Pundits tend to divide America in two on a tidy, linear scale: Either you're conservative or you're liberal. Differences between one conservative and another conservative can be explained by describing one as "more conservative" or "less conservative" than the other, and the same applies to liberals. And if you don't fit neatly into the conservative or liberal camp, you're described as a "moderate" or "centrist"-someone who has no particularly strong opinions on politics, favors compromises, and is highly susceptible to the cultural flavor-of-the-day.The trouble is that "conservative" includes a pretty huge spectrum of ideas, some of them great, some of them lousy-and the same applies to "liberal." You don't have to be a "centrist" to be anti-abortion ("conservative"), anti-gay rights ("conservative"), anti-war ("liberal"), anti-death penalty ("liberal"), and pro-immigrants' rights ("liberal"), for example, unless you consider the Roman Catholic Church to be a centrist organization.So whenever people start experimenting with new ways to describe political movements, I listen. In a recent article in Time magazine ("Libertarians Rising"), former Crossfire co-host Michael Kinsley-always introduced as "on the left," ironically enough-agrees that the liberal-conservative labels are a little worn out, and proposes a dichotomy that is in some ways more useful, and in some ways much less useful, than the "liberal" and "conservative" terms we're using now: Libertarians are against government in all its manifestations. Domestically, they are against social-welfare programs. They favor self-reliance (as they see it) over Big Government spending. Internationally, they are isolationists. Like George Washington, they loathe "foreign entanglements," and they think the rest of the world can go to hell without America's help. They don't care-or at least they don't think the government should care-about what people are reading, thinking, drinking, smoking or doing in bed. And what is the opposite of libertarianism? Libertarians would say fascism. But in the American political context, it is something infinitely milder that calls itself communitarianism. The term is not as familiar, and communitarians are far less organized as a movement than libertarians, ironically enough. But in general communitarians emphasize society rather than the individual and believe that group responsibilities (to family, community, nation, the globe) should trump individual rights.