- The term “liberal” has lost its original meaning
- Instead of representing progressives or Democrats favoring big government, the term is a reference to liberty
- Properly understood, liberalism and conservatism are mutually reinforcing
I grew up a Rush Baby. Some of my earliest political memories come not from school or textbooks but from Rush Limbaugh’s unmistakable voice filling our car. I subscribed to “The Limbaugh Letter” when I was nine years old, and somewhere in my family’s house, there are still VHS tapes from when we recorded his television show.
For a kid in the 1980s and 1990s, “Rush” wasn’t just commentary; he was the background music of the American Right. And through him, I learned a particular vocabulary. Chief among those terms was “liberal,” a word he used constantly as shorthand for the left wing of American politics.
To a generation of conservatives, including me, “liberal” meant big government, high taxes, bureaucratic bloat, and top-down social experimentation. It was a label applied to political opponents, not a philosophy. But as I’ve grown older, and as the political landscape has changed, I’ve come to realize that this casual use of “liberal” wasn’t just historically inaccurate — it shaped the way conservatives understood themselves.
Yet, Limbaugh used the term for those who overapplied the power of government, like someone who drenches barbecue in sauce until the flavor is lost. It was excess, not etymology, that he was interested in.
The lost vocabulary of freedom
Unfortunately, that rhetorical shorthand left the conservative movement without the language to explain what we believe. That conceptual loss is not just a linguistic problem — it affects how we understand the philosophical foundations of the American experiment. It trained us to think of “liberal” as big-government overreach rather than as the philosophical tradition rooted in freedom.
The word “liberal” comes from the Latin līber, meaning “free.” The original meaning of “liberal” was tied directly to liberty, not bureaucracy, and to the condition of free people, not to the expansion of state power. In forgetting this, we also forgot that many of the principles we cherish on the Right — individual rights, free speech, limited government, religious liberty, the rule of law — are not merely conservative impulses, but the core commitments of the liberal tradition from which our nation was born.
Individual rights, free speech, limited government, religious liberty, the rule of law — they are not merely conservative impulses, but the core commitments of the liberal tradition from which our nation was born
As James Madison argued in Federalist No. 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. … In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” The Founders understood that liberty requires both empowerment and restraint. Government must be strong enough to secure rights, yet limited enough to prevent domination. That insight sits at the heart of the classical liberal tradition: freedom protected by constitutional structure, not granted by the good will of rulers.
American political discourse suffers from a deep conceptual confusion that distorts debates and obscures the true stakes of our moment. The terms “liberal” and “conservative,” which should help us understand philosophical commitments and political tendencies, have instead become rhetorical weapons and tribal markers. These distinctions matter profoundly for any serious effort to articulate our first principles.
The American conflation of “liberal” with the progressive Left and “conservative” with the entire political Right has left us unable clearly to identify what we are conserving, what we are reforming, and what we are rejecting. The result is a political culture in which both the Left and the Right flirt with illiberalism without even recognizing it, because those terms no longer illuminate.
To restore clarity, we must begin with a simple assertion: Liberalism is not the opposite of conservatism. Nor is conservatism the opposite of liberalism. They are not two ends of a single spectrum. They operate on different axes altogether.
Liberalism is a political philosophy rooted in liberty, constitutionalism, and the dignity of the individual. Conservatism is a disposition toward political life grounded in prudence, continuity, and respect for inherited institutions. When understood correctly, the two should be mutually reinforcing — and have often been so throughout the history of the English-speaking world. The United States is a nation founded on liberal principles and maintained by conservative temperament. To conserve American institutions is, almost by definition, to conserve a liberal political order.
The drift toward illiberalism
Yet the American Right lost hold of this truth during the late twentieth century. For those who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s — raised on talk radio, Reaganism, and the cultural battles of the era — the word “liberal” served not as a philosophical category but as a pejorative label for big government, social engineering, and elitist paternalism. “Liberal” meant “leftist,” “progressive,” or simply “Democrat.”
This shorthand, popularized across talk-radio conservatism, was rhetorically effective but intellectually costly. It was a branding victory for conservatives but also an intellectual defeat, because it ceded the term “liberal” entirely to the Left. Progressives, for their part, adopted the label even as they increasingly diverged from the principles that historically defined liberalism.
