Ed. note: This is our final political article, capping a weekend of Presidency IV coverage. We hope you enjoyed reading about it as much as we enjoyed producing it. Back in high school, some politically-minded classmates first instructed me on the difference between the political left and right. On the most basic level, conservatives want less government, and liberals want more government. This applies to laws, corporate regulations, central government planning and management, and personal restrictions and rules for citizens. Since I have always struggled with the concept of "following the rules" -- just remembering what they are is a challenge for me -- conservatism has generally appealed to me. After this past weekend's GOP debate, I'm totally confused. Republicans, who have been traditional conservatives, now want a larger and stronger federal government; and Democrats, who have been traditional liberals, seem to want to eliminate a lot of the oppressive regulations and policies set forth by the current Republican administration. Have the sides switched?

The American founders were conservatives by 20th century standards. Coming from an oppressive British imperial government, they feared a strong American federal government and established the U.S. constitution to ensure that the kind of oppressive political atmosphere that created the United States could never happen there again. These are facts and are not in dispute. However, in modern times we struggle with the notion that our country has evolved beyond the founders' vision, and that we must adjust, ignore, or reinterpret the constitution in order to deal with global and domestic problems that the founders never envisioned. And this is precisely where America's 21st century political quagmire remains.

All throughout this weekend, I was inundated with references to Ronald Reagan as the pillar of modern conservatism, and Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln as its archetypes. But what have these leaders really shown us? What did they represent in their time in the White House? Lincoln advocated a large and powerful federal government -- so much so that he took the entire nation to war against itself. More Americans were killed in the civil war than in all other American-involved wars combined, all to establish the fact that the federal government has ultimate power, and states have limited rights. This is not a conservative stance; it advocates big government, and is not what the founders intended.

Theodore Roosevelt abandoned the Republican party and started the Progressive party, which caused the Republicans to lose the 1912 presidential election. He was the Ross Perot of his time, except he had more popular support and actually defeated his Republican opponent. How on earth can modern Republican conservatives look up to Theodore Roosevelt as an icon and an idol when they incessantly proclaim the paramount importance of a Republican candidate being elected to the White House? Roosevelt was the world's first Republican presidential election spoiler.

Ronald Reagan increased the size of government, spent billions of dollars of American citizens' money on weapons that were never used in order to out-scare the Soviets, and established a political legacy of heavy spending and heavy inflation. A hundred years from now, when political analysts are commenting on why America fell, the huge amount of wasteful government spending funded by the gratuitous printing of money to pay government debts will be listed as a significant contributing factor. And Ronald Reagan did this -- he stood for bigger government with big (military) spending. Isn't that what conservatives are supposed to be against -- aren't we supposed to be for lower taxes, less spending, and less government interference? Just a few years after Reagan was out of office, one of the most iconic Democrats of all time -- Bill Clinton -- reduced government spending and eliminated the federal budget deficit. Have we formally entered Bizarro World?

Speaking of Clinton, his main presidential idol was Thomas Jefferson, who was the original cheerleader for limited federal control and regulation. Jefferson was heavily in favor of states' rights. That hardly sounds like Bill Clinton.

I think this past weekend's Reagan worship is little more than a bad case of "pain is temporary, glory is forever." We've forgotten (or perhaps not yet realized) that Reagan's policies have destroyed or will destroy us, and that his charisma and charm -- like Bill Clinton's -- is all we remember in pictures and video clips now that the pain of the domestic economic rot of the 80s, when America's middle class began to die, is over.

I attribute the corruption and fall of conservatism in the late 20th century to an increasing connection between outdated and irrelevant Christian moral codes with the Republican party. The liberal Democrats want to avoid making rules to prevent abortion and gay marriage -- they want less government in this respect -- and the so-called conservatives want to create federal regulations to ban these things -- more governmental control. A true conservative would insist that it is not the federal government's responsibility to regulate these things, yet here we are with the regulation of these issues at the forefront of Republican political debate.

Do these neo-conservatives think that homosexuality and abortion did not exist in the 1700s, that the founders were not aware of these practices? Do the neocons think that the founders did not wisely choose to leave abortion and homosexual issues out of the constitution and other statements of federal policy? Abortion predates America, the protestant religious sect, and the English language. Homosexuality has been around -- and heavily documented -- since before Romulus murdered Remus. To think that the American founders were ignorant of these acts (and indeed that at least one of them did not at some time participate in one of them), or that these practices were suddenly introduced in the 1970s in America, is nothing more than pure arrogance. But activists on both sides of the political spectrum have no respect for the ideals on which this country was built. It's about arguing and being "right" instead of being "correct." The ability to shout loudly and argue successfully has superseded the need to rely on facts, accurate information, and intelligent observation. It's a lot like the majority of technology journalism.

If anything, religious Republicans should be in favor of more Bible-like governmental control and regulation, of a "nanny state" that forces an outdated and unnatural sense of morality on an unwilling populace. The atheists and liberals should want less government, less regulation, and more distance from the kind of despotic dictatorship that the god of the Old Testament exemplified. The simplified definitions of "liberal" and "conservative" have lost their meaning for me -- I no longer know which group I can safely throw my lot in with because they've both come to represent the same kind of socio-political disease.

Secretly, the neo-conservatives really do want bigger government, even if they publicly say otherwise. Unfortunately, so do the liberals. The only difference is that neocons think that they are morally obligated to support an oppressive nanny state (exactly like the Taliban did in Afghanistan), and liberals simply think that they've got the perfect plan for costly, widespread regulation (which works well on a small western-European-nation-sized scale, but cannot possibly work on an America-sized scale). The neocons think the founders were unaware of homosexuality and abortion and did not anticipate modern, Christian-judged immorality; and the liberals think that the founders didn't appropriately consider the future needs of a large and needy American nation with 50 states plus protectorates. They're both on the same level of wrong. I'm not convinced that there is any way out of this, that there is a "good" side to pick, but as a disenfranchised conservative I'm tired of the neo-conservative worship of spendthrift policies, bloodlust and warmongering, empire-building, and pro-big-government historical figures while paying lip service to freedom through limited government. These are not conservative ideals.

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