whytep38 said:
Supposedly, the terms "Conservative" and "Liberal" have changed in meaning over the decades. I've read in multiple places that today's Conservative core is basically the Classical Liberalism core of our Founding Fathers.
That's pretty close.
If anyone is genuinely interested in what conservatism is, I recommend reading Edmund Burke.
A conservative seeks to conserve our living traditions. Accordingly at different times in history, they have sought to conserve traditions of monarchy, religion, law and liberty from law. They will show a tempermental distrust of solutions worked out in someone's head only and based on abstract principle exclusively, like the Equal Rights Amendment, because these ideas so often are a poor fit for the people we actually are.
Whyte, the reason you idea is so close, is that american conservatives will seek to conserve american traditions of liberty. This gets us into all sorts of confusion since american ideas of liberty are almost exclusively liberal, thought not in a Robespierre-kill-all-your-enemies way. American liberalism is the liberalism of the slave owning, religious planter, the merchant and the banker -- all people who valued their liberty and liberalism for the order it brought rather than any destruction of the old order.
People whose only experience is american politics will confuse the policies american conservatives support with the ideologies with which those positions may be compatible. An economic conservative may support low taxes and small government because they work nicely or limit the power of destructive "progressive elements", but not out of a libertarian ideological zeal.
An american conservative is also likely to seek to conserve social expressions of belief through matters of criminal code, family law and character training in schools. You can make cases for contrary positions, but those cases all rely on liberal rationales.
This means that statements that " A
real conservative believes in X policy " are almost always problemmatic. Being conservative has less to do with the position at which you arrive, and more to do with how you arrive at it.