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[QUOTE]Originally posted by The_Tom: [QB] First off, its immeasurably dumb to get into a tizzy about who can better define the term "liberal" and "conservative." They're words like "tall" or "fat." Restricting the definition of which is one and which is the other to whether they favor "bigger" or "smaller" government is crazy. For starters, everyone has a different idea of what "bigger government" means. It could mean a more interventionist policy on social security issues. It could mean a larger civil service. It could mean a government that spends lots of money. It could mean a government that is visible. Ad nauseum. For instance, the Mulroney government in Canada assembled an enormous bureaucracy and raised taxes, and yet nobody challenged its status as right-of-center. Chretien's Liberals came to power, cut the bureaucracy and public spending in general, and nobody pointed at them and said they favoured "small government." However, Jeff's interpreation is also somewhat suspect. Many right-of-center politicians in Canada come to mind as being generally progressive-minded with regards to social issues. Up here, fiscal policy seems to be the biggest contributing factor to a "liberal," "social democrat" or "conservative" label. But I digress. For the only satisfactory answer, we've gotta call on our friend Mr. Spectrum. You see, we have a somewhat arbitrary thing called a political spectrum, where we line up politicians roughly according to their political beliefs. It's incredibly innacurate, party lines will undoubtedly be blurred, etc. But it's really the only acceptable way to label people something. We can start with our line and then wave our arms at a huge chunk of them off to the left and call them socialists. We can then point out that some of them to the extreme Left are communists (which can be broken down further into Stalinists, Leninists etc.) and those closer to the center are Social Democrats. But sprinkled in there are Greens... often not particulary eye-to-eye with the Union leaders of the world. They aren't socialists. How far to the left do you stick Allende? Castro? Aristide? Marx? Orwell? Roddenberry? I think you can see how fuzzy this all is becoming. Pretty near the center, with perhaps a few more on the left side of the centerline than the right are the liberals. Is Chretien there? I think so. How about FDR? Yup. Trudeau? Yup. JFK? Probably. Jimmy Carter? Yeah, possibly the only American president ever to be left of the midway mark. Blair? yeah, he's in the clump somewhere, though most of his coworkers are over hanging with the Social Democrats. Clinton? Definitely on the right side of the line, but probably in there nonetheless. Joe Clark, leader of Canada's Progressive Conservative Party? Toughie. One so-called Liberal leader who isn't here is my local example, Premier-to-be Gordon Campbell of BC. His party is called the BC Liberals, but they're liberal in name only. He's far further right, exchanging anecdotes with Mike Harris. The liberals bleed into the moderate Conservatives. McCain. Lougheed (look him up). I'd risk Nixon here, maybe even Eisenhower. If Joe Clark isn't actually a closet liberal, he's in this pack. To their right come the hardliners, which include the neoconservatives of today some of the conservatives of the Past. Dubya. Daddy. Reagan. Thatcher. The Canadian neoconservative contingent to this category includes Conrad Black, Ralph Klein, Mike Harris, the aforementioned Gordon Campbell, and all the members of the Canadian Alliance Party who don't fall into the next category, the Fundies and Fascists. Buchanan. Limbaugh. Ashcroft. Pinochet. Mussolini. Hitler. Of course, problems remain. Where do you put the Libertarians? Or the Anarchists? Somebody stick Putin into the lineup, or Mandela. Can you? Bring an American into the Room, and the centerline of the spectrum immediately shifts, sliding rightwards so the moderate conservatives touch the line. Bring in a Swede, and it slides back so the Liberals are dead center, with social democrats no more off-center than the likes of McCain. Bring in a panel of political scientists from democracies all over the world and it resets itself somewhere closer to where I said it was, dividing Liberals between a slightly larger chunk to the left and a slightly smaller chunk to the right. Omega made an the apparently indisputable claim that Clinton is a liberal. Dead wrong. The DNC today is right-of-center. It looks very liberal all of a sudden if the only point of comparison is the Republican Party, but that's like saying Drew Barrymore is fat when you stand her next to Callista Flockhart. A panel of medical experts would put Ms. Barrymore on the same side of the median line as Ms. Flockhart, with the former clearly much closer to the middle. But ask a TV viewer whose only really seen those two actresses or those with very similar body shapes if Barrymore is fat and he'll say yes. If GW Bush were to enter Canadian Politics, he'd most likely wind up in the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance, our local neoconservative and fundie social club. Clinton, on the other hand, would probably fit in better with the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada than the Liberal Party. In Canada, the entire liberal/conservative thing is especially fun because we have political parties with said words in their titles. As a result, Canadians have our little system of talking about "small-c conservatives" and "small-l liberals." We've also got the term "Red Tories," which are what used to be the centrist wing of the PC Party (including Mr. Clark) that now make up pretty much the entirety of the organization since the CA arrived on the scene. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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