Conservative. Liberal. Those two words probably speak entire sentences to you.
They don't to me, and they shouldn't to you. Even thefacebook.com offers liberal, conservative, moderate and "very" persuasions of the first two (it also offers libertarianism, thankfully, but that too is misunderstood).
The majority understanding of our current political system is terribly, sickeningly twisted.
It is so because both its eyes are focused on the present, with not a glance back to see where the ideologies came from.
It is a sad fact of life that the general public, and indeed it is perhaps safe to say even the Dartmouth caste of society, sees a linear relationship when they think of politics. On the left, there's Ralph Nader, John Kerry and Bill Clinton in some sort of arguable order. On the right, there's George W. Bush, John McCain and Jerry Falwell on in an equally nonsensical order.
My understanding of it from this past election season is that among us students here, the far left is seen as progressive and fighting things like "the system," the center-left is incorrectly shown as fighting things like government overspending and all else is almost lumped together with little distinction between Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dick Cheney, Michael Badnarik and fascism on the right.
I mentioned in a previous column the fact that the dictionary -- think about that, the dictionary! -- defines conservatism as an adherence to the past.
All throughout high school I scoffed at teachers who taught that notion of conservatism -- how could they be part of such a liberal conspiracy that they teach one whole valid viewpoint of the political spectrum as something so mindnumbingly perverse as solely "clinging to the past?"
Turns out it was I who was wrong, because even the dictionary says it (this could be where I become a conspiracy theorist again, but this is neither the time nor the place to explore that), and virtually everyone agrees with it, even conservatives themselves.
Even several of my friends here at Dartmouth who are bright, relatively moderate people did so.
I posed the question "Suppose we live in a pure, non-Stalinist, communist society. Conservatives, by your definition, would be the people supporting the status quo and liberals the ones fighting for a free market system and a meritocracy. How does that square up with the theory?"
The only answer I got is that conservatives who enact change are simply "reactionary" and fighting movement toward social progress.
I felt like I had just seen my Deaniac roommate sprout Bush's head and refer to "activist" judges, as if the word is supposed to have some biting, horrifying feel to it.
Meanwhile, liberalism is popularly defined as the advancement of human liberty. The stuff of Thomas Jefferson. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
How, in the name of God, could anyone be opposed to that sort of liberalism? This is where we start discerning the root of the problem.
Liberalism and conservatism are defined historically without that being understood; over a broad cut of human existence, the aforementioned definitions are correct.
The problem is that most assume that's what it means to be "left" or "right," "Republican" or "Democrat," "red-stater" or "blue-stater" in today's America.
They could hardly be more wrong if they said North Korea's Kim Jong-Il is the embodiment of Marxism.
Today's conservatives are not conservative, and today's liberals are hardly liberal.
Don't believe me? It is a "conservative" belief in this country to oppose gun control, but what can possibly be more liberal than preserving freedom in the face of the possibility of harm to others?
It is "liberal" to support government entitlement programs, and yet by their very nature they fly in the face of any sense of Enlightenment liberalism?
The only reason libertarianism is called libertarianism is because its founders couldn't call it liberalism in the Enlightenment tradition without having it assumed that they wanted the government controlling half their lives.
If there were any conservatives in America today, they'd be espousing the pluses of an agrarian economy and saying we should reunite with England and, oh yeah, let's ignore how powerful the Prime Minister has become since 1776.
The only thing close to liberalism today is libertarianism, which only exists in a fringe party that most consider fruity, mainly because it sounds like anarchism half the time.
As a people and a community, be it as Americans or Dartmouth students, it is important we realize this disconnect. In the great historical sense of the word, all major players in American politics are liberals, despite what some Republicans say.
We were the first great nation in the history of the world to throw off the shackles of dictatorship and build our true City on the Hill. Couching current politics in the language of "conservative" and "liberal" confounds our proud tradition.
Republicans want nothing more radical than to preserve that city which we built up from the Enlightenment; they do not want to go back to the Code of Hammurabi, no matter what many pundits from cable television news and many students and professors here in Hanover might tell you.
Democrats are not continuing entirely in the tradition of Enlightenment liberalism, which is all well and good -- it is perfectly acceptable to say tradeoffs are a necessity in today's political system.
But it damages the system as a whole when publicly we equate John Kerry with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and George W. Bush with Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler.
This is a nauseating perversion of the liberal representative democracy for which we would all be proud to die.
