Jonah on Labels

Starbucks interviews NRO's Jonah Goldberg. No, really:

The words conservative and liberal are obviously very old, but their meaning has drifted over the years. As late as the 1950s even most conservatives spoke favorably of the word “liberal” – including Senators Robert Taft and Joe McCarthy. Meanwhile, conservatism wasn’t really a political outlook at all – as we understand these things – until the fifties. Before that, liberalism’s meaning was in flux and I’m not sure this is the venue to get into all of that. I think the Right became associated with change for the fairly simple reason that the liberal pendulum went about as far as America wanted it to. Somewhere C.S. Lewis writes about how a man who takes a wrong turn in the road is not “progressing” by continuing in the wrong direction. Hence, a man who walks backward to where he took the wrong turn is in fact heading in a “progressive” direction. It’s a limited metaphor because life isn’t nearly so static. But conservatives are on the side of change because they are the ones who understand that heading in the wrong direction isn’t progress.