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1 Response to “CNN Headline of the Day (Re: The Republican Debate)”

1. 1 Jeremy Clifton
   January 30, 2008 at 9:14 pm

   (Posting a comment as an addendum as to not mess up my nice, succinct aside …)

   “Conservative” and “Liberal” are two of the most useless and most abused labels in politics. The terms in and of themselves don’t define any particular political philosophy (outside of a concept explained in the words of an un-named Southern Baptist who once went on record as saying “A liberal is anybody who doesn’t believe the way I do.”

   Technically, Huckabee, McCain, and Romney are by and large the more conservative in this race because they say they intend to (to some degree) keep the status quo as far as the size of government, foreign policy, etc. Ron Paul is the liberal in the race because his platform represents anything but the status quo.

   Of course, if we teleported all four of these guys back 40 years ago, Ron Paul would be the more conservative, and the others would be the more liberal (in terms of the Republican Party in general).

   The problem is, of course, that Huckabee, McCain, and Romney are really hiding their records behind the generally perceived understanding of “conservative” which is, for the common man, more likely to be more like Ron Paul’s positions (save foreign policy).

   If I weren’t an anti-Statist Libertarian, I would propose we ban the use of the words “conservative” and “liberal” as political labels and force people to use terms specifically associated with particular ideologies, such as “libertarian”, “statist”, “socialist”, “communist”, “marxist”, “federalist”, “imperialist”, etc. Even if people used them perjoratively, it would be an improvement over where we are now because the people to whom the labels were applied would actually be able to successfully refute (or confirm) the allegations.