Jonah Goldberg uses an entry at National Review Online’s blog “The Corner” to remind us how the terms “conservative” and “liberal” interact depending on the context.
As part of its 175th-anniversary celebration, The Economist has a very interesting, and mostly very good, essay in defense of liberalism (the kind The Economist was founded to promote and defend). In it they write: …
… “True liberals contend that societies can change gradually for the better and from the bottom up. They differ from revolutionaries because they reject the idea that individuals should be coerced into accepting someone else’s beliefs. They differ from conservatives because they assert that aristocracy and hierarchy, indeed all concentrations of power, tend to become sources of oppression.” …
… [W]hen The Economist says that liberals differ from conservatives because liberals “assert that aristocracy and hierarchy, indeed all concentrations of power, tend to become sources of oppression,” I feel like saying, “You talkin’ to me?” because I agree with that entirely. …
… My point was that if you consider the bedrock principles of liberalism — that we are all equal in the eyes of God and government, that we have inalienable rights, that government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, etc. — then any movement away from those principles is not progress forward but retreat backward. …
… In America, this fundamentally liberal view is also fundamentally conservative. The liberalism of Hayek and The Economist is not fundamentally at odds with the conservatism of Burke or Coolidge, both advocates of reform. It nonetheless leaves ample room for all sorts of arguments about what the government can or cannot do to improve peoples lives and what the proper role for religion should be.
