(sorry, flubbed some coding there, please disregard previous post. gotta preview! corrected post:)
To really understand what “liberalism” is, I guess we have to try to understand what “conservatism” is – which is why I posted the above quote from Mickelthwait and Wooldridge’s book. That passage is a pretty good summation of the main stream of current Republican thought, and the Bush Administration, which is dominated at the moment by big-business conservatism and foreign-policy neoconservatism. But it leaves out, or glosses over, several other forms of modern conservatism:
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Radical libertarianism: Libertarians are “distrustful of the state,” but their “patriotism” is limited by their distrust of the state in all its aspects, including the defense establishment and the military-industrial complex. I don’t think the Libertarian Party (http://www.lp.org/) supports America’s current interventions in the Middle East. This way of thinking is arguable “conservative” but definitely marginal with respect to the modern conservative movement. Libertarians would agree with Republicans at leat with respect to favoring free trade, open borders, and globalization.
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Religious-social conservatism: Best represented, at the moment, by the Constitution Party (http://www.constitution-party.net/) (formerly the U.S. Taxpayers Party), and the Christian Coalition. The Religious Right is “distrustful of the state” when it does not serve their moral and social agenda, but they would welcome state action to, say, ban abortion, or re-criminalize sodomy. They also generally favor military intervention in the Middle East because they regard it as something like a crusade. And the more extreme members of this movement actually believe we are living in the End Times, and thus America must defend Israel, so Israel can play its appointed role in the working out of Biblical prophecy. (I’m not making this up, I can provide cites if you want.) This group does have a lot of influence in the Republican Party, but not as much as they think they deserve – not one Republican president has actually pushed hard to ban abortion, ban teaching of evolution, or revive school prayer. They also differ from the Republican core in that most of their supporters are middle-class or working-class Christians who do not necessarily agree that whatever is good for the corporations is good for the country.
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Paleoconservatism, or nativist-isolationist-populist conservatism: This kind of “conservatism” is definitely marginal from mainstream Republican conservatism, and openly and fiercely hostile to it. Best represented, at the moment, by Pat Buchanan and his new America First Party (http://www.americafirstparty.org/); and his educational organization, The American Cause (The American Cause: About The Cause); and his new weekly magazine, The American Conservative (http://www.amconmag.com/) – which you’ll now find on the stands in every Borders and every Barnes & Noble. These populists are anti-corporate and anti-elitist – they’re not socialists by any means, but they are as hostile to Wall Street as they are to Washington. They are opposed to “free trade,” NAFTA and the WTO, for economic reasons – globalization means working-class Americans’ jobs getting outsourced abroad. They even want the U.S. to pull out of the United Nations. They agree with the Religious Right on many points, but definitely not on militiary policy. The paleoconservatives are not exactly pacifists but they are definitely isolationists. Buchanan has even written a book, A Republic, Not an Empire, arguing that the U.S. should have stayed out of the European theater in WWII and let Hitler do his thing. This does not endear him to Jews; neither does his hostility to our policy of backing up Israel. Another difference is that the Religious Right’s core is essentially Southern Evangelical Protestant, while Buchanan’s movement has more appeal to working-class Roman Catholics like himself. The paleocons are also hostile to immigration – ostensibly for economic and cultural reasons, but there do appear to be some racist elements in their thinking. In fact, there is some overlap between this kind of right-populism and Aryan-Nation-style white-supremacist racism; but the defining characteristics of the movements are rather different, and Buchanan’s movement probably would be open to blacks (so long as they were born in this country) and to Jews (so long as they are not Zionists).
I have gone on at some length about these marginal-conservative groupings for two reasons: They help us to understand “conservatism,” and to understand it is not a monolithic thing. And some of them offer the possiblity of occasional, issue-specific, strategic alliances with leftists! Stange bedfellows, you know?
In fact, the June 21, 2004 issue of The American Conservative carries an interview of Ralph Nader by Pat Buchanan. Now, when you put America’s leading left-progressive maverick in the same room with America’s leading right-wing nativist-isolationist-populist, you might expect to see blood on the floor. But in fact the two of them seem to have hit it off – more or less – and the interview was published to float the idea that real conservatives might want to consider voting for Nader instead of Bush this year. That would be a switch! Nader siphoning off votes from the Republican!
Here’s a link to the interview:
http://www.amconmag.com/2004_06_21/cover.html
We learn that RN and PB feel much the same way about NAFTA, WTO, the Iraq War, American support for Israel, the big bad establishments in Washington and on Wall Street, and several other things.
There is, of course, one more marginal stream of American conservatism: Outright white-supremacist racism – the Klan, the American Nazis, the Aryan Nation, the militias, etc. But I don’t think this movement, as such, is politically significant enough any more to merit much discussion. Those white Southerners who in an earlier generation might have supported the Klan are in this day and age more likely to support the Constitution Party or the America First Party (or even the Republican Party), parties which might be indifferent to racial injustice, but whose core values and goals have nothing to do with reviving segregation.
And there is one more American political tradition that merits discussion here, although whether it can even be classified as “conservative” is debatable: The tradition that used to be called “progressivism.” (I guess it needs a new name now, because the label “progressive” has been appropriated by left-liberals and nobody seems to dispute their claim to it. But for purposes of this post I will use the term “progressive” in its original sense.) This the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party and the old Progressive Party and “Fighting Bob” LaFollette of Wisconsin. It was originally an upper-class and middle-class movement for “good government,” defined in professionalized, technocratic terms that purported to transcend ideology and class interests – a Progressive motto was, “There is no Democratic or Republican way to pave a street.” Nonpartisan municipal elections and the city-manager form of government are Progressive legacies. One thing Progressives have in common with mainstream conservatives is a concern with fiscal responsibility and a fear of budget deficits; Progressives aren’t hostile to vigorous government but they want it to be clean, honest, transparent, efficient, and no profligate. The best representative of the Progressive tradition in American politics is probably John Anderson, who mounted an independent presidential campaign in 1980 and was one of the founding leaders of the Reform Party.
One reason the Reform Party did not last, I think (apart from Ross Perot’s control-freak megalomania and his refusal to let the party evolve into anything more than a vehicle for his candidacies), is that its ideology always was incoherent – because the party was essentially a coalition of Progressives with Buchanan-style paleoconservative Populists, and there was only so long they could go on working together. When it broke up, the Populist wing went off with Buchanan to form the America First Party, and the Progressive wing, including John Anderson, formed Jesse Ventura’s Independence Party (http://www.mnip.org/) (which has become prominent in Minnesota politics but has had little organizing success in other states).
Meanwhile, the remnant of the original Reform Party organization (http://www.reformparty.org/cgi-bin/hcgmain.cgi) is now running Ralph Nader, of all people, for president! 
Strange bedfellows, you know?
), one of the remaining issues for liberals in America, as Sam Stone points out, is socialized medicine. Old people are the major consumers of health care. Therefore, as the population ages, to counter-act the swing towards conservatism will be the desire to keep and expand government funding for health care. Therefore you get a “compassionate conservative” administration who gets a major increase in Medicare funding for prescription drugs.