Let's get straight what "conservative" really means

This is a very good article in The American Prospect elaborating on the difference between modern “movement conservatism” that now controls the Republican Party and this administration, and traditional Republican conservatism of Robert Taft, Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Bob Dole, Richard Lugar and even Barry Goldwater.

I much prefer a term like “right-wing extremism” over any formulation that to any extent whatsoever designates people like Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Grover Norquist or Rush Limbaugh as “conservatives.” They are hardly more the intellectual progeny of Edmund Burke, Adam Smith or Alexis de Tocqueville than Stalin was. They are radicals, with a mindless anti-government ideology that is the antithesis of the pragmatic, empirical approach to public policy that “conservatives” once espoused. They want to uproot and tear out everything that has evolved out of the popular will in the 20th century, not shape any of those programs in an organic way from what has gone before. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, moderate liberals all, have a much better claim to the mantle of conservatism than those right wing extremists because they accept the notion that while government is the only way to accomplish certain societal goals, government can also try to do too much. ut is necessary for certain functions.

The author, Greg Anrig, takes legitimate issue with the blunderbuss way Barack Obama has tried to show his independence from traditional Democratic thinking – talking about the republican Party as the party of ideas, which most certainly today it is not -- when, in fact, he could be making powerful points of permanent effect connecting modern progressivism with the historical conservatism that once the hallmark of that party.