[ExI] Liberal Daughter

[Stefano Vaj]

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 12:28 AM, The Avantguardian
<avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Conservative and liberal are labels that don't mean much when the chips are down, Frank. A sitting president that was the darling of "conservatives' a mere 4 years ago created more and bigger government than any president since FDR, circumventing our civil rights in the process.

I believe this is the real point. There are too many political axes,
most of them can only very metaphorically coincide with a right-left
split, and in turn the latter have vastly different meanings depending
on the era and the context (if Louis XIV was not persuaded of the
virtuous of free trade and free markets, does it make him a
"liberal"?).

I am strongly in favour of discussing the merits, as opposed to the
labelling, of political ideas. If one refers to a nineteenth century
anarchist, a neocon, an objectivist, a jacobin, a North-European
sixtyies-style socialdemocrat, a Maoist, we know what we are
discussing. "Conservatism" as such does not not mean anything, unless
the context is given as well as more details of what should be
conserved, and "liberal" is almost equally ambiguous. As everybody
knows, in Europe the term mostly indicates that you are not a
socialist, period.

Stefano Vaj