The Name Game. Liberal, liberal fee-fi-iberal. Conservative, conservative moo-oink-ervative. Lets get real. Republican? Democrat? Liberal? Conservative? Those terms have become irrelevant. They have been stripped of all meaning by history and a press that is quick to cast the fog of war on politicians they don’t like.
Many, many years ago, I remember a bumper sticker that said “I’m not anti-abortion, I’m PRO-LIFE”. This set off a revolution over political naming rights. Who has the right to determine what a person is called politically? Pro-Life has such a … well, positive, sound to it. Of course, so as not to be considered “anti-life”, abortions rights people decided to describe themselves as “pro-choice”.
Republicans haven’t always been conservatives, and conservatives haven't always been American in their ideals. A conservative is one who believes that the established order should be maintained and protected, while a liberal wants to change the established order (usually in the name of reforming it).
By those definitions, the American Patriots fighting for independence were liberals, and the loyalists were conservative. The Confederates, fighting for states rights and against federal intervention in property laws were conservatives and the abolitionists were liberals.
I think that one of the weaknesses of political discourse today is a lack of absolute terminology. Mark Levin in his book Liberty and Tyranny prefers the term “statist” to describe the main body of the current Democratic party. A statist is one who believes in “giving a centralized government control over economic planning and policy” (dictionary.com definition of statism).
I am anti-statist. I believe that the best thing government can do is get off our backs and let the American People be free and prosperous again. This is something you will unlikely get with Democrats, Republicans, liberals and conservatives in the United States today.
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