next »

[acrimone]

I have just heard PYSHNOV say he's a liberal, and have heard some pot-smokin' libertarian call himself a conservative. 

So yes, I have to agree with many who say that the problem is the labels -- "liberal" and "conservative" aren't terribly useful, particularly if you are relying on self-identification.  Pretty much everyone considers themselves a centrist because human beings are not tools of absolute measurement: we measure relations.  We see people on both sides of us (politically speaking) and assume we're in the middle.  We are also keenly aware of the nuances in our own thought, while we (necessarily) cariacature the positions of others, so that we might think of ourselves as a thoughtful, reluctant, morally conflicted pro-choice advocate, but we know that those pro-lifers just want to put shackles on women's wombs nonetheless.

One of the more mellow (except on Israel issues) conservative public intellectuals, Dennis Prager, put together a well-intentioned and serious list of the ideological characteristics of modern liberalism, which he naturally considers somewhat bad.  I've adapted the list slightly, made it a little less snarky, made some changes and deletions, and created a separate list for conservative values.  I consider this a work in progress, so suggestions are welcome.

Just go through this, figure out what you agree and disagree with, and ask yourself if you have a realistic sense of your own political position, because when I hear Pyshnov call himself a liberal... what I'm hearing is "liberal" in the old-school John F. Kennedy sense, which by any measure is essentially a conservative today.

Liberal Positions

• University admissions and hiring at fire departments, etc., should take race into account in order to increase access to people of color.
• Bilingual education for children of immigrants is prefferable to English immersion because it demonstrates a respect for the immigrant's culture.
• The Death Penalty is always wrong.
• During the Cold War, America should have adopted a nuclear arms freeze.
• Colleges should not allow ROTC programs.
• It was wrong to wage war against Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War.
• Poor parents should not be allowed to have vouchers to send their children to private schools.
• It is good that trial lawyers and teachers unions are the two biggest contributors to the Democratic Party.
• Marriage should be redefined from male-female to any two people.
• A married couple should not have any more of a right to adopt a child than two men or two women.
• The Boy Scouts should not be allowed to use parks or any other public places and should be prohibited from using churches and synagogues for their meetings because they are a discriminatory organization.
• The present high tax rates are good, and a little more might be better.
• Speech codes on college campuses designed to prevent racist, sexist, or other discriminatory speech are, all other things being equal, good things because they promote a safe and welcoming environment.
• The Israelis and Palestinians are morally equivalent.
• The United Nations is a moral force for good in the world, and a moral authority with respect to its members.
• America should be subservient to international institutions as a world court.
• It is good that colleges have been forced to drop hundreds of men's sports programs to comply with Title IX.
• No abortions can be labeled immoral.
• Restaurants should be prohibited by law from allowing customers to choose between a smoking and a non-smoking section.
• It is the proper role of Government to distribute the capital of society in an equitable and fair manner.
• Prostitution is a victimless crime and should not be illegal.
• High schools should make condoms available to students and teach them how to use them.
• Racial profiling for terrorists is wrong -- a white American grandmother should as likely be searched as a Saudi young male.
• Racism and poverty -- not a lack of fathers and a crisis of values -- are the primary causes of violent crime in the inner city.
• It is wrong and unconstitutional for students to be told, "God bless you" at their graduation.
• No culture is morally superior to any other.
• Children are the future of society, and society itself has a duty to ensure that they are properly raised if the parents are not willing to do so.

