badgenome on 01 January 2013
| Mr Khan said: Because liberal and conservative are defined by the era in which they lived. Liberals fight to advance and conservatives to retain, but advance towards what and retain what are the questions. Few enough conservatives in countries are advocates of absolute monarchies anymore, for instance, while liberals fought for free trade and industrialization when those were the radical new things. |
Which is why it's a stupid paradigm. The opposite of conservative is not liberal; it's radical. And the opposite of liberal is illiberal, not conservative.
