Koan, just to complicate matters, when you talk Canada you need to differentiate between Liberals and liberals.
The federal Liberal Party -- aka the Natural Governing Party -- is in power most of the time because they are centrists who poach the most popular ideas from the parties to the left and right of them. (This matches the strain of "liberal" that means free from ideology.)
The Canadian federal Conservative Party, currently in charge of a minority government, are far to the left of all but a few of your Democrats on most issues except for certain economic policies. Of course, the entire US political mainstream, which ranges all the way from the Democratic branch of the governing party to its Republican branch, would be way out to the right end of the political spectrum in every other advanced liberal democracy.
(Then there are also provincial Liberal parties, some of which are more to the right and some more to the left, but we won't get into that...)
And here's where it gets really confusing. A liberal democracy is one where all of its citizens have the right to the due process of law, upheld by the government. And in the context of political science and history, "liberal" means in favour of this, which is why what you call neo-cons are in fact neo-liberals.
And to complicate it still further, there's that other meaning of conservative -- wanting things to stay the same, or at least as they were in some perhaps-imagined past. This means a conservative can be in favour of liberal policies (using any of the flavours of liberal I outlines).
These kind of subtleties -- although they are not really that subtle, just a matter of thinking through one's ideological assumptions -- are the kind of thing most detested by the bully pulpit right-wing thunderers and shouters who unfortunately currently dominate American political discourse.
LC |
