HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to There are those who would claim...

You may actually be a liberal
robert — (archived)

I'm not trying to be provocative, though, even if this is Flame. Just wanted to drop a seed for a more serious discussion later in a more serious venue...

We may have a terminology problem here. I recently came across a diagram of the political "spectrum" that clicked for me: A triangle, with "conservative" and "progressive" the base vertices (in its context, "progressive" was being used in an extreme sense blending to socialism), and "liberal" the apex vertex. I found it significant that a 2D projection of the triangle would place "liberal" at the center, where, perhaps, it belongs historically, taking in the whole scope of "Western Liberal Thought".

A lot of the chaos in the current political landscape resolves, for me, when fit into that system.

Words matter, and I wonder if the quality of our discourse would improve if we adopted clearer definitions of the parties in this dispute?

In this taxonomy, the Zone does indeed look like liberal versus conservative. People who might have been categorized as progressives, like Bowser, are long gone.

Depressing to think that the Zone today represents the triumph of conservatism.

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