Liberals–don’t want you to have any guns or money.
Conservatives–don’t want you to have any sex or dope.
I think that this is really the crux of it all. I have friends of all different political stripes, but they pretty much have the same basic values, and none of those values involve hoping that people starve or suffer, or hoping that they will get ahead at the expense of someone else. I think that both “sides” believe that their plan will achieve the most success for the greatest number of people. And I think that both sides have legitimate reasons to believe that their philosophy is superior in that regard.
Speaking as a moderately conservative guy, this seems about right.
So does this! 
Going back to the juxtaposition posited in the OP…
Bracketing off for the moment the historical meanings of “liberal” versus “conservative”, and also whatever other factors may play a major role in the modern US incarnation of the political meaning of those terms…
I do think there is a central difference in attitude towards competition.
There exists an attitude that economic strife is a fair contest, the rules are adequately spelled out, and that there is plenty of opportunity to get ahead and ‘win’ if one applies one’s self, and that if one fails to do so, not only does one deserve no better than economic ruin and failure for that reason alone, one also deserves no better because, by failing to strive and compete, one has deprived the rest of society of one’s best efforts. I would call that attitude conservative.
There exists a very different attitude, that economic strife is an unfair contest, that the rules are not adequately explained, that the starting line is not identical for all participants, that the struggles of economic competition do not, in fact, reward the hard worker, the conscientiously responsible, the brilliant inventor, or the important contributor to society; instead, the rules reward the winners of the last round and gives those winners such an enormous boost over any other competitors in this round that quality of work and quantity of work and works of genius have only a negligible effect on the outcome. And that beyond a certain threshold, for the winners, it is almost entirely their money making their money and not anything that they do aside from investing their money, and at a certain threshold beyond that it becomes so effortless to concentrate yet more money with one’s money that one would have to actively conspire at losing it to keep from making a substantial profit. Therefore, with the economic system making as little sense as that in terms of who ends up suffering in poverty and need, it is important to take care of each other, and at least minimize the hardships of having lost out in economic competition, and quit blaming the victims of it. I would call that attitude liberal.
The conservative attitude towards the liberal is that such attempts to ameliorate the mechanisms of the economic system have the effect of throwing sand in the gears; that, rather than simply help out the less fortunate, the redistributive policies of liberals take away the assets of the winners and hand them over to the losers, thus dulling the lure of reward from the activities that might lift them out of their backwaters into a more successful situation; instead, they get rewarded for giving up and awaiting handouts, which are not sufficient grants to impel them out of poverty yet remove the prod of scarcity enough that they are not motivated to make the difficult initial effort. Yes, say the conservatives, it is a much harder slog when you are poor to make the same dollar as when you are rich, and perhaps that is a bad thing, but whatever unfairnesses may lurk in capitalism, redistributing the winnings as the liberals are wont to do is not a very good solution.
The radical attitude towards the liberal is roughly identical: putting Band-Aids on the free market system isn’t gonna fix the problem. The entire system of rewards for effort and contributions to society and distribution of goods and property et al needs to be scrapped and replaced with something different, the free market is entirely based on competition, and unlike playing soccer or poker or grand-theft auto, real competition in a game you can’t walk away from is not fun, it’s dog-eat-dog and it is aggressive and is intrinsically calculated to hurt other people as a means of improving matters for one’s self.
Me, I consider myself a conservative radical. My response to the radical would be: “I agree. Let’s see your design. Let’s test your design and verify that it works and would yield a pleasant life, with freedom for everyone (at least no less than we have now), trains still running on time (at least as much so as they do now), but with more equality than the free market system provides. THEN, if it does, and ONLY then, we start thinking about ripping down what we’ve got.” Somehow recycled Marxism doesn’t cut it, and doesn’t look much different to me than the liberal Band-Aids. So I can see the wisdom and the foolishness in both sides of the conventional liberal-conservative argument.
As someone else said, I think this is about as good as it gets for describing the general mindsets, while ignoring some of the fringe groups (like the religious right). Props to Bosstone.
For my own contribution, my dad use to love quoting Winston Churchill saying “Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.” While perhaps a little harsh in how it is stated, I think it’s another fundamental difference between liberalism and conservativism.
