To anyone who doesn't like calling the American left, "liberal," because that deviates from terminology on the other side of the pond... what should we call the American right?
"Conservatism," as an ideological label, traces its roots to Burke, via people like Oakeshott and Buckley (not the cool one*), and is now defined by Donald Trump. Does Donald Trump hold any intellectual resemblance to Edmund Burke or Michael Oakeshott? Even modern free market economics? He's a bloody mercantilist! He's not even a capitalist! So, following the reasoning that rejects labeling the American left as "liberalism," we would have to stop calling the American right "conservatism."
So, do we have a discussion about how there's a difference between "right-ism" and "conservatism?" Or, do we just recognize the difference between classical and modern conservatism?
In fact, in my "Whither Classical Conservatism?" series, I went through the history of the ideology, where modern American conservatism went wrong, and why the American political system is poorly served by the distinction between modern and classical conservatism, with the absence of classical conservatism from the system. The links to that are in my neoliberalism post, which is where I went through the history of "liberalism," and the transformation of that term.
Oy.
This really is why I am a prescriptivist. I swear, it isn't the arthropod. The world would be so much easier if we didn't have words change definitions all the time, but coalitions shift, and as I keep writing, unless we want new words every couple of years, we have to accept glacial movement in definitions, which creates dramatic differences when you look over a larger time frame, or across national boundaries when, ya' know, there's like, a revolution or something, to cause the linguistic equivalent of speciation in political rhetoric.
Damned arthropod!