Conservative Positions

• Color-blindness should be public policy with regard to race, even if it prevents the government from being able to deal with certain types of private discrimination.
• Every citizen of the United States should be able to speak English.
• Retribution is a perfectly legitimate justification for punishment.
• The United States was morally superior, on an institutional level, to the USSR.
• It would be, overall, a good thing if my child joined the Armed Forces.
• Men and women are, generally speaking, different in more ways than just physical plumbing.
• Taxes are ridiculously high at their current levels.
• Teachers' Unions have played a large part in essentially destroying the public school system, and at the end of the day they are far more concerned with their members than with their members' students.
• Marriage is an expression of the unique dynamic between a man and a woman, a dynamic that is, all other things being equal, better for the raising of children.
• Tradition is a perfectly legitimate reason to do something.
• A person can be a racist, a sexist, or a homophobe and still be a good person on balance with a great deal to contribute to society and to his or her fellow citizens.
• Financial entitlements such as Welfare and Social Security breed dependence and hurt the recipients more than they help.
• Sticks and stones can break my bones but names can never hurt me.
• Israel is a morally better country than most of its neighbors.
• The United Nations is has the moral authority of its membership, which is comprised in great part of thugs and dictators.
• Loyalty is its own form of virtue, irrespective of what informs it.
• There is nothing wrong with the fact that men and women can be interested in different things, leading to situations where there might be more female elementary school teachers, and more male math professors.
• Children should be taught to love their country for its good qualities first, and faced with the more morally questionable parts of its past later when they are more sophisticated intellectually.
• Abortion is the killing of a human being -- whether it is justified or not is a separate issue. 
• Licentiousness and promiscuity should be discouraged even if they cannot be prevented.
• Violence solves a lot of things.
• The United States was founded based on Judeo-Christian values.
• There is nothing wrong with a limited degree of ceremonial religion in the public sphere (i.e., non-denominational morning prayers in schools) so long as no one is compelled to participate or punished for failure to participate.
• Parents should have total authority over their children unless the child's life is at stake.

[draco]

Wow.  That's quite a list of positions for what makes someone liberal vs. conservative.  I'm not going to address each one point by point.  Suffice it to say that my beliefs would draw from both sides, as you have described them. 

I agree that labels are pretty useless.  I vote for candidates, not for a party, though the recent religious extremism among Republicans has kept me voting for them.  I'm not a one issue voter, but some issues are more important than others.  For example, I feel strongly about environmental issues, but I could care less how someone feels about the death penalty.

Finally, I'm surprised you would take pyshnov's comments at face value...I learned that lesson a while ago.

[tenured_feminist]

Part of the problem is the plasticity of liberalism in the United States, as Louis Hartz showed pretty definitively so long ago. By some definitions of liberal, one can incorporate Catharine MacKinnon. By others, one can incorporate Ward Conerly. I like Greenstone's approach of understanding liberalism as a set of boundary conditions, which renders it a bit more intelligible to me at least, but also makes it pretty broad and not very useful for mapping political parties, for instance.

I don't think there really are that many coherent ideologies in contemporary American politics, with the possible exceptions on the extremes.  For instance, is federalism a conservative doctrine? Yes if you're talking commerce clause, but what about medical marijuana and allowing states to adopt same-sex marriage?

It's interesting how many political standpoints do map and correspond around identity issues, though. In several periods of American history, partisan identity could either be readily grasped through the major issues concerning race and/or class (and very secondarily gender) or were themselves defined by and linked to race (think the Free Soilers, the Ku Klux Klan when it was participating as a legitimate political organization, and in some regards the contemporary Republican Party).

Perhaps it would be a more useful exercise for us to label ourselves with whatever level of nuance and care that we wish and see what kind of map we develop.

[husqvarna]

Interesting list.  As tenured_feminist says I think it would vary widely from time to time and group to group whether these points line up with the label.  A few comments:

- Any statements made about violence, the military, nuclear arms, or capital punishment should be made very carefully.  These are perhaps more easily visible in today's party politics, but if you think about even the most conservative Catholic, they often fall into the "liberal" category on some of these issues.  Same with pacifist anabaptists.  I know the religious outlooks better, but I'm sure this is the case in other sectors of society as well.  I think you can find a large amount of otherwise "conservative" people who stand just as much on these "liberal" values without finding them at all an exception to their overall view.

A person can be a racist, a sexist, or a homophobe and still be a good person on balance with a great deal to contribute to society and to his or her fellow citizens.

