On the Left:

The first view is extracted from: Guy Molyneux, "Conservative? Americans Don't Know the Meaning of the Word," Los Angeles Times, August 16, 1992, M2, 6. Molyneux is the president of the Next American Foundation, an educational organization founded by Michael Harrington.

... The Republicans are not really a conservative party. Indeed we might say of American conservatism, as Mohandas K. Gandhi said of Western civilization -- "It would be a good idea."

True conservatism is a philosophy committed to conserving -- conserving families, communities and nation in the face of change. Committed to preserving fundamental values, such as accountability, civic duty and the rule of law. And committed to a strong government to realize these ends. What passes for conservatism in America today bears only a passing resemblance to this true conservatism. It worships at the twin altars of free enterprise and weak government --- two decidedly unconservative notions.

...In America, then, what we call conservatism is really classical liberalism: a love of the market, and hatred of government. Adam Smith, after all was a liberal, not a conservative. As the economist Gunnar Myrdal once noted: "American is conservative ... but the principals conserved are liberal.

On the Right:

The second view is by Mickey Edwards, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma, who teaches at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and is a self-confessed conservative. The article from which this excerpt is taken was prompted by Edwards' participation as a teacher in the prestigious Salzburg Seminar. The topic of this seminar was a study of conservative political movements in Western industrialized nations. From "A conservative by Any Other Name Is Liberal," Los Angeles Times, November 19, 1996, B7.

... As the session went on, I realized I was learning more than I was teaching.

I was speaking of the American conservative's quest for federal restraint; I was hearing the eastern European's echoing desire for a government the citizens could control. But I was hearing also the concerns of women from Mexico and Jordan that conservatism, as it was understood on much of the planet --aferocious clutching to the identities of the past--had no place in it for women of the world.

This, I knew was nonsense. I rattled off the names of conservative women. But I was aware as I said it that just two weeks ago, a majority of American women had voted for a man whose values they questioned simply because they had such great antipathy toward the message they heard from the conservative camp.

I was struck, too, by the confusion over the very idea of conservatism. In America, "conservatism" has come to mean what Europeans call, more properly, "liberalism" -- an emphasis on the individual rather than the state. In much of the world, however, instead of emphasizing free markets and individual liberties, "conservatives" offer the clenched fist and shrill voice of ethnic nationalism or religious fundamentalism.

For eight days, courtesy of the Salzburg Seminar, I was immersed in the meaninglessness of labels and pat answers. And as the days went by, I was increasingly disconcerted by the realization that much of America's own conservative movement has begun to edge away from the American tradition toward the dark European model of ethnic identity and prescribed values. I went to Salzburg to spread the message of an American movement that values individual choice. I return in the hope of reminding America's conservatives that we must practice what we preach.