No Monopoly on Right or Virtue
My brief year and a half stint in the US was way back in 2000, long, long before Trump. Back then, I used to hear the words “liberal” and “conservative” used in American politics and it confused me greatly. Because “liberal” wasn’t always a positive term as used in their political debates. Nor was “conservative” always a negative term! So what was going on? Much later, I finally got it. “Liberal” in American politics is the equivalent of “secular” in Indian politics. In other words, the dictionary meaning of those terms is totally different from what those terms mean in domestic politics. The former is the literal meaning of the term whereas the latter is based on how people who claim to follow that value actually act. Fareed Zakaria, the CNN host, recently pointed out how accentuated this trend has become ever since Trump was elected: “At the heart of liberty in the Western world has been freedom of speech. From the beginning, people understood that this meant protecting...