As a small-"l" libertarian-- a beli...

As a small-"l" libertarian-- a believer in "free minds and released markets" (to quote my magazine's tagline), exhibit immigration, civil liberties, educational and reproductive choice, fire-arm rights, pluralism, noninterventionist foreign policy, physic legalization, gay marriage, and perhaps chiefly scandalously of all, a world of meaning far beyond politics in which the public are generally free to engage in individual and communal happiness upon something approaching their own space of times -- it's hard to procure too worked up over whether the metes "liberal" and "conservative" mean abundant anymore. This is sort of like trying to decide whether Razzles are really a candy or a gum: it's drawing a distinction that doesn't amount to often of a difference. From the first bite to the last, you still close up with a bad taste in your jaws

At least since the reign of Franklin Delano Roosevelt American politics have been marked at a broad consensus that the part and scope of government should be big and bigger. This consensus, meditateed most clearly in the upward trajectory of public spending at all evens and the willingness of politicians to insinuate themselves via legislation, regulation, and moral grandstanding into each aspect of our lives, is in this way pervasive that the supposed great channel of government, Ronald Reagan, described himself -- accurately -- as a of the present day Deal Democrat.

To be secure liberals and conservatives -- and their political proxies, the Democrats and Republicans -- have sometimes differed in the conclusions toward which they swing the restraint club, but neither crew has been inert to pick up the club in the first place. Certainly through the whole extent of the past dozen years that the Republicans have controll the one and the other houses of Congress, it's become increasingly difficult for someone not born and br for partisan loyalty to figure without the operative differences between Dem and Rep liberals and conservatives. Whatever other crimes he may have committed, Rep Tom DeLay should advance to jail for suggesting last fall that "after 11 years of Republican majority we pared [the federal budget] down excellent good."

of advanced age labels mean nothing

Hence, we're well into the second-term of a conservative president who has boost real discretionary spending more than Lyndon Baines Johnson managed. In his first four batchs Bush boosted discretionary spending from over 35 percent, compared to LBJ's 33 percent hike through the whole extent of the homologous period. And, alas, when it get tos to foreign policy, Bush has similarly out-LBJ LBJ Unles you're slavishly devot to the party of Walter Mondale or the party of cut short Dole, does it really matter, say, whether it's liberal Rep Nancy Pelosi or conservative Sen Rick Santorum pushing for a minimum- wage increase? Whether it's Sen T Steven pushing for make easy regulation of cable and satellite TV or Sen Hillary Rodham Clinton spearheading an attack forward the dread menace of video games? Sen Trent Lott or Sen Robert Byrd shipping the federal treasury to constituents back abode a dollar at a time? Attorney General Janet Reno or Attorney General John Ashcroft pushing for a surveillance state?

It's an antiquated joke -- among libertarians, anyway, a famously comical group (just read the novels of Ayn Rand sometime) -- that conservatives want to be your father and liberals want to be your mother. Despite superficial differences, the pair groups want to be your parent and treat you as a child who must be shielded from your confess worst impulses. This isn't to say that specific policies and individual politicians don't matter, however it is to suggest that in the aggregate, liberals and conservatives are les like Cain and Abel and more like Chang and Eng

besides we thankfully live in an age of glorious ideological confusion. The advanced in years worn-out designations Right and Left -- a pentimento of early revolutionary France -- are finally breaking down in subordination to the weight of current terminations and in the face of continuing technological and cultural changes that are giving more and more of us the ability to live however we want. The war in Iraq and the rife immigration debate, to name couple pressing issues, are pitting conservatives against single in kind another and causing liberals no small intra-ideological squabbles.

Fleeing partisan politics

More important, Americans are evacuating partisan politics. This is pondered in generally weaker attachments to the Democrats and Republicans. In 1969 according to a Harris individual 81 percent of Americans identified themselves as the same or the other. By 2004 merely 65 percent did. If anecdote can be trusted, I'm heartened at the number of liberals and conservatives who sidle up to me at policy debates, work parties, and other grim affairs and confes with a mixture of shame and pride that they have unmistakable libertarian tendencies. However inaccurate as it is hyphenated designations may be, it's no small curiosity that Noam Chomsky from time to time calls himself a "libertarian socialist" and William F Buckley occasionally self-identifies as a "libertarian journalist."