On a fairly regular basis, I find myself being asked to explain why, given my support for the war in Iraq, I am a liberal. I thought I would try to answer that here. Rather than explaining the theories of American liberalism, I will make an empirical case for it.I usually start my answer by pointing out the great causes liberals have championed in the past, such as the civil rights movement. "The problem with liberals today," my more conservative friends tell me, "is not that they're like Kennedy and Johnson, it's that they aren't like Kennedy and Johnson."

Kennedy and Johnson would be conservatives by today's standards, I am told. That is probably true. Conservatives today-at least northern ones-are no longer fighting against civil rights, and, while they might be a little hesitant to denounce someone like Jesse Helms as the racist he is, they generally believe the civil rights movement of the 1960s was good for America.

The first thing conservatives need to understand, though, is that liberalism is a lot more than a set of positions on issues; it is a complete ideology. It represents never being content with the status quo, and always looking for some injustice to fight to make society better.
Progress is the key to liberalism. While we presently may be fighting different battles than the liberals of previous generations, we can look back at the tradition of what liberals have stood for throughout history and still believe in it and be proud of it.

What are the causes liberals have stood for throughout American history? They have stood for ending slavery and for enfranchising women at the voting booth. They have championed safe conditions for America's workers. They brought us Social Security and Medicare and, naturally, civil rights. These are all things most contemporary conservatives support, too.

I have heard Newt Gingrich praise Franklin Roosevelt. A conservative Republican administration pushed through a Medicare prescription drug program, which, though flawed, still represents tremendous progress over the conservatives of a generation ago who would have been pushing to end Medicare altogether.

This progressiveness is precisely the historical difference between liberals and conservatives. Liberals of one generation build on the progress of previous liberals, while conservatives frequently have to disavow themselves from the conservatives of previous generations.
Conservatives throughout American history have stood for keeping slavery, denying women the vote, and preventing civil rights. There is no great conservative accomplishment in American history that conservatives today can point to and say it represents the great tradition of their ideology. These great American political successes, as acknowledged today by liberals and conservatives alike, were all liberal causes in their time.

While conservatives today may chastise liberals for not being like their admirable predecessors, conservatives of those times were chastising those same liberals whom they now admire.
Conservatives always come around to the correct position on these issues eventually, but always a generation after the important battles have already been fought by the liberals who got it right on the first try. It seems fair to say that a conservative is basically a liberal of the previous generation.