – which, of course, means domain in French.
I think the metaphor of false friends should be adopted by those who write about the political and moral sphere. It iwould clear up so much! The term liberal of left, for instance, seems to be a magnet for false friends. From Marty Peretz's the New Republic to this year's shiny "Abundance" agenda (and its new magazine, The Argument, just filled with former or even current members of the Effective Altruism movement, a false friend if there ever was one!), they come running. And it makes sense. You (and me) in the bougie household, we want to be liberal and we want nothing to change in our personal or professional life except the ever upward part. So why not a compromise position that sorta gives away all the liberal part buy does allow you to look down on NIMBY types? That is the ticket!
Meanwhile, the false friends of the right are curiosly proud of being false friends - of asserting overwhelming governmental force, whether in forcing Intel to sell 10 percent to the executive branch or eliminating free trade from the vocabulary. Here, of course, the only thing that keeps the friends together is owning the liberals and hitting the woke. A violent bond, that.
Perhaps the political sphere, given the weird place of party and the oddness of the representation relation, is always going to be full of false friends. Still, it is good to have a phrase to distinguish them.
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