Welcome to mcdowellnews.com. Skip directly to: our Keyword Search, Section Navigation, Content.

mcdowellnews.com - The McDowell News

HomeNewsEntertainmentSportsLifestylesOpinionCommunityWeather Online Tools Jobs | Real Estate | Shopping | Classified

Combs: Let's quit using words like "liberal" and "conservative."

surely we can come up with something more accurate

By Britt Combs | The McDowell News

Published: September 8, 2009

Updated: 09/08/2009 07:49 pm

One of the hardest things about having any discussion about current events is that many of the most used, most hot-button words have such transient meaning. You might agree with your immediate circle of friends or your political comrades about a certain set of words, and have no idea at all why those to-you beautiful and harmless words set others off.

In 1988, presidential candidate Mike Dukakis said he was proud to be a liberal and that he was baffled and flabbergasted that the word could mean anything bad to anyone.

"When did 'liberal' come to be a bad word?" he asked.

It's a good question. To great Americans like Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Randolph, George Mason and the like, "liberal" would mean merely not-a-monarchist, not a defender of the status quo. It means a defender of liberty, the belief that all men are created equal and are equal before the law. Pretty basic stuff.

You would think everyone could agree on that. To be a liberal meant – and should still mean – that one defends and supports the freedom of all individuals; that you support their freedom of conscience, religion, speech and property, their right to work and enjoy the fruits of their own labor, and to come and go as they please and to be secure in their homes and persons and papers and effects.

This is very basic, American civics 101-type stuff. And yet today's self-described "liberals" tend to regard most of those ideas as elitist or racist or both. I have often observed (and I am absolutely brilliant for observing this) that today's "liberals" only defend individual freedom when it's a question of vice – drugs or sexual promiscuity or profanity and blasphemy. And usually not drugs. Other than those, it's always more laws, more restrictions, more prohibitions, more confiscations. When was the last time you heard a Ted Kennedy or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton defend private property or the right to keep one's profits from one's own work? Not very recently, I'll bet.

You can't consider the word "liberal" without considering "conservative." The two have meaning mainly in contrast to one another. What is conservative supposed to mean? In olden times, it meant no more that a defender of the Crown and of the social order of the English world; in other words, the caste system that was left over, in form if not absolute fact, from feudal days, when the common men were but "villains" (slaves) of their lord.

I'll admit freely that I grew up a self-described "conservative," for no other reason that a basic philosophical opposition to those who would tax my wages, take my gun, limit my speech, restrict my right to work and brand me a racist for the crime of being born white in North Carolina. When I was 18 and contemplating my first vote, the slogan, "Defend guns; defeat Dukakis" meant a lot to me.

Clearly there was nothing liberal about the liberals. That made it very easy, even compulsory, to be a conservative. But never once, in those enthusiastic days of youth, did I consider what a conservative was, other than one who opposed liberals.

A conservative defends individual liberty? Defends the Constitution? Private property? I and others like me assumed that's what a conservative was. But it wasn't necessarily so. Liberals have long denounced conservatives as being "reactionary," and that is certainly true. I and others like me defined our "conservatism" as nothing more that anti-liberalism or anti-socialism or anti-communism. It only told you what were against, not what we were for. We were for slowing the terrible tide of creeping totalitarianism. We were for holding back the commies until the Rapture; nothing else mattered.

Yes, we thought it was for freedom and liberty and the rule of law, but certainly the reign of Republican "conservatives," from the Gingrich Congress to the George W. Bush presidency, put the lie to all of that. Conservatism, as far as our elected leaders were concerned, meant a bottomless bag of reasons to justify big government, big spending, big debt, and an almost gleeful suspension of civil liberties in the name of "national security."

We learned the hard way that conservatives were no more liberal than the liberals.

How deeply, profoundly, mind-bogglingly ironic, that those of us who believe in the very ideals the Revolutionary soldiers fought for – freedom, life, the pursuit of happiness -- are considered a radical fringe minority, so far outside the mainstream as to be irrelevant.