In the mid-1960s Ruth and I moved from Scott County, Missouri to Appanoose County, Iowa. From a political perspective that move took us from a Democratic stronghold to what seemed to be the center of the Republican world.

Having grown up watching local elections in Missouri where Republicans didn’t even bother to file for office, I saw the same thing happening in Iowa, but this time it was the Democrats who didn’t bother to run. Some Missourians said, “I’d vote for a yellow dog if it ran on the Democratic ticket.” The same was true in Iowa, except the yellow dog was a Republican.

In Iowa I was hearing speeches and reading newspaper reports with the same words and the same perspectives I had become used to, except that those words and perspectives were coming from the candidates of the other party. Honestly, I didn’t know what to think. I remember wondering, “How can that be?” The answer didn’t come right away but, eventually, I learned that the answer was in the difference between liberals and conservatives, whichever party they belonged to.

We had moved from a Democratic region to a Republican region but both were dominated by conservatives. Conservative Democrats and conservative Republicans seemed to have more in common with each other than liberals and conservatives within the same party.

The dictionary tells us that a liberal is a person who is “broad minded, tolerant, favoring civil liberties, democratic reforms, and the use of public resources to promote social progress.” By contrast a conservative is “moderate, prudent, and favoring preservation of the existing order.” Both of those sound pretty good. However, as always, the devil is in the details.

Presidential elections in the United States over the past 30 years have been mostly between conservative Republicans and more liberal Democrats, though both parties have been growing more conservative. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and both Bushes certainly came from the conservative Republican group. One could easily argue that Carter and Clinton were more liberal than the Republicans they defeated, though both came from the more conservative branch of the Democratic Party. You would have to go all the way back to the ’60s with John Kennedy, L.B. Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey to find a real liberal who was successful in a national election.

The American public has grown more conservative over the past 30 years and, like most of the South, Anderson County has grown both more conservative and more Republican. However, with Obama and McCain running this year, a true conservative, whether Democrat or Republican, will have difficulty finding a place to hang his/her hat in this election year.

Anderson resident Mark Hopkins is the former president of three colleges, including what was then Anderson College. He is a consultant in international higher education.