Differentiate between the ideas of liberal radical and conservatives
Answers
Answer: First, I am, going to assume that this isn’t a US-centric question, because US conservatives, as a current political group, carry a lot of different ideologies. Same with current US liberals.
I will use the following more universal, philosophical definitions that I’ve defined for myself:
Conservatives: Conservatives believe in, as the name implies, conservation. They believe in small, practical changes, if any at all. They weigh in heavily on traditions and legacy as far as social structures are concerned. They are suspicious of big changes and big ideas. (Some add property rights, inequality-as-inevitable and law-and-order aspects, but honestly there are other philosophies that have those, so I don’t consider them really identifying.) The word arose after the French Revolution, with people wanting to roll back the sheer amount of change occurring.
Liberals: Liberals believe in liberty and equality. It’s important to remember, liberalism as a philosophy started in the Enlightenment, and sought liberty from oppressive monarchy and equality so that no other monarch could come back in. It’s the philosophy of the French and American Revolutions.
As ideologies they are orthogonal and non-overlapping.
Now, Radicalism can mean many things, but in our case, the two meanings that matter are: 1. relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something; far-reaching or thorough, or 2. characterized by departure from tradition.
In the US, we seem to be more often using the second definition, but please note it’s not the only one. We can have radical conservatives (far-reaching and thorough lack of support for change on any institution whatsoever) and radical liberals (wanting to change so many things that it approaches anarchy). And, given that it’s an adjective that would be applied to ideology, we can have radicals in other ones too.r:
Explanation: