A Social Studies teacher I had in high school once explained the difference between conservatives and progressives as follows:

The progressive is responsible for the bulk of important social progress, while the conservative acts like the tail of a kite, preventing progress from occurring too fast and spinning out of control.

The teacher's analogy was intended to make his students believe that leftism is the motor by which society is driven forward while conservatism acts only to brake and stabilize this. Thanks in part to the promulgation of this notion by activists like that teacher, people calling themselves liberals started at some point to claim credit for all progress, and the public tacitly allowed them to get away with this claim.

Paralleling this, Republicans seem gradually to have bought this notion over the last few years and fallen into a pattern established by it: initially holding the line on spending, the sacrifice of human rights to security, government-sponsored social experimentation and the drift toward socialism, but inevitably yielding eventually to the liberals, as though conceding that liberal ideology, while essentially correct, needed only to be delayed until its time had come.

But what everyone, on both the left and right, was calling liberalism was slowly drifting, almost imperceptibly, from classic liberalism toward an increasingly strict and rigid caste system where people were either allotted privileges (loosely called Arights@) or denied their basic human rights on the basis of attributes over which they had no control, such as sex and race, and this based on arguments no more or less valid than those posited by Chairman Mao and the Red Guard in the Great Chinese Cultural Revolution. For example, higher privilege was claimed in China in the 1970s on the basis of humble birth, ie, peasant status, ostensibly to balance out past inequities, injustice and hardships suffered by poor peasants, while basic rights were broadly denied groups perceived as responsible for the plight of the poor and hence for all social ills. These Aculprit@ groups included former landlords, the rich in general or the former rich and their descendants, old-regime officials or military personnel and their descendants, and later, almost all politically unconnected intellectuals, who, it was asserted, had indirectly gouged their tuition out of the backs of the poor. People fortunate enough to belong to the peasantry were largely spared the brunt of the brutal pogromsBpublic beatings, banishments and incarcerationsBthat swept the country. Their children were given scholarships and they received government aid in a scheme best described as affirmative action. As the anti-intellectual movement spiraled, an alarming number of doctors were jailed and in many areas there were no longer enough physicians left to staff hospitals. Mao essentially ignored the resulting critical public health problems and focused on the woefully inadequate Chinese herbal medicine to resolve almost all medical issues. True progress was impossible because many engineers and other technical experts who could have helped lead economically were in jail. People began dying of malnutrition. Although this desperate situation was said to represent social progress, in fact it essentially destroyed the country. Yet it was politically incorrect to even hint that this was so. Revisionists, capitalist running dogs and other scapegoat groups were the imaginary enemy invented to cover up the general failure of Maoism itself.

Applying a variant of this same ideology to today=s America, we have gender and racial quota advocates insisting that affirmative action represents progress because it helps Abalance@ past inequities, injustices, the rich-poor gradient and so on.

But our reality is becoming increasing similar to what happened under Mao in the 70s. (A glance at history should have revealed this lesson up front, but instead we are learning it again the hard way.) At that time, wealth was effectively redistributed, no additional wealth was generated, and in fact, existing wealth was squandered to the point of general impoverishment.

Further, despite the application of the term Acommunism@ to this system, there was no longer any attempt to focus on helping the poor per se, as prescribed by the founders of that system. By the end of the 70s, the disenfranchised classes, still grotesquely branded and generally perceived as Aprivileged,@ were in fact much poorer than the peasants who had benefitted from Mao=s affirmative action. Many of the disenfranchised died of starvation or malnutrition in jails and labor camps.

Likewise, we now see a similar pattern in America that can best be illustrated by an example:

A poor man with a wife and four children living under his roofBone of his own and three from his wife=s former marriage with a man who left her a widowBand a child support obligation from a former marriage finds himself laid off by downsizing. He is promptly displaced from a job opening by a middle-class female with a similar or slightly lower skill level who is hired to fill a government-imposed female quota. This female lives with her parents, has no dependents, is not needy, yet in today=s system, has a priority right to this job (privilege) under the vague and sophistic justification that she belongs to an underdog group, women. As in Mao=s China, the individual is no longer considered in deciding his/her fate, only the group to which he/she belongs.

The low-income male mentioned above is then similarly displaced from a series of jobs by females of this class and consequently winds up unemployed for months. Meanwhile, because men are practically the only sex held responsible for child support, again, essentially because of their group (gender), and because this man was uninformed about the law and could not afford an attorney to appeal his child support amountBor in other words, and note this well: because of his impoverished conditionB he eventually goes to jail for non-support, forcing his second wife and children into utter abject poverty from which there is no hope of recovery.

In this way, even the second wife and her children are hurt by a system ostensibly designed to help women as a group. As in Mao=s China, the whole of American society does not benefit but in fact suffers, including the Aprotected@ group itself. And as in Mao=s China, it is politically incorrect to suggest that the man is poor or that he and his family are victims of the political system. Because he is a father and divorced, he fits only one authorized template: that of the deadbeat dad, who can only be seen as a culprit.

Microtragedies like this, played out daily in varying degrees of severity in thousands of homes across the country, happen partly because conservatives, who initially opposed affirmative action, wound up caving in because they had fallen for two myths: 1) that their role was simply to act as the tail of the kite, slowing down runaway progress, rather than to protect individual rights, and 2) that affirmative action represented progress for the whole of society because it Abalances@ out past perceived, sophistically defined, inequities.

How was the conservative duped in this way?

I believe the answer lies in the fact that his ideological base was flawed from the start. Extreme conservatism at its worst was just a mindless acceptance of the status quo simply because it was there.

