Screamapillar said:
There is a great Reagan quote about this. "I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism".
In that way, you can see that even as late as the 1980's the underlying foundation of the Republican (Conservative) Party was still very much rooted in Libertarianism. The criticism levied against "conservatives" nowadays is of course the result of the Congress and the President between 2000-2008. During those years, Conservatives became the War Party, the tax-and-spend party, etc. Bush wanting to give everyone a house, "faith-based initiatives", and so forth. If you go back though, it really wasn't all that long ago that being conservative actually meant limited government and very Libertarian-like ideas. Sort of the Robert Taft-era of conservatism has unfortunately been lost to the times.
They're still there, they're just being suffocated out by the big-government conservatives like Rick Santorum and others like him. The ones that say they're "very conservative" but they believe in more government laws and regulations to force their values on other people. Those types of conservatives are the very opposite of what a real conservative is, and frankly they make us look bad.
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What I am contending here is that core values that make liberal liberal and conservative conservative is pretty consistent. The means may change though, along with opinions of government. Only reason where i can see conservative being what it is now, is that the past would of seen less government, and the left ended up going statist through Communism, and secular powers and the user of government to affect change. Standing in opposition to that ended up naturally being opposed to government. But, go back to the era prior to when Classic Liberal came in, and I believe you see conservative being VERY statist. Hobbes, for example, is conservative, and he argues for the state.
