NEW YORK — Whenever I hear people on America's Republican right call themselves "conservative," I experience the mental equivalent of a slight electric shock.

A conservative is someone who, in the tradition of the 18th-century English parliamentarian Edmund Burke, believes that the established order deserves respect, even reverence. A liberal, by contrast, is someone ready to alter the established order in pursuit of a vision of a better world.

The Whig historian of the 19th century Thomas Macaulay described this difference well. There were "two great parties" in England, he wrote, which manifested a "distinction" that "had always existed, and always must exist."