Around what point would you say someone has crossed the line into DINO/RINO territory?
Say that a liberal checks all the boxes for liberalism, but is pro-life, or a conservative checks all the conservative boxes but is pro-SSM and in favor of gun control. Are they still a “true” liberal or conservative?
ISTM that conservatives have slightly more wiggle room on this, in that a conservative can be in favor of evolution, or gun control, or pro-choice and still arguably be conservative, but if a liberal is pro-life or anti-SSM, for instance, then he or she is not liberal. But military hawkishness seems to be one exception; plenty of liberals favor high military spending (the $600 billion defense budgets usually pass overwhelmingly in both houses of Congress) and Hillary and Obama both favored plenty of drone-striking or wars on terrorism.
I think abortion and gun control are among the few issues that could really go either way. Gun control, I think is more of an urban/rural divide than liberal/conservative. It used to be not so uncommon to see “tough on crime” conservatives supporting gun control. On the other side, Howard Dean once said that places like Vermont “don’t need” strong gun control, while California and New York should be allowed to enact stricter measures.
The military, and foreign policy in general, doesn’t really count. Even if you describe someone’s approach as liberal or conservative, there’s no particular reason it must match their domestic politics.
Really, the examples you brought up are the most exceptional issues. Things like health care, labor laws, taxes, transportation, and the social safety net are much more defining issues.
No conservatives have science or engineering degrees?:rolleyes:
The problem with simplistic binary labeling like conservative/liberal is that not only are there many locations on an ideological axis there are many ideological axes that can be used to model a political space.
My answer to the OP would be - about as far as a piece of string will stretch. What’s liberal/conservative/left/right depends entirely on where the person making the judgement is standing.
I think if you differ from the “party line” on any major issue, that isn’t a deal-breaker, but if you differ from them on three issues, then if I were a reporter I wouldn’t want to slap a glib “liberal” or “conservative” label on you as a shorthand when reporting. Two issues, I’m not sure, I guess it depends on how big the issues are.
And that assumes there is a party line on an issue: like others have said, in foreign policy and the spying powers of the presidency, there is enough disagreement in both camps that you can’t say there’s a party line: with other issues like gun control, there is a party line for conservatives but not liberals. If a GOP member were to be in favor of any increase in federal gun control legislation, then I would count it “against” them as one issue, but not if a Democratic member were to not be in favor of such legislation.
Abortion is one issue where there is a party line on both sides, even though there are shades of grey. If you say “I personally believe in the right to life although I don’t think we should tighten regulation of it” then you get a half point in my calculus from both sides
I think it reached the point a long time ago, where the use of the terms conservative and liberal ceased to be constructive for any serious discussion. They’ve been so politicized and distorted, no amount of “repair” or other attempts to put them on a scale will make them useful again.
Too many people use the terms exclusively to trigger special fanatic groups into a knee-jerk reaction, without any intent to communicate meaningful thought.
