> For the benefit of us non-American readers out here... What on earth is a Republican "conservative" actually supposed to stand for and represent?
>
> Traditionally and historically, that is. Judging from Sam and MarkN (and Dave P)'s comments, an American "conservative" is a traditionalist who wants to retain the status quo and yet, paradoxically, also wants fewer restrictions and more personal freedoms.

That's because earlier this century, the liberals won. :-) Conservatives never changed their views about government, but they went from wanting to keep things the way they were to wanting them to go back the way they once were. As a result, the labels "conservative" and "liberal" are not particularly attached to their original meanings anymore. In fact, on the "conservative" side there is a split between the "freedom right" (me), which advocates smaller government and a return to fewer restrictions on personal freedoms, and the "religious right," whose ultimate goal is, if not actually a theocracy, something approaching the legislation of morality, which is in direct opposition to the agenda of the "freedom right." (Views on censorship is where these two "right" groups most often clash.) I'm a Christian, and I'm "right"-oriented, but I'm not a member of the religious right.

Actually, I say the liberals won, but that's not entirely true. Liberals don't really want status quo, either -- they want the government to be *more* liberal, usually. U.S. liberals tend to be proponents of government being more heavily involved in things like welfare, employee treatment (regulations on hours, breaks, minimum wage hikes, etc), social security, affirmative action, etc. Many of these things are good and even necessary to an extent, and conservatives are not often outright against ANY involvement of government in these things, but liberals tend to want to have the government take a far more active role in these sorts of things. The reason I'm not liberal is because most of their political agendas seem to have a logical end in socialism and/or in a society in which people are free of responsibility for their own actions.

Then there are moral issues like capital punishment and abortion, and I'm not sure why my side of those issues also tends to fall in line with the conservative side of the liberal/conservative split -- but it makes it convenient. (For the record, conservatives are generally pro-life and support the death penalty; liberals are generally pro-choice and do not support the death penalty -- yet there are exceptions on both sides, more so with capital punishment than with abortion.)

Still, one of the worst mistakes people can make about issues like this is to assume wrongfully that there are only two basic sides to each of them. So in that respect it's kind of annoying that we have a bipolar perception about political stances. I frequently find myself at odds with other conservatives (the religious right, for example; MarkN as a notable recent example), and if one goes into these debates with a simplified mindset about what sides exist to take, it has the ironic effect of complicating and confusing things. For example, some people see the advocation of moral legislation of some conservative camps and choose, therefore, to be liberal, when in fact the "freedom right" camp might be more in line with their personal views.