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I Reject Left v. Right: I am a Conservative Liberal

By: Beaglescout (Diary)  |  May 6th, 2009 at 09:00 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

I am a Conservative Liberal.

That’s a strange thing to say. What does this mean? Does this mean I’m in the middle, a squishy centrist? I was once a registered Democrat. Then a registered Independent. Now I’m a registered Republican. Does that make me right-wing? No.

Am I left or right or center? No. None of these describe me accurately.

Left and Right are both freedom hating European (French mostly) political divisions, based on the seating arrangements in the French revolutionary parliament. The left are Jacobin, socialist, communist, or fascist. The right are royalist. Both are collectivist, statist ideologies that believe all property belongs to the ruler and all laws are but the ruler’s whim enacted for the benefit of the ruler. Everyone else is a serf, a slave condemned to live in misery and poverty on the land as the ruler commands. The center don’t believe in socialism or royal rule, but they still think the government owns everything and makes it available to the people.

They are all wrong! Left is wrong. Right is wrong. And center is wrong.

I am a conservative when it comes to the American foundational principles and values. And I am a real liberal, if you define a liberal as someone who values freedom and ordered liberty. I believe in individual freedom and liberty: that’s what a liberal is. I believe in free people and free markets. I believe in God. I believe in human life. I believe that the founders were inspired by God when they wrote the Declaration, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the other founding documents. And I believe that all federal officials, who take oaths to protect and defend the Constitution, must protect the plain meaning of the words of the Constitution, because any other interpretation is only making it up as you go. I believe that federal officials who behave differently have betrayed the US, some criminally.

So now that you know what I mean by it, are you a conservative liberal like me?

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COMMENTS

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  • Aaron Gardner
  • JadedByPolitics

    I CANNOT fathom liberal and my name side by side :-)

  • ColdWarrior

    I’m traveling at the moment, so I don’t have all my reference materials with me. And I don’t know if Barry Goldwater said something similar in “The Conscience of a Conservative.” But back in the 1980s a friend of mine made an audio copy for me of “The Barry Goldwater Story,” a long playing (“LP”) phonograph record that was produced for Goldwater’s 1964 campaign. Both he and his dad had attended the 1964 nomiinating convention. (I realize this is ancient history for some of you and that you have never seen a phonograph let alone actually operated one!). On it, one of Goldwater’s speeches is played. I believe it’s his speech accepting the nomination, but it may have been an earlier one. I am paraphrasing, but one of his lines went something like this: Yes, I’m a conservative, But, actually, in the true historical sense of the word, I’m a liberal. Ffor I will never accept the terrifying possibility that the dark shadows of regimentation and control will inevitably blot out the sunlight of freedom.”

    In that sense, I, too, am a Conservative Liberal.

    Thank you.

  • Diogenes314

    Well thought out. The nature of Conservatism is traditionalism and resistance to change. In the case of America, all of our traditions are Liberal, since that was what our founding fathers were. The Conservatives of that day were known as Torys. You know, the side that lost. And Reagan refered to himself as a Liberal Democrat who didn’t leave his party, his party left him.

    On the other hand, I prefer to think of myself as a Liberal period. Simply because I refuse to to allow the Left to define my ideology for me. A Reaganite, a believer in our original Constitution who refers to himself as Conservative is in my opinion akin to someone who opposes abortion on demand refering to himself as anti-woman/anti-choice, one who believes in secure borders refering to themselves as a xenophobe, or someone who belives in national security calling themselves a warmonger. The Left can only control the paradigm if we let them. And refering to them as ‘Liberal’ is playing their game.

    • Achance

      And in the words of an old song I learned in my youth:
      I ain’t asked no pardon/
      For anything I done.

      • http://beaglescout.wordpress.com LJ “Beaglescout” Miller

        Keep fighting the good fight against the axis of oppression and fuzzy thinking of all types.

        • http://beaglescout.wordpress.com LJ “Beaglescout” Miller

          “I” or “we”

          either one works.

    • ssshannon1026

      I detest that many conservatives actually use the term ‘right wing’ to describe themselves. ‘Right Wing’ is a term invented specifically by collectivists to demonize any possible opposition ot their agenda. Why do so many on our side willingly accept it? There is nothing ‘right wing’ about our principles. We are the true ‘liberals’. The real debate we are having is between liberalism and collectivism. Between people assuming responsibility for their own lives or handing that responsibility over to a centralized political elite ruling authority.

