QotD: Conservatives

At the moment, Europe is governed largely by politicians of "the right". Jacques Chirac, for example, is in French terms a "conservative". Granted, "conservative" is an elastic designation and, in the hands of the media, it's usually shorthand for the side you're not meant to like: thus, George W Bush is "conservative", and so are unreconstructed Marxists on the Chinese Politburo and the more hardline Ayatollahs. France's Jean-Marie Le Pen is usually described as "extreme right", even though he's an economic protectionist in favour of the minimum wage and lavish subsidies for his country's incompetent industries and inefficient farmers and is a longtime anti-American fiercely opposed to globalization — all of which gives him far more in common with the average leftie than with, say, me. The late Pim Fortuyn of the Netherlands was also labeled as "extreme right", though he was mostly a gay hedonist, and we on the right are usually seen as sour and joyless and too uptight to be any good at sex, insofar as we ever get any.

Mark Steyn, "Right Wing Europe", National Review, 2005-09-15