Can conservatives steal back the term "liberal" and return it to its true political meaning?

Classic liberals believed in the virtues of a common morality. Things like "the sanctity of the contract" were fundamental to their beliefs in our ability to retain our freedoms from government.

When you look at our current situation, with huge government and huge business taking care of each other and no one else, when you see the morality of the contract only apply to the middle class who must pay the tax man and pay to bail out big business and then pay big business their increasing demands (check out the new terms on your credit cards, if you have them), we have a situation which requires attention.

I don't think conservative should mean republican anymore. I definitely don't think liberal should mean democrat and don't think it ever has. but it would seem that if this administration distorts the US C, conservatives will become liberals to take the meaning back.

I still think the terms have the most meaning as applied to Constitutional interpretation and shouldn't belong to parties at all. Humans aren't perfect and there's always something of a disconnect between pure theory (Rousseau) and application of laws.

Thomas Paine wrote The Rights of Men as a counter to Burke. We the American people are a free people, our constitution was written that we may maintain this freedom, this by default rules out Rousseau. It can be said that Locke was the father of our over all economic theory, though both method and technique had to change in order to take advantage the international age. As for Jefferson and slaves, Our founding papers, explicitly state that "All Men Are Created Equal".

This is to say, the true political meaning of the word liberal is Freedom.

I'm 53 and since my youth when I could recognize such things, Liberal has always meant "progressive" and has been fixed in the Democratic party...it's strengths have always been the working class people and it has usually been against big business and for environmental issues. Liberals have, in my lifetime, been mostly for a free economy to better the creation of business and jobs, but not at the detriment of living conditions for the middle class. There are certainly factions inside of the Democratic party that are not defined as generally liberal, but they are not the majority. In fact the difference between a moderate Democrat and a moderate Republican is minimal. One good example of this difference is the "trickle down" theory, Liberals believe the only way to improve the economy is to provide jobs and money to the lower and middle classes so that money will circulate...they believe that "trickle down" is simply another way to make the rich richer.

In my opinion the limits that Conservatives have attempted to put on the individual are much more severe than the limits the Liberals want to put on the upper classes....because it is human nature...it's human nature to not want safety practices or environmental rules or product safety to get in the way of profits...

Most Conservatives are not liberals, even in the classical sense. Many of them are social conservatives along with being defenders of the Bush administration, which is far from conservative. I don't know how they call themselves conservative, but they do.

The classical liberals of yesterday are the libertarians today, and we are critical of Rousseau since he believed men were artificial constructs that should be molded through legislation, which is not a classical liberal concept. We are also critical of Burke who defended a feudal system which clearly favored some over others.

Neocon means "New Conservative", and the original spokespersons for NeoConservatism were such as Jean Fitzpatrick. Not a moderate, but neither a wingnut. As a classic and proud Liberal I do not denigrate the opposing philosophies. To promulgate discussion you have to be able to agree to disagree. The neocons as self identified in the current administration give Conservatives a bad name. Barry Goldwater would be rolling over in his grave.

The meanings of words change over time. There is no "true" meaning of the word liberal. We don't talk the way people did in the 18th or 19th centuries, and it's impossible to restore old uses of language.

I like the idea of just using the terms "classic liberal" and "liberal left."

After all, no one ever says "We had a temperature in my part of the country today." It's always identified with the descriptive and modifying high--low--hot--cold, or whatever.

Whenever anyone uses some words like "democracy" or "liberal",

if I don't know them well enough to know what they mean--I ask them what they mean by the word they used.

You are absolutely right! If you look at the true meanings of "liberal", it fits today's liberals about as well as a square fits into a circle.

Classic education? What's that? Yeah, it's gone by the wayside.

Unfortunately, it was "conservatives" like Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and a host of others who have trodded the word "Liberal" so deep into the mud that it may be stained forever.

You might be better off using the term progressive. It's a more accurate term anyways.

The classic liberal definition is forever tainted in the American political experience.

For example, if you believed in free trade or "liberalized trade" wouldn't you be labelled as such?

The term liberal (in the American context) is now a perjorative one.