I find myself on the horns of a dilemma: If I say that you're not a typical conservative, I'm, by my lights, denigrating typical conservatives. My views are very much in sympathy with yours--this is the common ground I've described before when I talk about "classic Conservatives".

My strongest area of agreement is with Federalism. Power should be located as close to the individual as feasible. That's entirely consistent with the American philosophy of decentralization of power. I like the idea of states as the "laboratories of democracy", because I see a national-level monoculture as stifling innovation. The area of disagreement here, I think, is in matters of degree. I see some problems/issues that necessarily cross state borders and require national attention, the environment chief among them. I also see the need for maintaining minimum national standards in areas such as civil rights and the law, so that no state can deprive an individual of rights enjoyed by residents of other states. In yet another area, I see that there are some problems or projects of such scale that they need national-level resources. Kansas couldn't have sent a man to the Moon all by itself, that's for sure.

I also think that making too many issues national is a major source of division and discontent. It raises the stakes: In order to order your own backyard as you see fit, you must also impose your beliefs on everybody else in the country. I'd be far less bothered by Kansas's choice to teach Creationism in the schools if I didn't know that Creationists consider such victories as a stepping-stone to imposing their views nationwide.

Who could disagree that with freedom comes responsibility? Yet we do. Some Conservatives take the concept to such an absolute that they reject circumstances completely, leading to such (to me) absurdities as blaming people who live in an area in which industry has fled overseas for their inability to find replacement work. If we still lived in an agrarian world it might be justified to say "well go out and farm a few acres to support yourself", but in an industrial economy people are genuinely dependent on others, through no fault of their own. People specialize in an industrial economy, and like organisms in nature, specialization leads to vulnerability. Yet if we didn't specialize, we couldn't have an industrial economy.

I don't necessarily disagree with harsher punishment for heinous crimes, but I'm not comfortable with it either. If the death penalty could be demonstrated to have deterrent effect, maybe; but the opposite has been shown by study after study. So if it's just retribution, I think I'm correct to question capital punishment on moral grounds.

"A quaint, quiet, slow paced, small-town life sounds appealing to me." Oh, me too! I'll stay here in this damn city only as long as I have to, but I plan to get out of here in favor of a small town or the remote woods just as soon I can.

So maybe you're not a conservative, maybe you're just a guy. I feel like I've been backed into a corner to wear the Liberal label by radical Conservatives, and I wear it proudly in part as a gesture of defiance. If I didn't, I feel like I'd only get pushed further and further...and like a lot of other people these days, I'm not going to back down any more. The days of militant Conservatives steamrollering everybody are over.