Via DougJ at Balloon Juice:
"I’ve always been liberal, proud to call myself liberal, and if people who want fiscal sanity and a decent health care system think they should call themselves “progressive” instead, I’ll all myself a progressive instead. If there’s two sides and one of them is wrapped up in meaningless ideology and the other is at least somewhat interested in attaining practical goals, I’ll call myself whatever the practical side calls itself.
Right now, pragmatic people call themselves liberals and ideological people call themselves conservative. That’s painting with a broad brush, I realize, but it’s pretty much true. I’m not sure any of that has to do with liberalism or conservatism per se. I don’t know if it means that Burke and Bobo’s other idols suck and their liberal equivalents are awesome. But I do think that fact that conservative pundits talk so much about Burke and Hayek and (let’s be honest) Reagan, while liberals talk more about exactly how much large the stimulus should have been and how much money we could have saved with the public option…that is telling."Simply put, conservatives are mostly interested in shrinking government, no matter the effect, liberals are interested in getting the government to provide certain services, not in growing government per se.
Or, the main difference is that conservatives look back to a supposedly idyllic past which they work to recreate, while liberals tend to look forward to a potentially idyllic future.You decide. I find we cannot change or recreate the past, so pragmatism has no place in achieving conservative goals, which are ultimately based on nostalgia and other emotions.
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