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angelaisms says:

My understanding is that:

-A social conservative is one who believes everybody ought to adhere to more traditional moral values: marriage, family, dress modestly, don’t do drugs, that sort of stuff. Also referred to as the Religious Right.

-A fiscal conservative is one who wants government to spend as little money as possible.

-A classical liberal wants as little governmental interference upon individual liberties as possible. If it neither picks their pocket nor breaks their arm (to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson), they feel government has no place in legislating it.

-Independent conservative is one on which I could be wildly wrong, but this is how I understand it: Someone who wishes to conserve the principals and ideals upon which our nation was founded, but does not belong to a political party.

-Social liberals feel that those traditional values mentioned above are largely old-fashioned and outdated and should therefore be disregarded.

-Fiscal liberals loooooooooove government spending, and often think that more of it should be happening. (I have relatives in this category. There is much facepalming.)

-I hasten to add that the above definitions, save the independent conservative, are all representative of the opposite ends of the spectrum on each issue. These are not binary matters.

I understand your confusion, since words like conservative and liberal are largely contextual, and tend to be heavy on connotation and fuzzy on denotation. For big-picture purposes, the current line is drawn thusly: in the United States, conservatives want smaller, limited government, while liberals champion a larger, more intrusive government. (I know it seems horribly backwards that someone calling himself liberal would want a more restrictive government; you can blame the early 20th-century Progressives for that particular bit of cognitive dissonance, because when people started learning what Progressivism was all about, the Progs started calling themselves “liberals” instead.) If you were to draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper, Conservatives would go on the right side, Liberals on the left.

Here’s the part where it gets messy. Fiscal conservatives would be on the right, fiscal liberals on the left. But social conservatives and social liberals can be on either side of the line — is depends on whether or not they feel that their own particular brand of morality should be enforced by the government or not. If they feel their morality — whatever it may be — ought to be legislated, they belong on the left, because that’s a big intrusive government mindset; if they feel their brand of morality is best but it’s up to others to decide whether or not they agree and live accordingly, then they belong on the right, because that is a small-government mindset.

The confusion in all this is exacerbated by a legion of self-proclaimed “experts” who, when discussing matters on a political spectrum, tend to disregard everything on one side of that line we talked about earlier — and it’s by and large the right side that gets omitted entirely from the discussion. As part of a massive exercise in groupthink and projection, many prominent people assume that everyone is discussing the issue from a large-government framework; this is whence comes the idea that all conservatives are chomping at the bit to get to a theocracy, because the only conservatives included in the argument are the big-government social conservatives. It’s a false premise. One of the big obstacles of the Tea Party movement is trying to put the small-government end of the spectrum back into the national discussion; I think we’ve made some decent headway on that. After all, a few years ago I didn’t even know that smaller, limited government was even an option worth considering. 😉

I hope this answers your question.

(And thank you, Tammy, for having an edit feature on your comments. It’s a lifesaver.)