It’s easy to analyze each new political event, like Obama’s election in 2008, in terms of what we already know.

Obama’s victory cemented the intellectual decline of the Republican Party as the party with nothing to offer but tax cuts for every American problem.

The Republican Party denies the science behind climate change and so functions as an interest group obsessed with short-term political gain at the expense of the country. It doesn’t matter what the science says if it’s politically unpopular to vote for cap and trade legislation.

It doesn’t mattern if universal healthcare involves euthanasia as long as you can demagogue off it. It’s as if winning power has become an end in and of itself; forget ideological faithfulness and just maintain party discipline.

And the fact that the Republicans have forgotten the difference between loyalty to the party and loyalty to principle speaks volumes about their decline.

Now what does this say about America’s political culture? One one side of the ring we have one big tent party of conservative-to-moderate Democrats skittish over the deficit and fearful of the conservative noise machine (that’s you Mr. Glenn Beck), and liberals anxious to undo the catastrophic consequences of the last eight years.

On the other side of the ring, we have a Republican Party dominated by southern evangelical Christian white males with Michael Steele as a titular figurehead.

So how do we make sense intellectually of current political disagreements? Big government liberals versus small town conservatives? Economic nationalists versus free trade internationalists?

Sounds like a rehashing of the fights of yesteryear applied to today’s unprecedented problems.

Yes, the issues currently faced by America are in fact unprecedented. Western industrialization has almost irrevocably damaged the Earth’s atmosphere and if we don’t start cutting carbon emissions, the developing world is the first to pay.

Sea levels are swallowing island nations in the Pacific. Famine is produced by food shortages and drought across South Asia and Africa. The science is almost incontrovertible yet the Republican Party denies climate change as a hoax, like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster.

What does this tell us? It tells us that conservativism as embodied by the Republican Party is bankrupt. Hence, George Will probably voted for Obama. David Brooks, former editor of the Weekly Standard, did too.

But does this mean Obama is a conservative, since intellectually conservative pundits voted for him?

No: not in terms of ideology but perhaps in temperment (minus the occasional cigarette).

He’s still pushing for universal health care, stringent limits on carbon emissions, green job initiatives, financial regulation reform and other policies demanding government intervention into the economy.

While a few conservatives may support him in the Washington D.C. Beltway, the vast majority of the country that considers itself conservative opposes him. Hence, his approval is around 50 percent.

So what explains attempts to call Obama a conservative? It’s a desire to appropriate power in terms of your ideology.

It’s better to say, “Yeah, Bush was a terrible president but he wasn’t a real conservative so don’t let him dirty the true faith,” and then say, “Obama, intellectually nimble and reasonable, is the true conservative because he’s not following the left wing of the Democratic Party.”

Even in foreign policy, Obama’s generals want to send tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan but he is obviously hesitant to commit without a clear strategy. However, he does want to re-engage Iran over nuclear talks and has committed the U.S. again to the United Nations.

He’s not fitting into any ideological box. And that’s weird.

We’ve become used to these liberal/conservative ideological labels because they tell us who to like and who to dislike. It kills nuance and encourages polarization by the party line.

See, the thing with ideology is that it’s blinding. Ideology, or, to drop a big awkward word, weltanschauung, makes the world easy. It dichotomizes reality into good and bad, right and wrong, liberal and conservative and truth and falsehood.

And we need ideology sometimes because the world’s complicated and we need to make sense of it. However, ideology operates on the basis of hidden assumptions. When a conservative makes a claim on the role of government in the economy, there are mutiple assumptions at work here that remain unquestioned. The same goes for liberals.

The nature of the Obama administration defies these kinds of categories.

He’s not an old-style LBJ liberal hawk nor is he a Pat Buchanan neo-isolationist paleoconservative. See how many bumper sticker labels just went into that sentence?

Political labels are easy because they do the intellectual work for us. When you call a politician a liberal prematurely, you’re letting the word “liberal” do the work in your claim because you aren’t unpacking all the ideological assumptions built into that word.

The danger of relying on labels for thinking about politics is that patterns of thinking have an inherent tendency to reify, to become static. Now, that’s what’s happened to the Republican Party: Ayn Rand ideology plus evangelical Christianity equals the disintegration of party into interest group.

Now, Obama is precisely trying to avoid intellectual labels in order to pragmatically solve problems. That means internationalism in some instances and nationalism in others.

Everything is contextual but contextualism doesn’t equate to conservativism.

That’s Obama’s approach: rather than letting ideology dictate the facts and therefore the policies, he works from factual problems to policies.

Gary is a junior political philosophy major. He’s an ASWC senator and member of the ASWC Finance Committee.