Well the problem with one category is this:
I'm Liberal and Conservative depending on the issue. The current Coup d'etat mindset (and for all I know "fact", which is no big deal as it's not our first) tends to drag me toward the Liberal side as I see the so called "neo-con" movement displaying the exact same grotesqueries (Just 180 degrees out of phase with respect to fascist sympathies) that their stoner grin wearing daddies did thirty years ago, and they don't look one iota smarter than they did before while acting out as the empowered "lump" in the population bubble that they are.
Our big problem now is that labels have (in a VERY Orwellian turn of events) come to mean their exact opposite and the people who engineered it are taking advantage of the ensuing confusion.
Case in point: Invading a nation that has not theatened us is imperialist nationalism. THE BIGGEST OF BIG GOVERNMENT type behavior.
A true conservative would be in favor of CONSERVING our personal and economic freedoms and respecting the sovereign rights of foreign nations, even if we don't agree with them. This usually means legislating in favor of the least constitutionally restrictive option.(In particular for US, the citizens.)
But that's not what neo-cons do. Ever. (In fact, they set them up where there used not to be any before. See: "Unless it's for big corporate PAC defended concerns"
Ergo, the extreme right wing wants HUGE government as long as it's to support a network of corporate welfare and pseudo-religious platitudes (despite the fact that federalist after federalist after federalist insisted that the two be kept WELL AND TRULY SEPERATE!) and not much else. Don't believe me?
Go to the library and read them yourself. I recommend Corwin & Peltason's "Understanding the Constitution".
Amendment I
"Congress SHALL MAKE NO LAW RSPECTING AN ESTABLISHMENT OF RELIGON".
Plain English. In a fundamentalist (our Taliban's a comin' out, just you wait!) culture that despises it.
Liberals should be in favor of preserving our Liberties. Or put another way, our right to pursue happiness. This would ordarily mean championing the rights of the underprotected and disenfranchised as well as the average citizen while legislating to the, yep you guessed it, least constitutionally restrictive option.
They don't do this very well either.
In many cases the reason is the same: MONEY. Other times it's just the arbitrary manipulation of the respective constituency stupidities which reveals the tragic flaw in democracy: you have to trust that a populace is intelligent and well educated (especially in something besides science and math) enough to play a role in it's own beneficient self-government. The failure of our education system (particularly in the area of government and civics) has failed us and we're reaping what's been sown now.
While gender and race are (mostly) cut and dried that third one muddies up the water pretty badly!
(Just ONE) Anonymous
(White Guy.)
