Published: 10 June 2026
Last updated: 10 June 2026
Some years ago, I bought myself a label-maker. I spent hours printing off little sticky labels and covering everything in them. Pantry items, drawers in the wardrobe, tubs in the bathroom cupboards. I even used them to differentiate the husband’s phone chargers from my own so we could avert the perpetual marital crisis of the stolen charger.
But labels have limits and there are three things for which labels are ill-advised: people, politics and identity.
One-word labels in any of these areas rarely manage to embody what they seek to achieve. Can I really call myself a progressive if I think some women are “asking for it”? Can I call myself left-wing if I think climate change is all a bit of an exaggeration? Am I a conservative if I’m in favour of marriage equality? Because these labels might be helpful in some loosely indicative ways, but ultimately, they are all broad churches with a variety of interpretations.
We’ve seen “hunt by label” before, probably the most famous of which was the second “Red Scare” in the US after World War II. It saw the establishment of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1938, followed by McCarthyist witch hunts of the 1940s and 1950s.
The red scare is defined as a moral panic around the rise of left-wing ideologies in society, specifically socialism and communism, all too often intertwined with anti-Chinese and anti-Russian racism.
The first step was to define “communism” as the embodiment of all evil and totally morally corrupt, whipping up hatred, fear and conspiracy. The second step was to haul those deemed to be communist (in the pejorative sense of the word) and interrogate them and encourage them to “give up” other “communists”. And the third step was to excise them from public life.