  • McKinley

    than a conservative liberal. At least as I understand your understanding of the connection between personal property and individual liberty and the comingling of religion and tradition. You sound like you’re familiar with what I think Russell Kirk called an English conservative, or maybe the American variety of it.

    Many people associate those calling themselves “conservative liberal” with “classical liberal.” I fear you might be grouping yourself into the unfettered market crowd of Richard Cobden and David Ricardo. You seem to see the order provided by state serving some divine purpose, hardly a liberal belief.

    • http://beaglescout.wordpress.com LJ “Beaglescout” Miller

      And that’s an indictment on me. But in partial answer to what I think your point might be, I’d say that I think that the best protection of individual rights is to restrict government trespass on individual rights, not for the government to protect those rights directly.

      That even though, perhaps paradoxically, I agree with Bastiat who wrote that the Law is the mutual self-defense pact of free people.

      • McKinley

        The difference is trivial. I understand what you mean as you are placing yourself within the American tradition as opposed to anything European. Classical liberals tend to be English free traders from the nineteenth century and economists in Vienna during the early twentieth.

  • McKinley

    but there is a variance between what I believe and how I think most on this site would understand the term.

    I don’t care for the democratizing or modernizing aspects of our foreign policy – whether exercised by Republican or Democrat. In fact, I understand them as errors of delusive good intentions, what historian James C. Scott has termed a “high modern ideology” whereby bureaucrats and planners rationalize the world and create a utopia on paper in the capitol and measure the world against their ideal, with only disdain for local and traditional practices.

    • http://beaglescout.wordpress.com LJ “Beaglescout” Miller

      We have the constitutional right to protect ourselves. If there is a world-wide secretive gang of brigands, highwaymen and pirates who have usurped the rule of otherwise lawless subnational areas then what are we to do? Our choices are all unpleasant. Either we may

      1. let their operatives attack us at their leisure and pick up the pieces after, while waiting for them to use nuclear, biological, or chemical weaponry on our populace
      2. use diplomacy to convince the legitimate government of those areas to neutralize them, which defaults back to the previous choice
      3. bomb, either conventionally or with nuclear weapons, those areas until they surrender
      4. attempt some sort of counterinsurgency

      In such a situation as we find ourselves, I do not think that global counterinsurgency is our worst option. But this is something that can be argued out in a thread of its own.

      Cheers

      • McKinley

        n/t

  • Return to Revolution

    Couldn’t agree more. Once upon a time, liberals were liberal. Now they’re statists. And we’re the real liberals.

    Total government v No government – the conversation we should be having.

  • http://www.jeffscottshow.com jeffscottshow

    All apply to me. I consider them all pretty darn close to the same thing.

  • Jim

    It truly is unfortunate that “the left” has stolen the term liberal, while many on “the right” has gravitated toward using “right wing” as a self-description.

    There is an interesting discussion of the whole ideological spectrum and its evolution from the founding of the country through the early 20th century in the first chapter Murray N. Rothbard’s
    For A New Liberty. It’s written from a classical liberal / libertarian perspective, and I think it offers a good explanation of the evolving political ideologies in America.

  • SteveLA

    LJ

    What you describe is probably more in line with the old time Constitutionalists point of view, one that I also endorse.

    I also endorse the rule of law, and the role of what “umpires” as Chief Justice Roberts calls them for deciding what the great document means. I’m also probably not into a living Constitutional sort of point of view, but also think that there are issues that were never considered when the framers were working on the Constitution.

    That’s why we need good “umpires”.

  • onlyright

    “The center don?t believe in socialism or royal rule, but they still think the government owns everything and makes it available to the people.”

    That’s what scares me….if enough people think the above statement is true, it becomes true.

    • http://beaglescout.wordpress.com LJ “Beaglescout” Miller

      Left, right, and center are all variants of caveman economics and caveman politics. Until humans can progress past caveman politics and caveman economics we will be unable to sustain our other advances.

  • Vegas_Rick

    Recommended!

  • farstar99

    …your convictions can’t be all that deeply held. Sorry, but to me, that seems self-evident. If I’m even thinking about how others see me, or want to tag me, I’m not being true to myself.

    That is the chief Republican failing right now. They don’t know what they believe, because they haven’t re-examined their beliefs often enough. They desperately, desperately want the press to love them, and they want their brainwashed kids not to hate them, so they try to chameleon their way out of everything. Weak tea, I’m afraid.

    And Democrats have NEVER examined their beliefs since they were programmed into them.

    • http://beaglescout.wordpress.com LJ “Beaglescout” Miller

      This is about reaching out to people who have a prejudice against Republicans but are open to reason.