Does the entire ideological divide between conservatives and liberals on all the issues they differ on reduce to a single axiomatic difference in worldview: conservatives believe in personal moral responsibility, and liberals believe in impersonal socioeconomic forces?
To pick just a few examples: in the neverending gun debates the divide seems to be between those who say “punish bad people who misuse guns, not the lawabiding” and those who say “guns are an epidemeological source of violence and death”. Or drugs; conservatives blame individuals for the moral failing of persisting in addicted behavior, and liberals regard it as a social and healthcare issue.
I’ve never seen conservatives as big believers in “personal responsibility”, but as believers in control over others and selfishness. It’s always about YOU following their rules, while they do whatever they want without consequence. And about them avoiding any contribution to society or consideration for their impact upon it, while demanding all of it’s benefits.
They are all about selfishness and malice. They want to dictate how others live, they want benefits without paying for it, they want everyone to parrot their beliefs regardless of other’s opinions or even reality, they disregard the lives and welfare and happiness of others as having value. They enjoy hurting others, and regard compassion as wrong.
Personally, I don’t understand either viewpoint. That is if you’re looking at the classic 2-dimensional x-y plot of
X axis: Social Freedom -> Social Involvement by Government
Y axis: Fiscal Freedom -> Fiscal Involvement by Government
The ‘classic’ definition puts liberals in the low X-Axis, high Y-axis corner.
The ‘classic’ definition puts conservatives in the high X-Axis, low Y-axis corner.
Libertarians would be in the low X-axis, low Y-axis corner. I don’t know what’s in the other corner. Communism or Totalitarianism, maybe.
But neither the classic liberal or conservative corner makes sense to me. Why would you trust nameless, faceless bureaucrats in Washington to make reasoned, thoughtful decisions on your behalf in some matters, but not in others? Why would you disempower yourself and place your fate in their hands in some matters, but not others? I continued to be baffled by that.
On this Board, for example, we have a segment of people who go ballistic when its suggested that the government decide what a pregnant woman can do with her body, whether or not same-sex couples can or cannot get married, whether or not creationism can be taught in schools, or whether marijuana can be smoked or not.
But they have no problem with the government taking 50+% of their money, investing it for them on their behalf for their retirement without giving them any choice at all, deciding what wages are mutually acceptable between an employer and employee, deciding what a label on a bottle of beer or cereal box should look like, deciding whether you can buy a little X-wing fighter for your kid that shoots out a little plastic missile, deciding that drugs that are freely bought and used in Europe, Africa and Asia aren’t ‘safe’ here, or deciding whether you can buy a car you like from a foreign manufacturer (or not) without their consent.
The latter things of course, the government MUST get involved in. And we trust them to make all sorts of right, just and sensible decisions.
But on the former issues, of course, they must stay out. Wayyyy out. We can’t trust them to get involved in those things at all.
That, my friend, makes absolutely no sense to me. Because they are the same people, with the same incentives. And whatever those incentives are, they aren’t going to be the same as yours. Why you would turn over power over your own life to those people in some matters, but not others, is beyond me.
Many people who call themselves ‘conservative’ would just flip the two paragraphs above.
No, they aren’t. It’s different people, with different incentives. Ranging from people just doing a job, to people trying to make society better, to people trying to help individuals, to control freaks, to bigoted scum.
Preventing unsafe medicine from being sold is generally benevolent, banning marijuana is a matter of control freaks, and the opposition to abortion comes from woman hating vermin and religious fanatics. Not the same people or the same motives at all.
This sounds a lot like the political compass approach to political classification. Personally, I still think two dimensions is too few, but it’s certainly a lot better than the One-Dimensional approach of the well known Conservative/Liberal spectrum.
That said, I would tend to agree that the well understood definition (though much more blurred these days than, say, ten years ago) was that, what we refer to as liberals tended to believe in social freedom and fiscal regulation and conservatives tended to believe the opposite. How you want to explain it though, really depends upon your perspective.
For instance, do people tend liberal on the social scale because they value individual freedom and because conservatives want to have control over your daily life? Maybe people tend conservative because they value some morals as universal and see liberals as moral reletivists and, thus, essentially moralless. Maybe the difference isn’t as black and white, as one like Der Trihs would have you believe, but simply because people are approaching it from different directions, with different beliefs, and different goals.
