Many "conservatives" feel they have been mislabeled for a long time now, with still more damage done more recently by the manner in which the mainstream media routinely refer to Donald Trump and his MAGA acolytes as such.

I've never really felt like a "conservative," but also know that whatever I am, Trump isn't; he isn't remotely a conservative either.

Trump has thoroughly taken over the primary organizational vehicle of alleged American conservatism, the Republican Party, but because MAGA consists of little more than Trump's ephemeral whims, dislikes and quirks of the moment, that takeover occurred largely without ideological struggle.

None of those I know who claim to be part of MAGA can tell me what its underlying principles are, other than support for whatever Trump wants or does, let alone provide any definition of conservatism that would permit Trump to somehow fall into that category. More often than not, MAGA is defined by what it detests (the woke left, the "swamp," the legacy media, the "establishment," etc.), combined with an unfocused shotgun populism and a desire to reverse whatever malfeasance the Joe Biden administration was deemed guilty of.

Closing the border and reducing crime rates might be widely shared desires, but do not in and of themselves a political ideology make.

Even if we were to painstakingly parse Trump's tendencies in search of kernels of ideological content, what one would likely find--statism, corporatism, hyper-protectionism and "America First" isolationism (at least rhetorically)--would bear little resemblance to, nay, blatantly contradict, the political principles of William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, and thus what the Republican Party largely stood for in the post-World War era into the present century.

The splits currently manifesting in MAGA-land over Iran and other issues will continue to intensify because it becomes impossible to sustain a political movement without a shared coherent ideological core with which to guide positions and establish goals. If MAGA means whatever Trump says it means, then it exists only for as long as he does ("I am MAGA").

Indeed, it is Trump's dubious achievement over the past decade to both empty the Republican Party of ideological meaning (including its supposed conservatism) and to provoke the Democratic Party into becoming an ideologically more coherent (overtly socialist) one; Republicans now stand for only that which Trump (temporarily) supports, Democrats only for everything he (temporarily) opposes.

Of course, the conflation of Trump/MAGA with conservatism isn't the first time that the latter has been slandered through ideological mislabeling, since those who've taken a course in political philosophy know that Americans have spent roughly the last century or so calling people conservatives who weren't actually conservatives.

What those people are (and MAGA minions are not), properly understood, are "classical" liberals.

Classical liberalism is a political ideology that dates to David Hume, John Locke, and Adam Smith (indeed, to the Enlightenment itself). It was the belief system of the American founders who crafted a Constitution that is the closest thing the world has to an embodiment of classical liberal values.

The tenets of classical liberalism--individual freedom ("liberty"), inalienable rights (including property rights), limited government, and the rule of law ("constitutionalism," with an emphasis on constraining state power)--formed a consensus that guided our nation's development well into the 20th century, whereupon that consensus began to dissolve and our ideological labels began to become confused with the emergence of first the Progressive Movement and then the New Deal.

The arrival of the New Deal welfare state began the Democratic Party's long journey, still underway, from the founders' classical liberalism toward what could be more accurately called European socialism or "social democracy," with its hostility to market economics and emphasis upon the use of centralized, state power rather than constraints upon such.

The Republican Party of Calvin Coolidge (a genuine classical liberal) thereafter became the misnamed "conservative" party, the Democratic Party of FDR became the misnamed "liberal" party, confusing in the public mind to this day classical liberalism for conservatism and European social democracy for liberalism.

All of this used to require considerable explanation for my international students, who were baffled by the way we called our liberals conservatives and our social democrats/socialists liberals, using the labels differently than in theirs and just about every other country.

Conversely, America has never really had, with the possible exception of the Confederacy during the Civil War, a genuine "conservative" party or political movement, at least not in the European sense, with emphasis upon tradition, class distinctions, aristocratic privilege, and monarchial authority. As Louis Hartz famously argued, the lack of a feudal past meant that America and Americans were "born liberal" (again, in the classical sense).

It's probably too late to untangle this ideological label mess, to convince people that Calvin Coolidge and Milton Friedman, not FDR and LBJ, were the real liberals. Most classical liberals, after all, long ago reconciled themselves to the conservative brand and even set about making the term liberal a pejorative.

But the least we can do is not compound our error by pretending that Trump occupies the same ideological space as Goldwater and Reagan.

Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

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