What’s the Difference Between Liberals and Conservatives?
Posted: August 26, 2015 | By: Dennis Goldford
Tagged: About the Caucuses
By Dennis J. Goldford, Harkin Institute Flansburg Fellow Professor of Political Science, Drake University Introduction Political candidates, talk-radio hosts and guests, cable-TV commentators, and many others are always saying that so-and-so is a liberal or “radical liberal,” or that so-and-so is a conservative or “hardline conservative.” Despite the frequency with which we read and hear these terms, their precise meanings continue to be difficult to track. Indeed, NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, August 2, 2015 played a video of Chris Matthews on Hardball unsuccessfully asking Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to answer the question, “What’s the difference between a Democrat and a socialist?” And at the Republican candidate forum in New Hampshire on Monday, August 3, 2015, Bobby Jindal stated, “Look, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the other Democrats in DC, they’re for socialism.” In this post and the next two, I will provide some clarity about the core meanings of American liberalism and conservatism. (There are somewhat different meanings of these terms in European politics, but I won’t explore those here.). Perhaps what is most important to keep in mind, despite political rhetoric and polemics to the contrary, is that liberalism is not socialism and conservatism is […]