That’s not exactly Sowell’s definition is it? Sowell said it meant conserving stuff. What stuff? Any stuff.
Are there any conservatives that believe in preserving everything just because it passes once? No. Buckley didn’t believe that either.
If you have a bad definition of conservativism, then it’s not accurate to say that one rejects what conservativism actually believes. This is really a ‘straw man’ on his part.
I love Sowell, but this isn’t really the best argument against his conservativism. It is a good argument against his libertarianism because he explicitly cites a substantive policy portion wherein he disagrees.
You do a good job of pointing out why “conservative” is as much of a misnomer as “liberal”. These days, “liberals” want more of the status quo and/or more government, while “conservatives” want radical change.
Sowell is a “libertarian” in the sense of the word as applied to the men by which he was influenced. Hayek wrote Why I Am Not a Conservative, and Friedman wrote The Tyranny of the Status Quo, for example. Sowell is probably a classical liberal (like Adam Smith) more than anything else, but to say that these days would create even more confusion. As the term relates to people like Sowell, “classical liberal” has been replaced in modern parlance by “libertarian”, mostly due to the progressive movement’s corruption of “liberal”. “Libertarian” in this sense, with the small “l”, is distinct from Libertarian Party, and I feel a little bit awkward even having to say that in a discussion with what I take to be an intelligent person. Forgive me if that was pedantic.
Okay, not the best characterization of conservatism. I’ll give you that tangent.
And I’m really not even arguing against his being a conservative. What I’m arguing is what I started off arguing at the beginning of the thread, which is that it’s absurd to say that liberalism and libertarianism are the same thing. As evidence I’m offering up Thomas Sowell, who we can all agree is no liberal, and the fact that he finds the libertarian label the most fitting for his beliefs. If libertarianism and liberalism were the same thing, he wouldn’t have said that. Also the sky is blue and water is wet.