'Contemporary Liberals'

When I pound on liberals, it is contemporary liberals who I have on my chopping block, not classical liberals or liberals from circa 1960.  Call the latter paleo-liberals or old-time liberals.  My brand of conservatism incorporates the best of their views.  My conservatism is distinctively American; it is not of the 'throne and altar' variety.

But 'contemporary liberal' is ambiguous.  It could refer to an old-time liberal with respect to some or all of the issues who just happens to flourish in the present, or it could refer to one who espouses contemporary liberalism, that species of aberrant political ideology increasingly indistinguishable from, and ever on the slouch toward, hard leftism.

I mean 'contemporary liberal' in the second  sense. Accordingly, 'contemporary' in 'contemporary liberal' as I use the phrase modifies the liberalism of the liberal and not the liberal.  The cynosure of my disapprobation  is contemporary liberalism or progressivism or leftism.  Finer distinctions can be made as needed.  And no one outdoes the philosopher when it comes to drawing distinctions.  For one of his mottoes is:

Distinguo ergo sum.