I am a center-left social libertarian
Left: 2.33, Libertarian: 4
I had a hard time with some of the questions on this Political Spectrum Quiz. E.g., "A person's morality is between that person and God only. Government should not get involved." Aside from the God part does morality mean murder? I'm in favor of anti-murder laws. I'm not in favor of the state legislating things consenting adults can do which some people treat as immoral.
5 comments:
I am a left moderate social libertarian...yet another label. At an exam in a Soviet university, a philosophy professor told me I was a Trotzkist. I barely got a C and it killed my stipend for six months.
I am a centrist social libertarian, but like Irina I think that is just another label. If one dimension, left to right isn't enough to describe a person's political philosophy, why is two?
We should ask thousands of questions to millions of people and then do conjoint analysis to find the dimensions of politics. It seems to me that politics is the subset of philosophy involved in how we deal with other people or set up governments to regulate our actions and we know how easy that is to categorize.
Then again, see this post by Krugman.
Perhaps actual Congressional voting may now be viewed as clearly left vs. right. This wouldn't surprise me at all. But, the exploitation of prejudices (racial, sexual, and cultural for example) is clearly the province of the modern Republican party starting with Nixon and his moral majority, moving onto Reagan and his welfare queen story that kept changing over the years (that's how he got the lunchpail dems to vote for him), onto Lee Atwater's Willie Horton ads for Bush I, and finally the culture wars of Rove/Bush II (gay marriage, abortion, stem cell research, etc.. etc...).
Repubs know it is much easier to incite a mob than it is to educate one. Hence their use of simple, but highly effective, slogans and language....
I give you......
Death Panels
Death Tax
Pals around with terrorists
Rationing
Starwars
Drill Baby, Drill
Compassionate Conservatism
Welfare Queens
Nationalization (see below)
Socialism (As if the Federal Government didn't give trillions of dollars to the Banksters)
Liberal Media (means Jews)
Elites (means Jews [and now Blacks] in Academia, Wall Street, and Hollywood)
Just say no
The Patriot Act
Climate Change (fucking call it global warming already)
ObamaCare (Major irony...if passed it might actually be used in future generations reverentially)
Liberal (some Ph.D. candidate should do his/her thesis on how the Republicans made liberal into a four letter word).
I recall reading somewhere that about one-third of any population will likely follow any strong leader, especially during uncertain times. These are the folks the repubs call their base as they can hammer on the emotionally triggered fear switch and get them to turn out in mass (witness recent healthcare town hall meetings).
Ask yourself why there wasn't the same vitriol and turnout 15 years ago for the Clinton health plan. What is so different this time. Nothing really, except that now a far more fearful figure, Barack Obama, is taking your healthcare away (and giving it to black people and illegal aliens).
The repubs have figured out that there is this core group that they can exploit as long as they gin-up enough fear (generally based on some type of us-versus-them theme). I'll bet that there is significant overlap between the Birthers, the Town Hall disrupters and the people who were attending McCain/Palin rallies and shouting "terrorist" and "kill him" while their kids/grandkids were holding little monkey dolls.
So it goes.
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