I would be careful with this one.  I think the vast majority of conservatives think no differently about the evil of racism, sexism, and homophobia than liberals.  Now, what each considers racism, sexism, and homophobia may be very different as well, but that's no reason to attribute acceptance of these vices to conservatives.  Just because a conservative does not believe in affirmative action, or holds to particular gender roles, or thinks that homosexuality is immoral does not mean that they adhere to anything like what this point has said.  I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a conservative who would agree to this phrasing.

Finally, on the abortion issue, I think both the liberal and conservative description may not hit it so well.  There are plenty of liberals out there who find some forms of abortion immoral... I don't think this detracts from the general liberal acceptance of the practice.  In addition, I think that some conservatives may speak in an even more absolute sense than you have included on your list... there are many who certainly would not separate the justification of abortion from the fact that it is killing- it would be unacceptable for whatever reason.

But good list!  I'm trying to think of something else to add... maybe I'll return later to do so.

[acrimone]

A person can be a racist, a sexist, or a homophobe and still be a good person on balance with a great deal to contribute to society and to his or her fellow citizens.

I would be careful with this one.  I think the vast majority of conservatives think no differently about the evil of racism, sexism, and homophobia than liberals.  Now, what each considers racism, sexism, and homophobia may be very different as well, but that's no reason to attribute acceptance of these vices to conservatives.  Just because a conservative does not believe in affirmative action, or holds to particular gender roles, or thinks that homosexuality is immoral does not mean that they adhere to anything like what this point has said.  I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a conservative who would agree to this phrasing.

Hmmm.  What I was trying to get at isn't so much the idea that conservatives accept these vices, merely that they don't view them as definitively corrupting, necessarily tainting and rendering useless all of another person's gifts and accomplishment.  Liberals are, and I could be wrong here, but I think more likely to identify Thomas Jefferson primarily as a slaveowner rather than a philosopher or statesman, more likely to identify Wagner primarily as a racist and antisemite, etc.  There's something about the modern liberal (perhaps leftist might be a better word?) take on discrimination that turns it from a mere sin into a sort of heresy or blasphemy that outweighs any good a person might have done or might be doing; I was just trying to express the idea that conservatives are going to be more willing to hire an brilliant engineer who happens to be a gross racist when they need their bridge built, even if they wouldn't invite the bastard over for dinner.

I'll think about how to better phrase that.

[husqvarna]

Fair enough, acrimone.  I don't even know if you'd have to rephrase to get across the point of what you said- probably I read it incorrectly more than anything.  I still don't know whether I'd agree that this is the case- for liberals or conservatives- but I'd have to think on it more.

[acrimone]

I also agree about the plasticity of the terms, and how difficult it can be to pin them down.  I was just trying to create a "snapshot" of the terms from the 1980's to today (roughly).  And it's just a rough snapshot... there's not a single person who is going to be all on one list or another.  (Or if there is, I probably don't want to know.)  But I think it's fair to say that if you agree with 75% of the conservative list, and only 15% of the liberal list, that you're not a liberal, and aren't really a centrist either -- that in today's political climate you are, regardless of who you vote for -- a conservative.

But as for voting candidates/party -- I'm not really interested in who people vote for.  I'm more interested in what people believe.  This isn't about "voting" conservative or liberal, this is about "being" conservative or liberal. 

Also - judging people by whom they vote for is putting the cart before the horse; I don't think that you're conservative if you vote for conservative candidates (there's too much that goes in to an individual decision that can skew it), but rather that a candidate is conservative if he is supported -- in general -- by a lot of conservatives, however you want to define those terms.

[larryc]

Shouldn't you be in church this morning, you secular atheistic immoral heretic you?

[acrimone]

No.  I've been excommunicated.

[tenured_feminist]

If the burr under your saddle is willingness to dismiss an entire person on the basis of that person's holding some position with which you happen to disagree, Acrimone, I don't think liberals as you define them have cornered that particular market. Your conservatives just have a different set of hot button issues.  Imagine a real conservative saying, "nice guy, except that he supports abortion on demand."