To give an example of what I mean, lets look at the common argument about taxation. In general, liberals favor progressive taxes that make the richer people pay more. Everyone deserves to live a good quality of life, and because taxation hits poorer people harder, it effects the quality of life of the rich less. Thus, it’s fair because it effects the quality of life for the poorest people the most while still not having much of an impact on the quality of life of the rich.
On the other side, conservatives tend to favor less progressive, or even flat taxes that have the rich paying closer to the same percentage of taxes as the poor. Everyone deserves to reap the fruit of their labor, and so people should not be punished by having heavier taxes just because they’re more successful. Thus, it’s fair because the people who work harder get the better quality of life they deserve, and the people that don’t work as hard have incentive to work harder.
Of course, the criticisms are obvious. The liberals accuse the conservatives of being heartless because it effectively punishes people just for being poor and doesn’t account for any number of special cases where people are poor for reasons beyond their control. The conservatives accuse the liberals of being idiots, because their taxation doesn’t provide any incentive for people to work as hard and it damages the economy by putting more tax burden on the people that own the businesses and invest to create jobs and such.
I think this approach also helps explain a number of other key issues like why liberals are more concerned with the rights of minorities and universal healthcare and why conservatives are more concerned with things like gun rights and business.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that liberalism and conservativism aren’t opposite concepts, they’re orthogonal ones that come to opposing points of view through completely different lines of reasoning. Or maybe I’m just digging too deeply into it.
I would describe the difference between liberals and conservatives this way.
Imagine two nations. In the first nation, everyone earns $1000 a week. In the second nation, the poorest earn $2000 a week, the middle class earns $20,000, and the richest earn $200,000. Liberals prefer the first nation over the second, valuing equality. Conservatives prefer the second, valuing opportunity.
Liberals believe government should focus on helping those likely to fail. Conservatives believe government should focus on not hindering those likely to succeed.
I’ll take a stab…
Liberals want to feel socially unrestricted and economically secure.
Conservatives want to feel socially secure and economically unrestricted.
Since we’ve brought up Scandinavia, I thought I’d mention that, apparently, Sweden does not give government funded kidney dialysis to people over 55 (out of cost/benefit analysis). However, they also will not let people pay for it out of their own pockets because they believe that “wealth should not be a factor in longevity.” As a conservative, I found this viewpoint completely foreign and disgusting. I simply could not understand why anyone would come to the conclusion that the rich should not be able to use their money to help themselves as much as possible. Why else would they value being rich?
Not only that, but it just felt wrong on a gut level. It also reminds me of reactions over the issues of euthanasia and abortion and the point that aborted babies would otherwise have been a drain on society.
So perhaps conservatives value extending human life over the good of the community, and liberals value the good of the whole over the life of an individual, coupled with the liberal viewpoint that the wealthy are just the same as the poor and deserve no extra privileges.
Actually, I think that’s the single most important underlying issue: conservatives think the wealthy in a free market society are “better” people, and liberals think the wealthy are either soulless and greedy or simply poor people in different circumstances.
More broadly, conservatives think a man in a free society defines his circumstances, while liberals think the circumstances defines the man.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
ETA: I was thinking of the issue of capital punishment and why conservatives support it, but oppose other “life-taking” measures: conservatives place a distinction between guilty life and innocent life, thinking guilty life has become subhuman and forfeited its right to exist. Liberals do not make this distinction, or at least, not as often. This also explains why conservatives are generally more hawkish.
Liberals view the world as they wish it were.
Conservatives view the world as it is.
This is one of the most embarrassingly ignorant threads in the history of the SDMB, really. I mean, I know it’s IMHO, but it’s telling how virtually the entire thread is nothing but US-centric partisan baloney.
Politics is inevitably local. General terms like “liberal” and “conservative” are going to mean different things in different countries. And mean different things to different parties. For such a subjective topic, there’s very little that’s objective.
Feel free to add your own opinion instead of complaining about ours.
<sigh> Ok. Fine. The conservative/liberal divide comes out of differing approaches to the Enlightenment; specifically, the questions of whether rights are universal or specific, and whether societal relationships are organic or mechanistic.
Liberals, like Locke in England and Rousseau in France argued that rights were universal…people had rights simply by being people, and that society was mechanistic…people’s relationships were based on rational self interest and implied social contracts.
