Liberals and Conservatives don't exist

Of course liberals and conservatives exist. They at least exist as subjective concepts. As far as skewing or manipulating attention... I have no idea what it means to skew an attention.

The words "liberal" and "conservative" are part of the narrative of the United States. We share a common understanding of what these words mean. If you took ten politicians and asked 1000 Americans to lump them into these two categories, I think you widespread agreement that Bernie Sanders is liberal and Steve King is conservative.

I think the point you are making is really about the narratives that are part of our public discussions and debates. Each side presents its case. Proponents of each issue have the right to express their narratives as they see fit.

Often the broad categories express coalitions... and any important progress on any issue involves coalitions. The use of simple words to express broad ideas and general agreement among political allies is part of the process.

This is a natural part of a politics in a modern democracy.

Yes to the latter portion of that sentence. People self-identify in these categories. Liberal and conservative were terms invented by newspapermen in England after 1830, and liberal was used in the traditonal sense of someone who was generous, and conservative in the sense of those who resist change.

The terms have become shibboleths in the United States. They are not simply used to manipulate, but to get people to support ideas, whether or not those ideas are actually good for them, or for the nation. And people get suckered by them every time. Conservatives whine about freedom all the time, but what is really being asked of them is to support license. Capitalists do not want to be hindered in the pursuit of the bottom line, and conservative demagogues can whip up support for measures which actually harm the people who support them, such as opposition to environmental or work safety legislation.

So-called liberals are no better, and they are victimized by their own demagogues just as routinely. For example, liberals agitated for the windfall profits tax at the time of the Arab oil embargo, but the provisions of the bill were not closely examined, and since it only taxed domestic production, it had the effect of making us more dependent on imported oil--why should domestic oil companies spend money on exploration and exploitation of domestic sources when they would be taxed, but weren't taxed on imported oil?

These labels are indeed too vague, and they are indeed used to manipulate people.

I took the Nolan test and discovered I'm a librarian, er, Libertarian.

Your answers suggest that you are a centrist. The yellow star shows more precisely where you fall within the centrist region of the Nolan chart.

leaning to the left

this makes me happy, since i can comfortably still hate all major political parties

centrist

star heading left -- if there was any doubt

Sorry Dys, I have never thought of you as a centrist. There is a very big gap between Dennis Kucinich and Joe Lieberman.

People do tend to clump into groups with similar preferences, but I think that there are a lot more political clusters than just "liberal" and "conservative".

GW Bush, for example, was socially conservative, economical liberal (just borrow the money!), and militarily aggressive.

Clinton was socially moderate, economically moderate, and militarily conservative.

Gee, wadda do you know. Im a liberal!

yeah, weird ain't it? I consider chicago joe as a conservative. so it goes. perhaps it's my diet.

I guess I'm just objecting to the ambiguity of it all. Many people out there who accuse one person or another of being a Liberal or Conservative, don't even have consistent definitions of what those categories are. And almost everyone who classifies themselves as one or the other, has particular issues which cross over the lines.

And to make matters worse, the political parties themselves have changed over time to encompass different combinations of issues within each general category and then used the labels to brand the people they object to.

Even though people may lean toward one classification or another, almost nobody lands squarely into a particular category even if the categories themselves can be firmly defined.

Maybe it's just me. I'm annoyed by something in this whole mess and I can't quite put my finger on it. It seems dysfunctional.

I'm such a sucker for this kind of test.

Libertarian, with the little yellow box straight above centrist.

(I love all the variations I get on these - usually some variation of libertarian, but the variations can be amusing)

We had a joker here who started a thread about socialists. We kept asking him to define socialist. Eventually, no one wanted to post any longer unless he provided a definition of socialist.

He never returned to answer the question, and, mercifully, the thread died.

I agree with rosborne re: the uselessness and probably insidiousness of insisting on putting ourselves (Americans especially) in one camp or another and standing by it.

That said, I took that damn test -- which I distrusted throughout -- and it put me pretty much where, if pressed, I'd put myself: liberal, but close to the libertarian corner with centrist. But what of that? When I look at an issue, to I consult the manual and ask, "What does a marginally liberal with libertarian inclinations think about that?" At election time, do I look on the ballot for the libertarioliberocentrist candidate?

So, if I was going to describe my outlook...

*I'm basically socialist when it comes to distribution of social services -- including guarantees to an acceptable minimum of housing, nutrition, education, and medical care;
*I really like the interstate freeway system and would like to see a revival of rail for purveyance of passengers and freight;
*I think the power of the executive to wage war without an actual declaration from Congress is deplorable, especially given the results we've had in this arena since WWII;
*I think the criminalization of most illicit drugs is more harmful to society than use of the drugs themselves;
*I don't have strongly feelings about gun control except for the role that the widespread availability of handguns plays in the carnage associated with the criminalization of drugs;
*Unrestrained economic growth is predicated upon ever-increasing levels of consumption, a model that is untenable and is likely to result in continuing ecologic devastation, though I frankly expect that any elected government is powerless to curtail this process, which I consider to be an essentially biological trait of our species -- and curtailment thereof is, at least in a practical sense, completely at odds with the first item on this list;
*The fourth estate is FUBAR, possibly FUBB, and is both a result and an ongoing cause of the novelty-crazed, self-indulgent and self-interested state of the American public.

But I'm basically a Malthusian when it comes to our (not so) distant future, and as such I find it impossible to buy into any of the messages of "hope" delivered by any candidate for elected office. Because no one's going to be elected on a platform of, "Well, we're all basically fucked in the long run, but in the short term maybe we can at least try to be good sports to the (born or made) losers of this sociopoliticoeconomic game and maybe try to make sure we don't completely destroy the playing field in the process."


Another thought: if you put Dennis Kucinich and Pat Buchanan in a room together for a year and forced them to come up up with a credo they could both agree on, I might be into it.

Oh ok, I don't even know what I'm complaining about any more.

Someone posts a thread asking Liberals why they want to dismantle the 2nd amendment. They don't.

Someone else implies that Conservatives want to destroy the ecosystem with CO2. They don't.

Someone else claims that Liberals like to eat live babies. They don't. (well, there's always a few crazies...)

And others like to believe that Conservatives want to start wars and take over the planet. They don't.

These strawmen don't exist. They are exaggerated stereotypes given the appropriate label to try to brand a general classification with a narrow behavior. Maybe what I'm complaining about is that the labels, Conservative and Liberal are being used to name strawmen which don't exist, and only serve to confuse and misguide people's impressions.

The ambiguity belongs to the centrists. I am a proud American liberal. There is nothing ambiguous about that.

I want well-funded government programs that work paid for by taxes that are higher for the rich then for the poor. I believe in a regulation of the economy that provides a fair distribution of wealth. I want socialized medicine and government funded education for all.

I think war is bad and families (of whatever make or model) are good. I believe that religion should be protected from government and kept out of government. I believe in civil rights, and same-sex marriage and abortion rights. I think minorities should be protected from hate crimes and the diversity should be celebrated.

I think that science, including evolution, should be taught in schools and that global warming should be taken seriously. I believe in strong unions and worker rights. I believe that Corporations are not people and that immigrants are people.

There... do you still think liberals don't exist?

The thing is, I do think they exist, because life imitates art. There really are dittoheads and -- well, whatever the equivalent is on the "left" -- because a lot of people find it easier to accept what's handed to them as their spate of beliefs than develop their own.

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