Megan McArdle, given a lump of rhetorical dung, tries to read entrails:

From Joe Conason:

If your workplace is safe; if your children go to school rather than being forced into labor; if you are paid a living wage, including overtime; if you enjoy a 40-hour week and you are allowed to join a union to protect your rights -- you can thank liberals. If your food is not poisoned and your water is drinkable -- you can thank liberals. If your parents are eligible for Medicare and Social Security, so they can grow old in dignity without bankrupting your family -- you can thank liberals...

My goodness -- how did we ever survive as a nation with Abe Lincoln sneaking out of the White House at night to poison our food?

Part of the difficulty with parsing that tirade is that many still consider most Republicans or the right as "conservative" and most Democrats as "liberal." And knowing Conason's paper trail, he's obviously referring to party affiliation. But I don't think the decades-long affiliation still stands. I've mentioned this before on Megan's weblog: somewhere along the line, tendencies towards reactionary or radical switched. That the left and right represent, respectively, the de facto liberal and conservative [political poles] is obsolete.

Yes, conservatives fought civil rights legislation - but the majority of those conservatives were Democrats. In today's foreign policy, the much-derided "Straussians" and "Kristolites" (or the subtly Hitleresque "Neoconservatives"), accused as having "hijacked" the Republican party, are very much akin to Wilsonian liberals.

The left stands firm on Cold War-implemented containment of foreign threats, a conservative position; while the right moves into uncharted, progressive waters of country-by-country democratization and self-actualization. The left insists on keeping social entitlement programs largely unchanged (conservative) while the right begs to reform them (liberal).

This goes along for most issues. Many strictly societal debates do remain divided, conservative to liberal, as the Democrat-Republican face-off we've grown up with. But it's a reflection of the larger issue that has eclipsed the 20th Century's left-right identification: morality and perspective.

What one will find consistent throughout the years is that, Republican or Democrat, moral absolutists will find their place on the right (i.e., Truman and Acheson); while moral relativists are at home on the left (i.e., Nixon and Kissinger). Politics of the day obscure this; historical consideration sorts it out. Cooperative and utilitarian motivation (idealization and rationalization, respectively) is one whale of a topic unto itself but, suffice to say, the center around which these two opposing forces spin.

UPDATE: I'll make a distinction between practicality and abstraction. The right, as I describe it, is "conservative" with conceptions of truth and value, or stubbornly absolutist - while in the real world, conservative or liberal, depending upon the nature of an issue. The left is "liberal" with those basic principles, or flexibly relativist - but can be considered either conservative or liberal in concrete application. So technically one could still refer to the right as "conservative" and the left as "liberal," only not in the traditional sense which is primarily concerned with the philosophy of politics.