For sheer precision in what is too often a wholesale muddle of political definitions, E.J. Dionne this morning is indispensable:
Obama will ... be the conservative in 2012, in the truest sense of that word. He is the candidate defending the modestly redistributive and regulatory government the country has relied on since the New Deal, and that neither Ronald Reagan nor George W. Bush dismantled. The rhetoric of the 2012 Republicans suggests they want to go far beyond where Reagan or Bush ever went.
I argued a similar case in the run-up to the 2010 congressional elections; I argued that Democrats, in this incontrovertibly center-right nation, should exploit the majority's professed preference for a philosophical conservatism by declaring themselves the true conservatives (in that they were merely "defending the modestly redistributive and regulatory government the country has relied on since the New Deal").
I about got my head handed to me by a progressive community that, I discovered, preferred lofty labels to pragmatic victories.
Why, Democrats, I was informed -- rather, had stridently screamed at me -- should never ever recoil from their sacred duty to advance the noble Progressive Cause as progressives; even if their cause, at that painful moment of late 2010, entailed little more than "defending the modestly redistributive and regulatory government the country has relied on since the New Deal" -- that is, an essentially conservative cause.
My sense of the righteous was that if keeping the tea-sipping barbarians at the electoral gates meant expropriating the enemy's bragging rights to "true conservatism," then by all means expropriate with a passionate cunning, especially if one's progressive ass is running in an organically conservative swing district. It wasn't as though these Democratic candidates would have been lying; indeed, they were campaigning as the true conservatives -- see conservation of Social Security, Medicare ... -- in a minor epic of sweeping radicalism on a fevered rampage.
Our traditional labels have entered a fluid state of subtle transformation; and if Democrats are to protect their cause, they'll need to explain the profound conservatism underlying today's progressivism.
And with that, I'm taking my daughter to the mall so she can go 'tweenly radical with her assorted gift cards. God help me.