Converse reported that the bottom thirty-seven per cent of respondents "could supply no meaning for the liberal-conservative distinction"; the top seventeen per cent gave what the interviewers deemed "best answers".
Over the past few years the distinction between conservative and Republican has eroded.
Niall Ferguson, a conservative historian of greater distinction than Clark, wrote "The Pity of War" in 1999, in which he vehemently argued that Britain made a disastrous mistake entering the conflict: the stakes were low, but the costs unimaginably high.
In molecular evolution the distinction between conservative (negative) selection, innovative (positive) selection and unconstrained evolution (drift) is usually ambiguous at the gene level.
But when I started looking at Catholicism from the inside--and how it was joined to particular academic groups and institutions--it seemed to me that the distinction between conservative and liberal also didn't hold much relevance.
When I left the United States for India to do dissertation research on Catholicism rural India, I found -- as do many Catholics who live abroad -- that the conventional American Catholic distinction between conservative and liberal was nonsensical.
According to Lilla, the distinction between conservatives and liberals is philosophical.
Not long ago, there was a clear distinction between conservatives and Republicans.
The distinction that conservatives are missing here is between voluntary action and force.
My own position, in distinction from the conservative, secret-police aesthetic of the camp administration, consists in reading my books and journals during moments that I extract by force from the deadening daily schedule of the prison colony.
Like the initial inclusion of green-card holders, its philosophy seems to be to smudge out the old distinction that governed conservative immigration policy, between those who are here legally and those who are not, and replace it with a far uglier distinction, between those who were born here and those who were not.
