I'm starting to think the whole political spectrum is wrong.
I think being a liberal is as simple as wanting reform of policies and to try something new. Likewise conservatism is a reverence for tradition and comfortable ideology and a dislike of change. Of course this means that neocons are really liberals that use conservative imagery(like that's a shocker).
Liberals have a hard time in comparison to conservatives because people generally can't agree on change. Liberalism is not monolithic. There are a lot of different groups and we would all rather see no change than see one of our rivals win. Because if a rival wins, we have to clean up a mess before we can institute good changes- makes our job harder. For instance, I'll vote for a traditional con over a neocon normally (not Buchanon, but "reactionary" or "backward" is more extreme than conservative- it's reverse liberalism: changing by getting rid of new and trying something old that we know doesn't work) because it's less messy.
As a result I often wind up voting for Crats, who I think are conservative right now because they cling to old policies that are not done well over tradition. But the Pubs have been quite liberal lately, but definitely not my kind of liberal.
So I'll probably wind up voting for Libertarians or some other third party. But I'll do it out of being liberal.
I think liberal and conservative are simple adjectives with strong emotional meaning. They don't mean anything that can be charted. They're personality traits or maybe values. Look at all the conservative Crats and liberal Pubs. Then there are parties that consider themselves neither but are really made up of people who are both. And then some of us pick a party because we expect they're one or the other, but are they really?
And in this model, what the hell is a moderate?
I think it's someone who heavily values not being a con or lib.

Just a thought.

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