April 27, 2004 - Am I a Liberal? Are you a Conservative? We don those labels like armor or hurl them like spears as we join in political battles but their meanings are puzzling. Just what is it that I am being liberal with? Just what is it that you are trying to conserve? It is, as the King said to Anna, “a puzzlement.”

For a decade the national purse strings have been in the uninterrupted control of the self proclaimed Conservatives of the Republican Majority in the House of Representatives. Today those same Conservatives have exclusive control of all three branches of the Federal Government. We would have expected that the result would have been that government had shrunk; that government would be operating at a modest budget surplus; and that the National Debt would be in the process of being retired. Those are, after all, values that have been at the core of Republican fiscal dogma for generations.

We would have expected the new Conservative hold on the reins of government to have ushered in a retraction of the United States role in the wider world. For decades the Republican Party had decried what it called Liberal Internationalism and America’s commitments to the defense of our allies following WWII and Korea. We aren’t the world’s policemen was their mantra as generation after generation of Republican candidates – including George W. Bush – called for us to bring the troops home from Europe and Asia.

We would have expected less government intrusion into our day to day lives. Preaching the doctrine of individual responsibility and individual freedom candidate after candidate waved the elephantine banner to lead the charge against Liberal Big Brother government promising to get government out and let us live. That was Conservative doctrine.

Deficit spending, government intruding into our homes, soldiers dying on foreign shores – those were the specters of Liberal activism and not the centerpieces of Conservative policy. It is indeed, in this new American century, a puzzlement.