[acrimone]

If the burr under your saddle is willingness to dismiss an entire person on the basis of that person's holding some position with which you happen to disagree, Acrimone, I don't think liberals as you define them have cornered that particular market. Your conservatives just have a different set of hot button issues.  Imagine a real conservative saying, "nice guy, except that he supports abortion on demand."

That's thing... I really do think conservatives are more likely to say "Nice guy, but he supports abortion on demand."  They're much more analytical (as opposed to synthetic, not as opposed to "stupid") about people and beliefs.

Look at Giuliani... he's ahead in some polls, and close by in others.  Can you imagine a Democrat who hemmed and hawed about civil rights and school desegregation leading in Presidential polls the way Giuliani and the abortion two-step is doing?

I mean, there's Robert Byrd, I suppose, but he's not running for President.

[tenured_feminist]

Clinton and the DLC sure got away with retrenching an awful lot of cherished lefty positions and didn't much pay for it. Last time I checked, Joe Lieberman was still a card-carrying Democrat. And I think Guiliani's going nowhere fast once the word gets out among Christian conservatives about some of the more, uh, colorful elements in his profile.

At this point in the presidential race, name recognition is pretty important, but name recognition alone doesn't mean that likely voters know anything about the candidates' substantive positions. A lot of Guiliani's support is probably linked to people's lingering impressions of him immediately post 9/11. His abortion two-step will ultimately leave him with both feet in deep doo with the Republican base most likely to vote in primaries.

[larryc]

The phrase "The personal is political" originated on the left (in 70s feminist circles I think). It has been my overwhelming experience that people on the left are far less comfortable working or socializing with people who disagree with them than are people on the right. You cannot attend a faculty cocktail party and make a statement opposing abortion and leave with as many friends as you had when you came. 

Why is this? I think the answer lies in how each side explains the other.  Conservatives think that liberalism is the result of an intellectual failing.  Liberals, in the conservative world view, don't understand the world properly. They think that wealth is created by the government, that people can behave properly without religion, and that their cats love them. They are to a certain degree childish, but can be quite loveable at times.

Liberals on the other hand think conservatism is a result of a moral flaw. Conservatives lack empathy and perhaps even a conscience. They do not care about other human beings, and so are motivated by only the basest desires--usually money but also power and a fear of anything different.  They are not only wrong, but bad.

Both sides are absolutely correct.

[eddie_haskell]

"Licentiousness"?  Is that really still an issue?  Seems to me the true definition of licentiousness is I am having more fun than you are.

[anthroid]

The problem, of course, is that none of the Democratic candidates are liberals as outlined by Acrimone.  Almost all of them have been willing to see the party move to the right, so that Clinton (can we please stop calling her "Hillary" and call everyone else by his last name?) speaks with pride about wanting to make abortion, safe, legal, and rare.  Hardly the babykiller.  Obama doesn't approve of same-sex marriage.  John Edwards is the closest to this list, I think.  Richardson isn't, and I don't remember who else is running, since, quite frankly, it doesn't matter.

As well, Acrimone, I think your statement that conservatives see liberalism as an intellectual flaw is wrong.  Conservatives find as much morally wrong with the liberal position as the liberals find with the conservative one, in my experience.  At the same time, liberals find conservatives to be ignorant of some clear facts (evolution, for instance) and thus they do make intellectual judgments as well as moral ones.

I also have to say that by and large liberals are not the moralistic secularists that you argue.  In fact, in my judgment, one of the biggest problems with the left is its unwillingness to get all Ann Coulterish and really go down and dirty with conservatives. 

Finally, your continual reference to "high taxes" is disingenuous and not worthy of you.  Our tax rates are actually relatively low in comparison to other industrialized societies.  You may think you can slip that in but...

As for where I fall in this discussion, I am unabashedly leftish, pretty far beyond this list in some ways, though there are some things I don't much care about and other things are just incorrect statements (I don't know too many liberals, at this juncture, who thought the Gulf War was wrong...).