For example, some conservative legislators once supported blatantly racist legislation because they perceived white people as the rightful leaders of mankind. Further, they truly believed blacks were mischievous at heart and needed white control. Some further believed, on Biblical grounds, that the Asons of Ham@ were born to serve. But because racism was eventually seen generally as morally untenable, rejecting racism made liberalism look good. In fact, liberalism per se was good C when it was still liberalism.

But the bulk of society was a victim of a bait and switch scheme. Genuine liberalism, ie, classic liberalism, had been supplanted by what could properly be called pseudoliberalism or neoliberalism. The group touting itself as Aliberal@ today is little more than a special interest group. Like communism in Mao=s China, it no longer lives up to its name. The above example of the poor male head of household, displaced occupationally by middle-class women due to public policy and incarcerated as an indirect result, illustrates that neoliberalism is not for the underdog but rather for a large politically correct group of voters posing as helpless and needy but in fact wielding formidable political power C very much like the Red Guard of Mao=s China, where communist ideology was corrupted by focus on class rather than individual differences, skills, contributions, culpability or innocence, and degree of need.

Here as well, ideology is hopelessly corrupted in the same way by the myth of male power and white European power.

Left out of the picture altogether was the classic liberal who saw through these myths. As a voter group, he was unorganized and almost negligible politically, despite the weighty authority of his intellectual undergirdings.

Liberalism was no longer what it purported to be. As for conservatism, it was based on non-change or deceleration of change - even change aimed at combating real inequities such as those engendered by racism, graft, narrow theocratic ideology, ethnocentrism, etc - rather than on actively fighting for human rights. By contrast, classic liberals have no interest in maintaining the status quo or of changing except as change can reasonably be expected to give positive results. The classic liberal can mimic both conservatism and liberalism at times because the latter two groups both have justifiable agenda portions which he freely accepts or rejects as he deems appropriate. In fact, the fundamental difference between classic liberalism and the prevailing ideology lies in the underlying motivation. The classic liberal is motivated more by a desire for a better society than by ideology and hence will unflinchingly weigh any reasonable approach to solving societal, economic and political problems.

But even among so-called Aclassic liberals@, a major dichotomy emerges on close scrutiny:

We find, on the one hand, a classic liberal who seems fixated on pure theory, or ideology. A visit to one of the Libertarian websites or newsgroups quickly reveals this mindset. There is a trend among many libertarians to hold to their philosophy for its own sake. Rather than contemplate solutions to problems they seem content to congratulate themselves. In this they resemble the extreme conservatives and extreme liberals, or more correctly, neoliberals.

The other group, the more-or-less pure classic liberals, are willing to accept the idea that all ideas need preliminary testing before they are applied to the society.

The extreme libertarian will generally insist that narcotic drug use should be legalized on Constitutional (ie, ideological) grounds, or in other words, on principle, but the more pragmatic classic liberal, while acknowledging the hopelessness of the drug war, will be inclined to await testing of how legalization actually impacts various aspects of society and culture before accepting or rejecting it. He may, for example, want to study the Dutch experiment with its tolerance of legalized euphoric drugs, perhaps taking an exploratory trip to Holland, visiting the bars where drugs are served up in semi-legal fashion and interviewing critics of the scheme. If the results of the Dutch experiment seem unclear or point to failure, this pragmatic liberal will be willing to back off from the original demand for legalization if need be, regardless of the ideology behind it.

If the ideology-driven libertarian group comes into power, however, I believe many libertarian activists can be expected to do essentially what today=s Aliberals@ do, ie, justifying the unjustifiable by manipulating language, using Aristotelian logic, slanting news, adopting a Amore intellectual than thou@ attitude, skewing statistics and outshouting reasonable peopleC telltale signs of an incomplete grasp of the complexities of the ideology and its application to reality.

This would be a rerun of the Great American Cultural Revolution that started in the 60s and continues to this day.

Whatever the outlook might be for the next millennium, we are still largely in thrall to one of humanity=s many isms, a philosophy called liberalism, whose main failing C like that of communism C seems to be its inability to live up to its name, ie, to actually materialize.

Americans always look awkward at best in their isms. They seem uncomfortable and unnecessarily angry when discussing the environment, urban sprawl, social justice, women, global issues, animal rights, race, etc, and their arguments are often Aristotelean.

However, before we began flirting with socialism and globalism under Woodrow Wilson and FDR and before we later embarked on the experiment with the liberalism that never quite was, there was an ism for which Americans showed a remarkable affinity, an ism that we imbibed with our mothers= milk, an ism that Americans readily understood, if not intellectually then intuitively, and that was optimism, a belief in what we are doing, in our country and in the future of ourselves and our families. Although there seems to be a shortage of this ism nowadays, it was always the real Americanism, and it fit us like a glove. And if optimism has taken a back seat in our thirty-year social experimentation since the early 60s, early signs of a turning away from a corrupted ideology in the latter 90s seem to offer hope for the third millennium. Indeed, a series of key surveys have shown that Americans are rapidly moving toward a new conservatism. If this neoconservatism can keep the positive lessons of liberalismBparticularly the heightened sensitivity for different others, the concern for the environment and the admiration for different cultures as taught by that ideologyBwhile tempering itself with a healthy dose of rugged individualism and a respect for individual freedom and the free marketBand if it can be kept relatively free of the detritus of provincialism that plagued conservatism in the past, as well as the progressive ideological sclerosis that plagues virtually all isms, and in particular, if it can be subject to the rigor of classic liberal thinking and practice, I believe the start of the third millennium could introduce a golden age of justified optimism, the true American ism.