For the past few months I’ve been conducting an email campaign where I give away “Green Tips for Homeowners” to real estate agents. I make this offer to hundreds of thousands of agents and have hundreds who take me up on the offer.

But occasionally (twice to be exact) a guy (so far it’s always been a guy) will say something like “Stick your green tips up your a**. I don’t want anything to do with your green Al Gore-loving liberal bs.”

Usually I just ignore this kind of message and take them off the list. But a few days ago when I got this kind of message I decided to send a response to see what would happen.

I innocently thought that if I explained that these “green” tips had nothing to do with “global warming”, but were basically about saving money, this would suddenly make the guy at the other end of the message more receptive.

It didn’t work. He thought I sounded like a “liberal”.

I resisted the temptation to explain that, well, yes I am a kind of liberal, but I’m also a kind of conservative, and that I think people (mostly American people) throw these terms around without really knowing what they mean.

As far as the man-in-the-street is concerned the term “liberal” has been defined in recent years in a negative way by people like Rush Limbaugh. It is hard to understand exactly what guys like this don’t like about “liberals”, but whatever it is, they sure have strong feelings about it. The man in the street who listens approvingly to guys like Limbaugh know even less why they disapprove of “liberals”, but dammit, they just do.

The superficial answer is that “liberals” are in favour of things like big government, universal health care, handouts to the poor, wasteful social programs and high taxes. Perhaps more to the point, “conservatives” think “liberals” are slippery when it comes to things like right and wrong, and individual responsibility.

Now this is getting us closer to the meat of the matter. What “conservatives” want are solid answers, black and white distinctions between things like right and wrong, good and bad, the individual and society. Liberals, on the other hand want to be free to be noncommital about values.

In other words, “conservatives” like things black and white. “Liberals” only see shades of grey.

This can (and does) get confusing because “conservatism” sounds like a principled stance, but on its own really has no content, no inherent core principles other than conserving what already exists. A “conservative” wants to conserve good old fashioned values simply because they are good and old fashioned, not because they are inherently good or bad.

This is really a kind of pragmatism. For a “conservative”, values are worth conserving in any given society because they have become part of the fabric of that society. They have worked in the past, so there is no good reason why they shouldn’t work in the future.

There are obvious problems with this “pragmatic” rationale for conservatism. Clearly, different societies have different “good old fashioned values”. Chinese traditional values are different from American traditional values, and both are different from the traditional values of Iran. Could it be that simply conserving these in any given society is automatically a good thing?

Of course most “conservatives” would deny that their position is inherently unprincipled. But this is where the “principled conservative” as opposed to the “pragmatic” one starts sounding vaguely like a “liberal”.

Because there is no question that liberalism does have principles – or at least one. Its most cherished principle is “freedom” or “liberty” – the origin of the word “liberal”. Practising “liberals” are just hesitant to cash this general principle out in terms of simplistic things like traditional values, or some particular society’s view of right and wrong.

What they want is the freedom to choose – the freedom, as it were, to be free of traditional views, or the views of the elite, or of a bunch of priests or lawyers or bureaucrats, or of loud-talking guys like Rush Limbaugh.

Which brings us back to slippery – the thing that “conservatives” most dislike about “liberals”. “Conservatives” want to say “This is right and that’s wrong” while “liberals” want to say “Hold on. It may be right in your eyes, but there are other things we have to take into consideration.”

Does this make me sound like a “liberal”? I’m afraid it does.

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