My point, which I will concede was made obscurely, was that both the "right" and the "left" have totally lost their meanings due to acquiring too many conflicting definitions to be meaningful. It used to be "liberal" to oppose the ancient regime and the idea of aristocracy and opposed the state's domination of civil society. Now the term "big government liberal" is redundant. The right used to be synonymous with resisting the course of empire, the corruption of the republic, the collapse of liberty. Now, though, many of them have embraced the idea of "A Clash of Civilizations" and a new, grand, collectivist crusade in the name of social engineering that is now a staple of the left. The point I was trying to make is that both left and right have bought into the collectivist idea of statism and I am fundamentally of a different ideology than that. Because of that fundamental difference, people tend to presume that when I differ with their preferred expression of statist philosophy that I am obviously the opposite of their own ideology. To the "conservatives" of the warfare state mentality (including law-and-order drug warriors) I am a bleeding-heart liberal. To the democratic socialist left, I must be a right wing fascist. It doesn't occur to many that I am different in ideology than both of the presently popular political streams in the U.S., that I reject statism as such, as a counterproductive force (like the Ring in Tolkien's tale) in human relations. Many make the presumption though, that if I am not in favor of their own brand of statism then I must logically be in favor of the other faction's brand. Like all presumptions, it says more about the presumer than it does about the object of the presumptions. At any rate, I'm used to mischaracterizations. Politics is full of them, and nobody is entirely immune to making them at one point or another.