McFreedom

Steven Den Beste complains that a liberal ain't what it used to be: At the founding of our Great Republic, a liberal was one who wanted a small, nonintrusive state, but, today, a liberal is one who wishes to have a large, intrusive state.

I was reminded of a conversation I had with my mother as the Eastern Bloc was turning into a bunch of Eastern Pieces. She'd complained about some article which had spoke of "conservative communists," battling democratic reform and had felt that the word "conservative" inherently meant not communist and that the article was guilty of imprecise language at best or was evidence of some leftist plot to discredit Republicans at worst.

The problem, of course, is that conservative and liberal are relative terms. Dictionary.com says a conservative is one "tending to oppose change," while a liberal is someone who is "[f]avoring proposals for reform." The trick is that, in this country, at some point the labels "stuck," and they now are shorthand for "rightist" and "leftist," respectively. Even in cases where the "liberals" want the status quo and "conservatives" want radical change (say, The Endangered Species Act).

Gene and I went ammo shopping yesterday, and on the way to the gun store we walked past an antique store, which had a sign in the window advertising "50s Modern." Which is a similar case of a term getting frozen - when someone says that a building looks "modern," is he saying that it looks like it was built two years ago, or forty? People could honestly describe both Barbara Boxer and me as "liberal," but if there's a single policy element we both agree on, I've never heard of it.

In short, if you wish to be precise, eschew "liberal" or "conservative" as general labels. I don't have a good set of alternative labels to propose; there are five main separations of mainstream political thought (leftist-authoritarian; leftist-libertarian; rightist-authoritarian; rightist-libertarian and populism). Unfortunately, only the last one has a widely deployed pithy name.