"When words lose their meaning, people lose their liberty,"
Confucius is paraphrased to have had said. Thus, the
Rectification of Names was always a fundamental Confucian project. Said the Sage, "If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success." (
The Analects of Confucius - Lun Yu XIII. 3.)
There are numerous terms in modern political discourse which have lost their meaning, endangering people with the loss of liberty or at least the inability to carry affairs on to success. Among the many terms in need of rectification, two stand out: "liberal" and "conservative." Somehow, social engineering and legislating behavior while raising taxes has come to be thought of as "liberal," whereas foreign wars of aggression waged through amassing debt is "conservative."
These terms regain some meaning by attaching the prefix "left-" to the former and "neo-" to the latter, and the one thing they agree on is that strong centralized power is needed to acheive their objectives. However, a complete rectification of the terms "liberal" and "conservative" is only possible by understanding them in terms of two political philosophies beginning with the prefix "paleo-."
Imagine an America in which
[link edited for length] and
Paleoconservatism were the two mainstream political philosophies in popular currency! Imagine an America in which what we now fancy to be "liberalism" and "conservatism" were relegated to the margins and recognized by most Americans as the dangerous ideologies that they are. Imagine an America in which
Ron Paul and
Pat Buchanan were representative of the country's two main political factions.
It would be an America in which people would be in no danger of losing their liberty, in which affairs could be carried on to success. It would be an America in which the designation
United States would be rectified and recognized as a plural noun followed by the plural verb
are not a singular one followed by
is.