Conservatives, like Ireland’s Edmund Burke, said that rights were particular and customary…a group had rights because they were traditionally allowed to exercise those rights…so we could talk about “The rights of Englishmen” or “The rights of the city of whatever”, but talking about universal human rights was a meaningless statement. Further, society was organic: human beings naturally form societies, there are naturally people fit to govern and those unfit, and everyone has a place.
These two philosophies both developed (and in English speaking countries, tended to develop into the Liberal and Conservative Parties, respectfully).
Time passed, the American and French Revolutions (both sparked by liberal revolutionary movements in those countries) happened, industrialization happened, the liberal revolutions of 1848 happened, and some liberals got concerned with the the state of affairs under capitalism and industrialization. Capitalism, which was, according to liberal thought, supposed to raise the standard of living and reduce inequality, was leading to, as they saw it, more inequality, as the lower socioeconomic classes were suffering at the hands of industrialization, and the living conditions for factory workers were, at best, minimal. This led to the growth of yet another political movement, socialism, and along with it, trade unionism, which sought to organize industrial workers, and to improve their condition and correct the flaws of capitalism through both collective bargaining and government action to help the poor and limit the powers of buisnesses. This movement led to the development of the Labour parties in most English speaking countries, the NDP in Canada, and the Socialists and Social Democrats in most of Europe.
The United States, meanwhile, lacked a traditional conservative party after the fall of the Federalists. An independent Socialist party never really developed for various reasons, and so trade unionists tended to gravitate to the Democratic party (in part, because the would be socialists and trade union leaders were largely immigrant, and the Democrats, who tended to be strong in the cities, were more friendly to immigrants than the more nativist Republicans). It’s more complicated than that, obviously, and the story’s a lot more nuanced, but it’s late and I’m tired. 
You know it’s in IMHO, but you are totally incapable of making an appropriate post for this thread, posting this type of post in The BBQ Pit, or refraining from posting altogether?
Next time, try harder.
It stems from the association between moral virtue and financial success which has been embedded in American culture from the time of the Puritans.
In What’s the Matter with Kansas, and The Wrecking Crew, Thomas Frank explores in depth the contradictions between the the government policies conservatives think they’re voting for, and the government policies they actually get.
According to Frank, when Republicans are in power, at least at the national level, they never actually deliver on the promises of conservative government. They always end up increasing government spending, running budget defecits, and using the public treasury to enrich well connected private individuals.
They talk a good game about patriotism and military strength, but they repeatedly fund useless weapons systems, and underfund resources for the actual troops. It goes without saying that the Republican establishment sees actual military men as fools and poor white trash.
Their social conservatism tends also to be fraudulent, the do as I say, not as I do, variety. They get divorces, use drugs, have gay sex, use prostitutes, don’t attend church, etc. They just participate in the charade because it gets them votes.
Conservatives: Pretty much everyone has the opportunity to succeed. Those who don’t succeed are generally not taking advantage of those opportunities. “If I succeed, it’s probably because I’m good.”
Liberals: Many people have not had the opportunity to succeed. Those who do succeed are generally advantaged in some way. “If I succeed, it’s probably because I’m fortunate.”
The precise wording would vary from person to person, but I think this is the gist of it for me.
Really? :dubious:
I don’t think it’s fair to attribute this view to liberals. If you want to get technical, the intellectual father of modern welfare liberalism, John Rawls, explicitly allows inequalities if they benefit the least well off, as they clearly do in your hypothetical scenario. And you’d be hard-pressed to find someone more liberal than Rawls.
I read somewhere that one basic divide between liberals and conservatives is the issue of personal responsibility. If you think that the state of a person’s life is by and large a result of their own actions, then you’d be a conservative. If you think that it’s because of external circumstances, then you’d be a liberal. That’s an oversimplification, but there you have it.
My favorite definition of the terms centered around one’s tolerance for change and reform.
Radical: wants to overthrow the existing system and start over from scratch.
Liberal: does not want to completely overthrow the system, but wants to speed up the pace of change.
Moderate: thinks things are progressing nicely, as is.
Conservative: thinks things are changing too fast; wary of unintended consequences, and wants to make sure that the cure is not worse than the disease.
Reactionary: thinks changes have gone too far, and wants to go back to “the good old days”.