This linguistic victory for talk-radio conservatism did more damage than anyone realized. By abandoning the word “liberal,” American conservatives disconnected themselves from their own philosophical roots. The principles the Right claimed to champion — limited government, freedom of speech, religious liberty, economic freedom, free inquiry, constitutional restraint, and pluralism — are not merely conservative positions; they are liberal foundations.
The Founders were classical liberals. Alexis de Tocqueville’s study of America is an examination of a liberal democracy. Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, and even President Ronald Reagan identified their core commitments as liberal in the classical sense. American conservatism, at its best, has always been about conserving the liberal order.
Abandoning the term “liberal” left a political and intellectual vacuum that we see today in the rise of “post-liberal” movements on the American Right. These factions — national conservatives, who advocate a strong state to enforce cultural cohesion and economic nationalism; Catholic integralists, who seek a political order explicitly subordinated to Church teaching; and various populist reactionaries — insist that liberalism has failed and that America must turn away from individual liberty and constitutional pluralism. Yet their proposed alternatives revive political forms that liberalism originally emerged to correct.
This is why the term “post-liberalism” is misleading. Its “post-ness” suggests innovation, evolution, or transcendence of an exhausted paradigm. But in substance, post-liberals recycle moral and political frameworks rooted in eras of centralized authority, enforced cultural uniformity, and hierarchical social control.
These prior systems were not abandoned by accident. They were abandoned because they proved unable to manage pluralism, dissent, economic dynamism, or basic political stability. Liberalism emerged not from philosophical abstraction, but from historical necessity. No other system succeeded in managing persistent differences while preserving social peace.
Liberalism’s critics today accuse it of producing atomization, loneliness, cultural fragmentation, and spiritual exhaustion. And the critiques are not entirely wrong. Liberal societies do suffer from real tensions — yet those tensions stem not from liberalism’s failure, but from its nature.
Liberalism is not a utopian blueprint promising harmony; it is a political architecture designed to manage disagreement without violence. It keeps the peace not by enforcing unity but by preserving freedom. Its institutions — constitutional checks and balances, federalism, free expression, religious liberty, voluntary associations, and free markets — are instruments of purposeful friction. They ensure that no single individual or group can dominate others. That friction is often uncomfortable, but it is the price of a free society.
Reclaiming a liberal conservatism
Yet because American conservatives surrendered the language of liberalism, they lack the vocabulary to defend this system against both left-wing and right-wing threats. The progressive Left of 2025 is openly illiberal in its willingness to regulate speech through bureaucratic coercion (campus speech codes, “misinformation” boards, or compelled ideological trainings) and increasingly uses the tax and trade systems as instruments of political conformity (punitive surtaxes on disfavored industries like oil and tobacco). Meanwhile, the post-liberal Right rejects pluralism, celebrates centralized power, and advances illiberal proposals of its own, from using tax penalties to punish companies for political expression to calling for sweeping tariff regimes designed to enforce cultural objectives rather than economic interests. Both movements represent a departure from the classical liberalism that has long defined the American constitutional order.
This is why conservatives should reclaim the term “liberal.” Not as a rebranding exercise, but as an act of intellectual honesty. Conservatism without liberalism risks sliding into reactionary tribalism. Liberalism without conservatism drifts toward rootless abstraction. Both are needed to produce the features of a healthy republic: principles of liberty grounded in respect for enduring institutions, ordered freedom as opposed to unrestrained autonomy, and constitutional restraint informed by civic virtue. These are not contradictory ideas — they are complementary ones.
Reclaiming the term “liberal” would allow conservatives to make a clearer case for what we stand for: the defense of individual rights, freedom of conscience, constitutional governance, free expression, and a society where different beliefs and ways of life can coexist. It would sharpen the distinctions between true liberal democracy and its illiberal challengers. And it would reconnect American conservatism with the deeper tradition it has been stewarding all along.
The United States does not need a new ideology. It needs clarity about the one it already possesses. Liberalism is not the opposite of conservatism. As John Locke wrote, “[T]he end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.”
Liberalism is what American conservatives have always been conserving. And in an era when illiberal movements threaten liberty from both sides, reclaiming that truth is not merely an academic exercise — it is a civic imperative.
