I'd finally managed to slog through the rhetoric of Tom's article to the part which related to the terms "conservative" and "liberal" (you could've warned me where to look, Tom!) when I spotted Steve's post and link. The latter grabbed my interest because of its plain-spokenness and common sense. When I reached the end and saw that it had been written by Orson Scott Card, I said "ahright, way to go Orson!".

I don't see a lot of merit in discussing the turgid prose of the first article, because it was partisan: A political conservative playing with words to yet again slam his enemies. It's Orson's article that's more relevant the earlier discussion about what "conservative" and "liberal" really mean, and rises above partisanship. That was his whole point, in fact.

We've gotten hopeless bogged down in sweeping generalizations. As Card points out, most people except the ridiculously dogmatic have fine-grained opinions about a wide variety of issues, and neither label can accurately describe anyone.

I think that it's this way because of our two-party system. It's nearly hopeless to try and elect an indepedent, and so we all have to hold our noses and compromise by picking one of the two "major" parties if we hope to have any influence at all. The choice is always of the lesser evil, and we're always offended by some of the positions "our" party takes.

I recently went on at great length about changes to the system that might break the two parties' stranglehold on political power. Because people have fine-grained opinions, we need fine-grained representation in government. We have to find a way to accommodate a myriad of small parties--better called interest groups than parties--so that we can work out fine-grained compromises through the democratic process.

Am I hopelessly utopian, or what?