Definitions

From one of Andrew Sullivan's readers:

My choice - and yours - is to join up with a reality-based community that trusts expertise, democratic processes, and established institutions and makes fact-based decisions (these days called liberals), or to join up with a community of relativistic mystics who are not open to reason or persuasion, distrust democracy, reject standards of behavior because they believe themselves to be inherently godly, and have no use for traditional democratic institutions. These tradition-despising relativistic mystics we call conservatives.

The problem with shifting definitions is that no one ever stands there and says, "OK -- we're changing the definition of 'conservative.'" (Or marriage, or torture, or. . . .) Read the whole post. It's really "spot on," as Sullivan would say.