Uh, Nancy.  Sorry to communicate with you this way but I'm blocked from your blogs.

That unfortunate article by Anne Wortham isn't the liberal philosophy you thought it was. Wortham describes herself as an "individualist liberal".  You should look on FreeRepublic.com to find out what that means, but I'll save you the trouble.  

Where there are political "liberals" and there are "individualists",  when you combine the two concepts as "liberal individualist" or "liberal individualism" you're not talking about political liberal in the classic sense of the left wing and as a conservative I just thought I'd let you know about this so you won't go around embarrassing yourself and other conservative who are (brace yourself) "individualist liberals", especially when your goal is to embarrass the Left.

See, the "liberal" part of that identity doesn't have anything to do with the "collectivism" the left is known for. It's about a "liberal free-market" or, as fiscal conservatives like myself think of it, a view of capitalism that encourages unrestricted ("unrestricted" meaning "liberal" in the economic sense) markets.  Or something like Barack Obama was promoting in his interview last night on 60 Minutes.

The "individualist" part is truly a centerpiece to conservatism and for "liberal individualists" it's a concept of personal responsibility we know well in which the self-made success is the highest goal and achievement. 

So, that's what Ann Wortham is talking about. She's a free-market conservative who believes individuals should be rewarded on their own merit and achievement.

Take marriage, for example. In some cases, when a couple divorces, the state splits the estate in half and awards each person an equal share.  But if we applied the ideals of "liberal individualism" to a divorce, there wouldn't be any of this half and half baloney. Instead, Ms. Wortham would INSIST that whatever SHE put into the marriage was Hers and that her spouse was NOT entitled to any of it since SHE did the work and invested HER labor into, say for example, a house the couple lived in, or a savings account they held jointly.

So, we can certainly laud Ms. Wortham for being that CLASSIC self-reliant and self-made individual, but the identify she embraces is in NO way associated with classic political liberalism which is more a case of "let's split the sheets down the middle" economically speaking.  Conservatives OWN the individualist identity and always have,  and while political trends show Democrats increasingly and whole-heartedly embracing the great good of free market capitalism (see Clinton and Obama), for the moment at least it's a concept most commonly associated with conservatism.

Sorry I couldn't participate on your blog to let you know about this.  Good luck on explaining you mistake.