From a fiscal perspective, I think my point is a lot more clear. Fiscal conservatives believe they’re in the best place to make the decisions for their money, they believe they’re entitled to it since they earned it, and look at fiscal liberals as people who think they can make better decisions than them about how they should spend their money. Meanwhile, Fiscal liberals think the best way to improve the quality of life is to improve the socioeconomic position of everyone, that it’s the obligation of the wealthy to improve society and help out the poor and that conservatives are selfish and socially irresponsible.
Either way, you pick one set of axioms and one side seems perfectly reasonable while the opposite extreme seems almost evil in comparison, and vice versa.
In general, I agree. You’re not stating it exactly as such, but you’re creeping towards the slippery slope of language that implies fiscal conservatives are selfish, greedy bastards who have no interest in improving the socioeconomic status of the poor. That assumption is a very common, and tiresome, strawman of those who claim government sponsored-and-delivered social programs, education and healthcare are necessary.
Those people are all for helping others…well, sort of. They are all for giving the government (person A) the power of the gun to extract resources from others (persons B) to deliver - efficiently or not - to persons C. Then they (person D) claim it was all necessary, because they (person D) want to ‘help someone’. When in fact they’ve done nothing of the sort. They haven’t really helped anyone. But they think they have. So that makes them feel good about themselves.
I think a more accurate and simpler definition of fiscal conservative and freedom would be to state that those proponents are strong advocates of property rights and determining, to the maximum extent possible, what to do with their own resources. Whether that’s giving it to others, giving it to their kids, investing in local businesses, or squandering it on hookers in Vegas. Intentions, motives, and assumptions of goodness or evil are irrelevant.
Assigning or assuming impure or unhealthy motives to them, whilst assigning pure and healthy motives to the other side, pollutes the discussion and inevitably ends up in partisan bickering.
The big difference is in how plastic the two groups view a person’s nature to be. In my opinion this explains almost every policy difference between the two.
Conservatives think that your ‘personality’ – including things like your beliefs, your moral tendencies, etc. – is a fundamental and unalterable fact of your existence. There are good guys and bad guys, maybe some people on the edge but in any case nobody’s going to go from one type to another.
Liberals think that your personality can be altered by both external and internal forces, and that each of us has the capacity for both good and bad behavior. A good guy can be made bad by circumstances or by letting selfishness and superstition overrule compassion and rationality. Conversely, a bad guy can become good through treatment, self-investigation, etc.
To use the OP’s examples of policy differences:
Guns:
Conservative: A good guy will never do anything bad, regardless of what kind of weaponry he has. So, as long as we keep guns out of the hands of bad guys, there’s no reason to regulate them; indeed, arming the good guys would keep the bad guys in line but wouldn’t increase the risk to good guys at all.
Liberal: Power can corrupt and each of us has bad impulses from time to time. Therefore, the more weaponry there is in the world, the more likely it is that people will be tempted to give in to their bad impulses (which we all have) and the more destructive the results will be, so the risk goes up for everyone.
Drugs
Conservative: If you take drugs, you’re a bad guy. You will be a bad guy whether you continue to use drugs or not. Therefore, the correct policy is to marginalize you. (Unless you are a famous conservative radio talk show host, of course).
Liberal: Human behavior is a result of chemical processes in the brain. Drugs are chemicals that alter the chemistry of the brain and thus alter a person’s behavior. Drug addicts are people whose bad choices (which we all make), unlucky living conditions (poor and black are risk factors), and genetic susceptibilty have led to such profoundly altered brain chemistry that they are not capable of quitting on their own. Therefore, the correct policy is treatment and social service.
Actually, I completely agree with what you’ve said here and on rereading, I think I see that my point wasn’t very clear. I wasn’t trying to paint one side as good or the other as bad. Instead, I was trying to point out that, based on your perspective, since you have certain fundamental beliefs it’s very difficult to see how someone who doesn’t hold those same fundamental beliefs can possibly have a differing viewpoint because it’s difficult to divorce the larger, abstract picture from the underlying motivation.
