Mark Steyn has some extremely trenchant observations today, but his last paragraph is his most important one:
You’ll notice, incidentally, that I haven’t used the word “liberal” to describe the left. “Conservative” has been carelessly appropriated by the media to mean no more than the side you’re not meant to like. John Ashcroft is a hardline conservative, but so, according to the press, is the Taliban and half the Chinese politburo and the crankier Ayatollahs. So I think we conservatives ought to make an attempt to reclaim the word “liberal.” We believe in liberty, and in liberating human potential. I don’t know what you’d call a political culture that reduces voters to dependents, that tells religious institutions whom they can hire, that instructs printers on what printing jobs they’re obliged to accept, that bans squeegee kids unless they’re undercover policemen checking on whether you’re wearing your seatbelt, etc., etc. But “liberal” no longer seems to cover it.
I agree. I think the Conservative movement does need to reclaim the good old term “liberal”. Hayek used the term 60 years ago to mean what we mean today when we say “Conservative”, not what we mean today when we say “Liberal”. It does not mean “liberal with handouts to the point of nanny state”, it means “a believer in freedom of choice, thought, and anything else you can think of.” And today the correct definition of “liberal” has much more applicability to the right than it does to the left.
