As a good liberal, John Hood should enjoy the following passage from Yuval Levin?s contribution to a National Review symposium on the relationship between conservatism and liberalism:
We might say ? that the two parties of modern liberal societies are a party of conservative liberals, who seek to secure the liberal society as a product of countless generations of gradual social and political evolution, and a party of progressive liberals, who seek to go beyond liberalism by using liberal principles to enact a complete break with the past and achieve a politics of rational control.
In this sense, modern conservatism has always been liberal, and there is nothing self-contradictory about the fact that American conservatives are the defenders of classical liberalism in America. There is also nothing terribly surprising about the way in which the modern Left, in its effort to go beyond liberalism, has often undermined and attacked liberalism. This is sometimes hidden from view by our political terminology: The effort to ?progress? beyond liberalism has come to be called ?liberalism? in our politics, while the effort to treasure and defend the liberal order has come to be called ?conservatism.?
