| Mr Khan said: While we're in here, i'm going to disagree that Liberal is a set term, given that Liberal used to mean what is called today Libertarianism, and in the world today is still relativistic (like how European Center-Right parties are oriented at about the same place as the US Democrats are). The two stances are purely situational, like how, in the Soviet Union in the late '80s, there were "liberals" who valued freedom of worship and free-market economics, set against the conservative Stalinists, ultra-hard leftists of a Pol-Pot-ish variety The only common strain in Liberalism is that it seeks either freedom or equality, it's just that those terms are equally relative, so modern American liberalism seeks a regulated market to promote economic equality and seeks social freedoms, as opposed to classical Liberals of other orientations |
Naturally, liberals can and will disagree on the finer points, but the fact that human liberty is the ultimate goal for liberals everywhere stands in pretty stark contrast to conservatism, which is situational by definition.
Although the American left harbors a few odd fetishes here and there (a tendency to carry a torch for drug legalization or recognition of same sex marriages, for instance), its real hallmark has become its crushing paternalism. It strikes me as patently absurd to call any group so dedicated to the creation of a fiscally impossible Hobbesian horror, liberal. I could perhaps chalk it up to a simple disagreement over how to get from here to there, except the left seems to come down on the wrong side of every issue of practical importance - from speech codes to food bans to cackhanded government meddling in the economy on a massive scale - with such regularity that there can be no doubt that they are not one iota more liberal than the right. If anything, they strike me as a good deal more illiberal.