To use spazurek’s examples (and I think they’re excellent), conservatives and liberals would both assume the others think the same way, so when a conservative sees a liberal policy that could potentially help someone who is obviously evil, they look evil, or when a liberal sees a conservative have a hard black and white rule on something that is definitely not black and white, they look heartless.
Basically, I was more responding to your point about not understanding how people can trust nameless, faceless people in Washington. That is, while I would tend to agree with you, being libertarian myself, if you take a different set of fundamental beliefs upon which to base your reasoning, you’d have trouble understanding how anyone could trust the nameless, faceless population. That is, it’s all relative to some fundamental underlying belief.
Eh… I don’t know if I’m doing any better describing my point, but I hope that makes sense.
I see this the other way around. I think, stereotypically, conservatives will be more likely to see a person as a product solely of his or her personal choices, with bad people always having the innate capacity to reject bad behavior regardless of their social circumstances. Liberals would be more likely to see a person’s behavior as having been fixed in place by their formative environment.
To take the drug-abuse example, if you see drug abuse as a failure to make good choices, you advocate punishment to increase the incentive to make the effort of will not to abuse drugs. If you see drug use as an intractable addiction triggered by body chemistry and a history of abuse, you advocate treatment because the person can’t change by his or her own effort.
The gun issue seems like a bad one to use as an example because a big element of gun-control advocates’ concern is the potential for gunshot injuries through simple negligence, which doesn’t really implicate one’s moral framework the way issues of intent do.
It may be hard to find current examples, but that is because conservatives have been in power in Western Europe for most of the last three decades. At least economic conservatives, which includes New Labour, for example. Before that there were marginal income tax rates at least that went to 70%, 80% or even 90%, plus VAT, excise taxes, council taxes and death taxes.
For at least some liberals, those were the good old days. Not necessary because the tax rates were high, but because regulation and social welfare programs were supposedly stronger in those days.
Roughly, I agree with the OP. At least, it works for me. I consider myself liberal in the sense that I wish society as whole to [attempt to] mitigate damages that I see as being disproportionate to the severity of the offense. So, pro-seat belt laws, for instance, and pro-abortion, and some others that are each threads of their own.
This is not because I’m against personal responsibility, but because personal responsibility is not a recipe for avoiding disaster. You do right all your life and you can still get screwed. We’re all in that boat. Let’s all work to make sure it doesn’t sink.
If the choice between liberal and conservative were, as some suggest, really about whether some beauracrat would constrain my choices or I would, I would be a conservative; but really it is about whether we have democratic controls in place or feudalistic ones (CEOs deciding things for me) and in such a case I am strongly pro-government.
These claims typically require including FICA in the calculation— someone who’s self-employed and earns over $357,700 would be paying 35% federal tax and 15.30% Social Security, on money earned over and above that. How loudly and shudderingly one wishes to sob for these unfortunates is, of course, a personal matter.
Between federal income tax, state income tax, city income taxes (in some instances), capital gains and dividend taxes, SS tax, Medicare tax, gas taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, car registration taxes, hotel room taxes, unemployment taxes paid for you on your behalf by your employer, special levies for school districts, airline ticket taxes, it’s damn near 50% for practically every wage-earner in the United States. More for those in higher tax brackets.
You are offering these as examples of the government taking over half of someone’s income. But since the examples you gave involve marginal tax rates, you haven’t given clear examples of anyone who had to give “over half” their income to the government.
Who in relevantly recent history has had to give over half their income to the government? And what liberals have been happy about the prospect?
But that’s not a case of someone having to give half their income to the government. It’s a case of giving half their income over #357,700 to the government.
(I’m surprised, anyway, if there aren’t ways around this through incorporation or something, but I know nothing about how that stuff works so I’m probably wrong).
The vast majority of them, in general. Little people commit crimes ? Stomp on them. Rich guy commits a crime ? Let it slide, or slap his wrist. You have homosexual urges ? You’re a monster. They have homosexual urges ? No big deal. You use drugs ? You’re evil. They use drugs ? It was a youthful indiscretion ( in their 40s ) !