Saying “the answer to the first is a qualified yes” is just playing to your confirmation bias.

Perlstein’s use is consistent with one I once heard Diane Rehm using in describing her own evidence-and-reality based liberalism. It seems to me that the use of it by many who call themselves “conservative” is to provide a dyametrically-opposing contrast to their own views, which are not actually conservative at all in the classical sense of the English political tradition, nor even consistent with the Republican conservative tradition up until the absorption of a huge percentage of what used to be called Dixiecrats into the Republican party over the period from when the Barry Goldwater campaign offered them a home with his John Birchers and other reactionary radicals and when Ronald Reagan symbolically reached out to them in his own initial campaign in 1980 – those events framing and containing the passage of and reactions to that of the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

So, the question arises as to the nature of the “differently (use) by different people” of the term “liberal”, to which I would say this: for the most part, those who call THEMSELVES liberals mean it, more or less, in that classic enlightenment sense of Perlstein, and Rehm, and academic historians (well, academic just about everything, not just historians), whereas the use of it coming from the mouths and pens of current self-styled conservatives is to identify a group associated with politics and policies and programs which the bundle of not-actually-classical-conservative-but-instead-reactionary interests making up much of the current support for the Republican party derogate (in the sense of standing for government enforcement of equal civil rights regardless of gender and skin color, government programs aimed at assuring minimum health standards and educational opportunities regardless of ability of people or their parents to pay, etc.).

I think Perlstein WAS saying that it’s that so-called “history” of that faction of self-styled “conservatives” who are in fact radical reactionaries that is wrong-headed, and that by implication, even though he did not state it precisely, he was allowing for the distinction Michael Brady raises. It’s many of those classicial conservatives who formerly voted Republican because that party listened to and reflected their views who now, I think, constitute an important support group for Candidate Obama in 2008 and presumably Candidae President Obama in 2012, one towards which he seems a lot more sympathetic than to the group he and his political aides characterize as the “professional left” – and one that may in fact be both larger in numbers than that last group, and certainly closer to the mushy middle of moderates and centrists that are open to voting either Republican or Democratic depending on pillar issues like the economy and how they feel about the wars du jour.

Thus, while I do think the phenomenons Michael Brady noted were present, I do not think they have the least effect on the accuracy and value of the observations of Rick Perlstein.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_compromise

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1875

So yes, our Republican founders did fight against slavery and one could argue Revere did warn the British that our militia was waiting for them, it was documented when the Red Coats stopped him on his ride out of Boston. However, I’m not sure she meant to say it that way, but all politicians gaffe regularly, so this point is moot (unless you exploit every gaffe to further an agenda…).

Fact of the matter is that these people must, of necessity, focus on their primary job: getting elected. It leaves little room for anything else. It’s the problem with modern politics (or one of them, anyway) – getting elected is the goal. Governing (or opposing) is just a tool to that end, rather than getting elected being a tool toward governing.

The other major crime of modern politics is that politicians and their spinmeisters and analysts have convinced us that everything is political. Fact is, politicians of all stripes make stupid mistakes about history, precisely because history is one thing they don’t want to acknowledge even exists. If they did, they’d have to confront the question of why they think their policies, which were tried 10 or 25 or 50 or 100 years ago and didn’t work then, will work now.

When facts – whether scientific or historical – have become at best tools to be manipulated to increase a politician’s chance of election, and at worst something to be avoided and denied, then your culture is dying.