Andrew Sullivan has been giving some badly needed attention to the ideological postures assumed by the left and right on the war on terror. I've addressed the topic a couple of times before: the ideational divide separating left from the right is an ethical and moral preference, respectively, for a relativist and absolutist value scale. That internal compass then dictates the positions taken by each side on a political issue. ["Liberals" have stumped for progressive causes over the last century with "conservatives" defending established mores, institutions and concepts.] It's a blog-and-a-half for another day, but I would argue that [some liberals] pushed so far on concrete matters in the late 1960s and early 1970s that they crossed the line of radicalism; they have emerged as reactionary on many issues. Not all, but certainly the most pressing. And the right has taken up progressivity. Says Sullivan:

My old friend Ian Buruma had a bracing essay in the Financial Times over the weekend. He baldly states something that is, to my mind, indisputable: the biggest force for conservatism in world affairs right now is the Western left. You only have to listen to what pass for their arguments about the remarakable experiment now being attempted in Iraq to witness the sheer Tory pessimism of them all. Their "anti-Orientalist" stance has robbed them of any means to criticize Arab or Islamist societies, or to support reform of them, even if it means temporary armed intervention. Their support for "peace" is really an argument for complete Western disengagement from societies and cultures where tyranny, genocide, terror and theocracy abide. How is it that one can scour the pages of, say, the Nation and not find a single essay marveling at the new freedoms in Iraq - of the press, of free speech, of religious diversity? Even when they do see the good side of, say, greater freedom for women in Afghanistan, their loathing of the Bush administration dampens much of their liberal conviction.

Sullivan has more. Again, I disagree with the "right is left" idea on a technical level - Sullivan makes the point, of course, and that's all he means to do with the title. But my angle is that "left" and "right" remain fixed in the ideational sense, relativist versus absolutist, while the resulting concrete political assumptions change from liberal to conservative case by case.

Nonetheless, it's wonderful to see this ethical watershed trickling its way into mainstream debate. Give it a few years to become commonplace and the phenomenon may change the way in which everyday people view parties and issues.

ALSO: More thoughts on the ideological switcheroo. The basic idea has always appealed to me as a sense of the general trend in politics rather than a grand unifying theory with footnotes and a patent. So it's always a matter of refinement:

What confuses most of us about leftists as reactionaries are long-standing associations of ideology with politics that have been taken for granted. "Left" is considered synonymous with "liberal," "right" with "conservative." That's not so. The trick is to separate the ideational from the concrete.

In the ideational, two poles exist: relativism and absolutism. Any variable can be assigned to these ethical and moral perceptions - we choose, respectively, "left" and "right." These never change: the relativist remains equivocal and qualifying of values, the absolutist adamant of universally commensurate values. Thus, the left and right - in the realm of the idea - do not trade places, but are ever irreconcilable and opposing.

Concrete political application - radical, liberal, moderate, conservative, reactionary - is where adherents to the left or right trade places with each other. On one issue, the absolutist might defend tradition (conservative) and the relativist will reject it (liberal). On another, the absolutist might seek social progress on grounds of moral equity (liberal) and the relativist will deny it (conservative). Right and left (absolutism, relativism) have not changed; but identities as "conservative" and "liberal" have.

We can look to a just handful of modern liberal causes and assign them to the right as absolutists (not necessarily to a party, Democrat or Republican, but to an ideological orientation): emancipation of slaves, universal suffrage, civil rights. Look at modern conservative causes run by the left as relativists: so-called progressive taxation, identity through race and gender, defending the 20th Century welfare state. It goes on and on, and some issues are actually split up into subtopics on which the left and right go both liberal and conservative. Beyond the surface - party affiliation, indentity as "lib" or "con" - many of us, especially at this apparent turning point, may be at a different pole than we would first assume.

But the point is that yes, the right is progressive on foreign policy - many who are referred to as "conservatives" are, and have been, liberal.