[marron]

Ok, I'm risking a shelacking here, but hey, I'm among friends, I hope...

We got into trouble when we lost control of "liberal". As in, John Locke liberal.

Most of what we call Conservative, in the US, is classic liberal. Limited Government, individual liberty, private property. If you believe in that, you are a classic liberal. But since the socialists stole our name (our id was in our wallet when they stole that too...) we have been forced to make do with the Conservative name.

Certainly many of us are also "conservative", in US terms, since we are conserving the constitution, which is a classic liberal document. But the original meaning of conservative doesn't necessarily apply to most US conservatives. We are not tradition bound. Conservatives are where its happening, intellectually, right now. Certainly the left is intellectually moribund, and conformist to the point of uniformity.

US conservatives are at home with change, they are agents of change, their ideas are the only new ones on the scene, and as they become more confident they are almost revolutionary. So the "traditionalist" meaning of the word "conservative" clearly doesn't apply.

[Ohioan]

US conservatives are at home with change, they are agents of change, their ideas are the only new ones on the scene, and as they become more confident they are almost revolutionary. So the "traditionalist" meaning of the word "conservative" clearly doesn't apply.

When you use the word "change," you fall into the same conceptually imprecise error as those who embrace the greatly over-worked term "progress." I always used to use the example of a rat riding a bit of trash into the sewer in a thunder-storm, as an example of "progress." There is no virtue in progress, and none in change. The devil or virtue is in the details, the specifics of your direction, not the embracing of an action word.

Conservatives do not fear change as such. To the Conservative, however, change is a building on a firm foundation. To the Leftist--the Socialist egalitarian, bent upon levelling Society and collectivizing control--change is a disruption, a destruction of the foundation, not a building upon past achievement. We are the builders; they are the destroyers.

You are, of course, correct in your references to classical "Liberalism." However, in America those values are a part of our tradition; a part of our tradition springing directly out of the dynamic achievements of the original settlers, and the lessons that they learned in building a new Society from the ground up. It was not, as in Europe, a matter of sitting around and philosophizing about what might be nice. It was the tradition here. So there is no dichotomy, when American Conservatives seek to preserve their tradition, with the best of classical "Liberalism."

I make these points not to attack you, but in the interests of seeking greater clarity in a cause common to most of us at this forum.

William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site

[inkling]

Ok, I'm risking a shelacking here, but hey, I'm among friends, I hope...

We got into trouble when we lost control of "liberal". As in, John Locke liberal.

No need for a shellacking; you're completely correct. It is not "liberal" to enforce speech codes on college campuses. Neither is it "conservative" to favor a top-down overhaul of the current federal tax code.

The problem with debates about ideological labels is that they always collapse into semantic arguments rather than substantive ones. And right-wingers like us are more concerned about substance; we leave semantic debates to the lefties!