modern liberals have hijacked the "liberal" label to lend credibility to their movement. classic liberals are having conniptions at trying to find their place in a world gone mad with labeling.
American conservatives are the classic liberals of yesteryear.
At least they've labelled themselves so that we can use it against them. The best I've ever seen was in Florida--Connie Mack v. Buddy MacKay for U.S. Senate. Mack's slogan?
"Hey Buddy--You're Liberal."
Wrong. Foolish conservatives applied the liberal label to leftists as an insult back in the day (decades ago). Now we've lost one of the best words to describe our economic policy (especially how central liberty is to it).
Stupid American conservatives turned the word "liberal" into an insult meaning "libertine." It's our fault, not the leftists'.
Not entirely. Some certainly are. But others are religious. The damnable thing about Revolution and 'enlightenment' is that it wishes to find the truth and purpose of life in man alone, in materialism or occultism even, but not in Catholicism, or broadly Judeo-Christianity. Yet this shaped western culture so that even on the depraved trailing edge, today, many assumptions are made from a floor created by Christendom. Our 'liberal' founders were some of them insane Protestant cultists. One of the Adams Presidents was almost an embarrassment, or is seen so today, for the vitriol of his writing. But that sectarian contempt was shared by many. Yet it was for the glimmer, still, of Christendom in this masonic and 'enlightened' experiment that the people were encouraged even by their leaders, in speech after speech, to preserve their Judeo-Christian faiths. It's the one thing that still holds it all together in the face of militant Revolution in the ACLU and other Communist organizations, in the face of 'new age' and masonic paganism and materialism, and just otherwise dispirited heathen and oriental bureacracy, which is always a blessing and curse, depending on how the bureacrats are managed. Not all conservatives are that sort of liberal. Many are traditionalists. Many of the principal voices are traditionalist Catholics, in fact, Latin Mass Catholics, like Bill Buckley, Paul Weyrich, Brent Bozell, and so on. I'd mention Pat Buchanan, but I find myself tending to disagree with him, now, on practically everything.