[kipita]

Easiest way to understand it. Conservatives are generally suspicious of Govt intervention in people’s lives. Therefore they tend to look for non Govt, or limited Govt solutions in dealing with problems.

Liberals or Democrats tend to believe every problem can be fixed by expanding, or creating, a Govt program.

I tend to agree. In short, Liberals believe man knows more than God and should thus manage mankind and conservatives believe in individual intelligence-morality (with Judeo-Christian values) without human hierarchy.

[MNJohnnie]

The thing that gets confusing is that you have people who are varying degrees of Conservative. I cannot come up with a good way of defining it.

There seems to be a split among Conservative between those who have a religious base for their views on one end to those who share the other Conservatives suspicion of Govt but also reject the moral hierarchy imposed by Religion. So you have Libertarian/Conservatives on one end and Religious Conservatives on the other with the rest of Conservatives falling some where along that spectrum.

Then to make it even more confusing, you have people like Newt Gingrich. This is the latest wave of "Conservatives". People like Newt tend to be Libertarian when it comes to social issues. But at the same time Newt, like President Bush, is one of those "Govt Conservatives" who seems more interested in "fixing" Govt then in pruning it back.

You can tell these kinds of "Conservatives" because they tend to be very upset about Govt spending, UNLESS it something they want the Govt involved in (Trade, Immigration, etc. If it is doing something they want done, they have no problem at all expanding the scope and reach of the Govt.

So it would seem we have to come up with a new political spectrum since these people really do not really fit the term "Conservative" since they don't want to limit Govt so much as change what it is doing.