[Response to a post on Ranting to /dev/null.]
It is a good and noble thing for citizens to object, to disobey, to oppose, and to work to eradicate the sort of grave injustices one finds in Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany, and if revolution is the only way to do this, then revolution is justified. "Prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes," because revolutions run the risk of engendering either the terror of anarchy or else a regime even more tyrranous than that which they supplant. It may be that liberals would take that risk more readily than conservatives, but the distinction between the two political ideologies runs deeper than this.
Where conservatives see a foolish and incompetant ruler, liberals see a tyrant. In vain are all the protestations that conservatives make regarding the danger of challenging the status quo. Liberals know it well. The people of France know the terror of anarchy far better than we. If they are on average more liberal than Americans it is because they disagree with us on the fundamental question of what tyrrany is.
Tyrrany is the persistent and widespread violation of fundamental human rights. Liberals quite simply believe that there are more fundamental human rights than conservatives are willing to admit; and among these are the right to some kind of representational government, and the right to some kind of economic equality.
Economic equality does not necessarily mean that no one is wealthier than anyone else. It is not strict equality that is in view, but something less--any attempt to define this would be fraught with mudiness and complexity. It means at least that the income of someone who works long, hard hours at a difficult job should not be less than that of someone who lives a life of leisure, or whose "work" produces nothing of real value, but only serves to put more wealth into the pockets of those who can afford to pay someone to spend his days moving money around. To the conservative, this is no injustice but merely an infelicity. It is unfortunate that people spend their money in this manner, but it is after all their money, and who am I to tell them how to spend it? The liberal is accused of being arrogant, in attempting to impose his own values on everyone else, by the conservative, who regards himself as being humble in allowing people to make their own decisions about what they value. But the liberal is not, by his own lights, attempting to correct an infelicity, he is fighting injustice. Liberals use methods no more severe in fighting economic inequality than conservatives would use in fighting something they regard as a genuine injustice such as laws against diagreeing with the government in one's private opinions.
The more I interact with liberals, the more convinced I become of conservative principles, but I don't accuse liberals of arrogance, and I expect them to refrain from accusing me of greed, because I think both of these accusations derive from a failure to see the root of our differences.