What makes a person a "liberal" or "conservative"?

Words mean things.

I know I sound like a broken record here (because I say this a lot), but that's what this is really about.

"Conservatives" as a concept is about maintaining the status quo. To conserve, to maintain, to avoid change.

"Liberals" are the anti-thesis to that. The term itself is often a misnomer, as it is not applied universally.

President Reagan made "Liberal" a dirty word. What he was actually referring to was "Progressives" or people wanting to change policy.

Some policies need to be changed. Some policies are downright stupid. Other policies are good, and should be maintained.

Using the term "Conservative" or "Liberal" as an attack, is a logical fallacy, specifically known as the Ad Hominem attack (to the man). This fallacy doesn't work, because it avoids the actual issue, and goes after the speaker.

Self Identifying as a Conservative or a Liberal just means that an individual likes a specific "party platter of goods" more than another one. Believe it or not, the two sides agree on more than they disagree. Generally the disagreement is not on the goal, just on the method.

As an example. Neither side wants to see People die in the streets. The "Liberal" side often (not always) states that the Government is the best means of avoiding that. The "Conservative" side says that the Individual (and by extension the Free Market) is the best means of avoiding that. Goal is same, approach is different.

Now, what happens is that individuals are all different. We all have our key issues. Some of us have issues that are so important to us that it will sway us onto a specific "party platter of goods" like the Gun Control or Birth Control (single voter issues). When that happens, you becomes associated with one side or the other (as a form of attack, rather than as self identification).

My grandmother raised me and when I was 10yrs old, she told me two things that I still hold to this day.... One day I was being lazy and she pulled me by the arm and said to me... Your neighbors were not put next to you to put food on your table and the government was not created to put money in your pocket. As I grew up I began to realize what she meant by those two statements. Those words got me to work for wages at age 10. To this day, I work hard for everything I have. I never let anybody's perception of me deter me from achieving my goal. I may fail, I may succeed but I will continue to work hard to achieve my goals. I will credit my success to those who helped me achieve them, but I will not blame anyone for my failures. I guess the opposite of that would be liberalism. I maybe wrong, but when you see every liberal blame everyone else for his or her failures and credit himself or herself for every success, you can only make that conclusion. Now, to answer your question... conservatives believes that achievements comes with individual effort not the government. Conservatives believes all obstacles can be overcome. Liberals believe that government is there to remove all obstacles so you do not need to work hard to achieve anything. If you fail, the government is there to pull you up and if you can't get up it will do it for you. Bad thing about that is... human nature tends to take the easy way out. If we all take the easy way out, we would never rise if we all face a big obstacle because no one has learned to overcome it.

To say that the political dividing line is made up of "liberals" and "conservatives" over-simplifies the *political* nature of the question. Ideologically, people are grouped into multiple significant groups: conservative, liberal, progressive, socialist, libertarian, etc. People bandy about the terms "liberal" and "conservative" so much, and usually as a means of attacking people of an opposing ideology, that what they ACTUALLY mean has been largely perverted. This is a largely Progressive tactic; in their view, the ends always justifies the means, so intentionally obfuscating actual meanings is a perfectly legitimate way to accomplish a goal. "Honest" debate is avoided as often as possible. Progressives seem to have perfected the skill in the US, but the other ideological factions have made frequent use of it, as well.

"Talking points" are an excellent example of this theory in action. Politicians will simply parrot the same lines, in roughly the same language, over and over again even when what they are saying is patently untrue. The political parties spend a great deal of money on psychology and social engineering expertise for the purpose of developing talking points, with the core expectation being that, if the public hears something often enough, from the people they SHOULD be able to trust, and reported by organizations who have an ethical mandate, they will eventually come to accept it, if not actually believe it themselves.

On that note: I wholeheartedly agree with Sgt Aaron Kennedy about the idea that "words matter." I object to the statement that ad hominem attacks are ineffective in any political discourse: they are the very thing that all political campaigns now depend on to sway public opinion. I would agree if he had said that ad hominem attacks are generally completely irrelevant, but relevance was left behind by politicians a long time ago. I suspect that was what he meant, so I will leave that there.

As for my personal view of "liberal v. Conservative," I think there is a very simple way to differentiate between the views.

Ideologically, conservatives believe in Constitutional primacy, limited government, and free-market economic policy. Morally, conservatives believe in th e