Liberalism may be usfully defined, in our era, as an ideology based upon the enshrinement of change and open-mindedness about the revision of values. This redefinition has become necessary because of the dialectic between the Enlightenment idea of liberalism and its effects as applied from that time until the present day. Liberalism is founded upon the idea of the robust natural goodness of man, which implies that individual self-sufficiency is an enlightened way of organizing society, as centralised power is subject to corruption and domination by a few evil people; and consequently a constant danger to the free and many good.

The natural goodness of man is a problematic assumption. It is one thing to observe that men, individually or in the aggregate, are good or capable of good, and quite another to leap from that to man's possession of a nature that is good in itself. If this idea were true, it would not be possible for evil to arise, so the mere existence of evil disproves it. If a majority of men were good, evil people would only be able to hold power by concealing their evilness, and would constantly be subject to destruction as soon as the good people sussed them out. This is equally unsupported by the evidence. History teaches us that man's nature is evil, for we accept selfishness and cruelty as normal (if regrettable) even in the best man; we do not see even a great man and wonder that he has done serious wrongs. It would be the wonder if he had not.

In this light, liberalism seems a little shaky. I would like to refer back to my earlier definition and derive the following from it: as liberalism enshrines change, with the presumption that it is shaking the evil out of the essentially unsullied human nature, it is fundamentally opposed to conservatism, which needs no redefinition; conservatism is the belief in the validity of old-fashioned values. The only question is, which values? Who gets to decide?

That last question must be asked because of the 'cultural conservatism' movement in America. Such liberalists as Buchanan have claimed that they are actually conservatives. This is clearly wrong. The old-fashioned values of Greek civilisation or apostolic Christianity do not include slavishly flattering power; establishing foreign murder squads to maintain power in foreign countries; racism of the most debased sort; not to mention such cornerstones of modern 'cultural conservatism' as monetarism, the international system[1],[2] in politics, or materialistic, technocratic bureaucratism.

I trust this clears a few things up.

[1] This term has a specific meaning, such as ought to be well-known to all adequate people. If you don't know it, I won't do your homework for you, except to suggest that 'international' is the subject of 'system' rather than an adjective modifying it.

[2] I'm specifically asking no-one to take the term 'international system' to indicate some ridiculous conspiracy theory.