So What Should I Call Myself?

A conservative, Stephen Hayward, writes about conservatism, wondering what is going to happen to it:

During the glory days of the conservative movement, from its ascent in the
1960s and '70s to its success in Ronald Reagan's era, there was a balance
between the intellectuals, such as Buckley and Milton Friedman, and the
activists, such as Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Weyrich, the leader of the New
Right. The conservative political movement, for all its infighting, has always
drawn deeply from the conservative intellectual movement, and this mix of
populism and elitism troubled neither side.

Today, however, the conservative movement has been thrown off balance,
with the populists dominating and the intellectuals retreating and struggling to
come up with new ideas. The leading conservative figures of our time are now
drawn from mass media, from talk radio and cable news. We've traded in Buckley
for Beck, Kristol for Coulter, and conservatism has been reduced to sound
bites.

I've been a liberal and I've been a conservative, and now, I'm not sure what it means to be liberal or conservative, or exactly what I am. Let me explain.

During college and seminary, during the 70s, I was basically an anti-war liberal, with sympathies for the growing countercultural, ecological movement. Then for 15 years, beginning in the early 80s, I was part of the conservative movement. I read widely in the movement's literature, met some of the leading lights (i.e. Russell Kirk), and worked in the vineyards for the cause. But even then, conservatism didn't mean just one coherent thing. The different wings--neo-conservatism, paleo-conservatism, anti-Communism, free-market libertarianism, Catholic conservatism, Protestant fundamentalism, and others as well--each had their own priorities and emphases, and sometimes, their fundamental beliefs and doctrines didn't mesh very well. I was probably equal parts neo-conservative (Moynihan and Kristol), paleo-conservative (Kirk), Catholic conservative (Neuhaus), and anti-Communist.

Gradually, however, my conservatism morphed into something else in the nineties. I don't think it's accurate to call it liberalism really. What happened is (one) the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union ended with the dissolution of the latter; (two) the vaunted conservative revolution, exemplified by Newt Gingrich, fizzled badly; (three) I began to believe that climate change was a serious threat to our planet; (four) I came to see that the Reagan economic revolution was largely a fraud, based on growing income and wealth inequality and the engorgement of the financial sector in largely non-productive activities, fueled by non-sustainable debt levels and loss of manufacturing; and (five) the aggressive nature of post-Cold War conservatism, leading to the invasion of Iraq and other expansionary efforts of the U.S. 'empire.'

I stood against virtually everything that the last Bush administration stood for. I predicted that the Iraq War would be a disaster for all concerned, and that is what happened. I predicted that our economy was headed for a big time problem, and that happened. I predicted that global warming would get more and more serious, and that is what is happening.

But these weren't necessarily 'liberal' positions. When it came to the Iraq War, the anti-war position was virtually non-existent on the media, with both establishment liberals and conservatives gung-ho to take out Saddam. When it came to our economic games, liberals like the Clintons, Larry Summers, and Robert Rubin were clueless and just as surprised as anyone else.

Honestly, I could find more agreement on my new positions among certain paleo-conservatives, libertarians, post-modern Christians, peak-oil contrarians, ecologists and agrarians, and 'left' radicals than among either 'conservatives' or 'liberals'. Establishment political thinking of either conservative or liberal type is, in my opinion, largely sterile and irrelevant.

Yet I don't know what to call my new position. Any ideas?