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A thoughtful article, but maybe not thoughtful enough.

And, despite the fact that his Presidency came after the French Revolution, Jefferson never used the term "Left" or "Right." Jefferson, one of the most brilliant and learned political thinkers in history, never used the silly language that we do today to describe political thought.

Jefferson accused his opponents of wanting to impose monarchy or tyranny. They accused him of being a French Revolutionary Jacobin, an atheist, or a would-be tyrant. I'm not sure that's less silly or more useful than today's political terminology.

Certainly, it's better to worry about doing what's right and what's best for the country than worrying about labels, but today's labels probably do help us to understand what's going on a little better than those of Jefferson's day, when you were either on the side of the angels or the demons.

Actually I think the terms "right" and "left" originated with where delegates sat in the National Convention of 1792.

Twelve states have their state capitals on land acquired by the Louisiana Purchase under Thomas Jefferson--Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana.

Bush won 11 of the 12 in 2000 and all 12 in 2004. (Gore carried Iowa in 2000.) Thank you, TJ.

(Most of Minnesota is land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, but St. Paul is on the eastern side of the Mississippi, which was already American territory by the Treaty of Peace in 1783. The 'Rats carried MN in 2000 and in 2004.)

Why, then, do we have so many problems identifying what conservatism is in American politics? There is an easy, though not simple, answer to that question: What we have come to call "conservative" or the Right is a group of principles whose definitional names have been invented by those who hate those principles.

And why do those who hate those principles have the clout to define who is called what? Because they are journalists, or fellow travelers of journalists.
America obviously had something which could be meaningfully called "the press" in the founding era - but it was not journalism as we know it. Newspapers of the day were idiosyncratic and opinionated, and did not claim to be objective. They couldn't, and get away with it - because, before the telegraph and the Associated Press, newspapers were often explicitly associated with one political party or another, but they were independent of each other. With the advent of the AP, newspapers are all associated, and they are all selling the same product. And as such they are a special interest.
Journalists call themselves (and, especially, call each other) "objective." They call others who promote the product journalists are selling but are not themselves working journalists "liberal" or "progressive." And they call those who denigrate the product journalists are selling "conservative" or "right wing." Those labels are nothing but advertising slogans, having no natural descriptive power. In the case of "conservatives" and "right wingers," of course, the labels are negative advertising slogans.
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