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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I came to the conclusion along time ago that 80% of all Americans vote along party lines NO MATTER WHAT. Very rarely do people, in my view, easily change sides.

In the 1800's, a liberal was a social liberal, a strong capitalist and a foreign policy interventionist. A conservative, in turn, was a social conservative, a supporter of state control over the economy and a foreign policy isolationist. These terms have changed greatly in their meaning over time.

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"I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like every one to go about doing just as he pleased- short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed." (Max Beerbohm)

That's exactly why I think the orientation toward change or tradition is a better constant than any particulars.

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You might be 19th century (classical) liberal, JavaBlack. Does that seem correct?

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"I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like every one to go about doing just as he pleased- short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed." (Max Beerbohm)

Kind of. But the neoliberals that fit this description better are slavish to old ideas, even when they have flaws. In a real liberal tradition, I have to believe in trying to fix those flaws. That's the kind of thinking that led to what we term the welfare state. But I think that is flawed as well, not because of what it's supposed to do but because of how it is carried out. That means I, as a liberal, have to focus on fixing the concept or replacing it with a better one. Conservatives on the other hand, tend to be against the very reasoning of the concept and want to remove it completely without replacing it.

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This is just an observation, but if S-S is a neoconservative, I'd desribe neoconservatives as hawkish libertarians rather than hawkish liberals. My political correctness is liberal (or so I'm told) and he is no fan of it.

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"I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like every one to go about doing just as he pleased- short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed." (Max Beerbohm)

Political correctness is liberal, but it is an opposing school of liberal. Like I said before liberals have more problem with rival schools of liberal thought than with conservative thought (keeping extremity as a constant).

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In showdowns between the ACLU and feminist groups I side with the feminist groups every time. I see the ACLU's way of thinking as libertarian.

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"I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like every one to go about doing just as he pleased- short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed." (Max Beerbohm)

They are because they are for a particular kind of policy issue, rather than an orientation. They defend all speech regardless of current policy.
Then again, feminists are based on an issue to. They are only liberal because the status quo is masculine in nature. Though feminists are not one organization like the ACLU, so it's hard to explain them as a monolith. Some feminists from the 70s probably support the status quo now.
On individual issues I tend to side with the ACLU and "liberal feminists" (as opposed to "socialist" or the pinnacle of insanity "radical feminists"). That is because I think that the issues would be resolved to my ideological liking if they got their way. There is no point in reforming what you don't feel needs reform. It's only when saying everything is fine or some issues need to go backward that you become conservative.

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