How can you tell whether an idea is liberal or conservative?

[Durandal]

It'd actually be interesting to ask Stephen Colbert how he determines something like this. He's not a conservative, but he seems to know exactly how conservative pundits will respond to certain ideas.

[Surlethe]

Even if the conservatives consistently hold the same positions, is it possible to devise a comprehensive litmus test? We agree that modern American conservatism is pretty generally irrational, so it seems to me that there won't necessarily be a common strand connecting all the positions conservatives hold, even if conservatives consistently hold them.

[Darth Wong]

You're making it sound like we're trying to come up with a unified theory of gravity. There's no reason why the test couldn't have separate components for different subject areas (ie- one test for religious issues, another one for economic issues, etc).

[Joker]

As far as I can tell, conservative and liberal ideals seem to be based on two characteristics inherent in humans: for the conservatives, it is the desire to defend against outside threats, whereas for the liberals it is the desire to benefit the group. to engage in a little evolutionary psychology BS, in a prehistoric society, the conservatives would be the warriors, and the liberals would be the gatherers and such. We may be able to extrapolate this to various positions taken by liberals and conservatives, and thus predict their stances, and so far as I have done so it has been reasonably accurate. Of course, this may be total bullshit.

It's a shame that most people from each side view the other as 'the enemy'.

[Turin]

While I'm sticking to my "tribalism" definition for now, I've got another idea to throw into the mix. I'm currently reading William Poundstone's Prisoner's Dilemma, which is a combination of social history of game theory and it's relation to the Cold War and a biography of Jon von Neumann (good read, I highly recommend it). It happens that he has an interesting definition of liberal and conservative with respect to game theory and the Prisoner's Dilemma:

As the term is most commonly used in U.S. politics, a liberal is a "cooperator": someone willing to put himself at risk for exploitation in order to increase the common good. Liberals favor paying taxes that go to help the homeless in the expectation that the homeless will not fritter away such aid but use it to get back on their feet. A liberal may favor cutting back in defense expenditures in the hope that other countries will do the same. By cooperating, a liberal expects to create a society with fewer homeless, or fewer missiles -- something that everybody wants, but which will not come about through anyone's unilateral effort.

Interrupting for a bit here, note that the Prisoner's Dilemma is a non-zero-sum game. And while this assessment sounds like it's painting the liberal as rather naive, the previous pages demonstrate how the classic (non-iterative) Prisoner's Dilemma has no "correct" strategy. So if you accept that it is a prisoner's dilemma situation, then Cooperate is no less a bad strategy than Defect. Continuing...

Conservatives are often "defectors" in that they seek to guarantee themselves the best outcome possible on their efforts alone. Taxes may be squandered, so the safest course is to let people keep as much of their income as possible and decide individually how best to spend it. Enemy nations may exploit a unilateral arms freeze to gain the upper hand. Conservative political positions avoid the "sucker payoffs" of welfare cheats and arms treaty violators.

Unfortunately Poundstone engages in a bit of Golden Mean thinking next -- he claims that because the Prisoner's Dilemma has no correct solution, that "reasonable people will always disagree." This might be correct, but it ignores two problems:

1. Individuals are often not strictly rational actors (as required by game theory), and
2. Real life examples generally follow the rules of Iterative Prisoner's Dilemma, wherein the results from a previous "match" will influence the next choice. Iterative Prisoner's Dilemma has been demonstrated to have correct strategies, unlike non-iterative Prisoner's Dilemma. In particular, "generous" strategies like "Tit for Tat" (cooperate unless your opponent defects, then defect), or even in some circumstance "Tit for Two Tats," can come out ahead of all other strategies -- although the exact correct strategy depends on the frequency of other various strategies in the mix. (Computer experiments performed by Robert Axelrod on this subject are discussed at length in a biological context in Dawkin's The Selfish Gene).

[Alerik the Fortunate]

As I see it, the conservative/liberal split centers on the following two paradigms:

To a conservative, the existing social structure is, however imperfect, fundamentally just; the government should merely try to root out "subversive" threats to this order and do the minimum to allow the functioning of society.

To a liberal, the existing social structure is in many ways unjust and in need of varying degrees of transformation; government is a legitimate and even necessary agent in this process.

Thus the wealthy white male aristocracy is worth perpetuating because they must have risen to the top for a legitimate reason in the eyes of a conservative; as long as no blatant persecution of the poor and minorities takes place, it is not the government's job to make up for accidents of birth or differences in ability.* Nominal de jure equality effectively results in de facto fairness because God/society/the free market as currently understood will automatically create the most equitable outcome. Sexual freedom represents a temptation away from the established functional structure, and thus is subversive to the system and must be regulated.

As far as nanny state mentality, it seems that regulating the lives of people for the sake of safety represents an attempt to make up for people living in conditions where from a liberal perspective they may not be expected to be informed enough to make wise decisions on many issues; hence the government must make up for whatever disadvantage their upbringing/education/or whatever else caused their knowledge gap conferred on them.

Of course in fact blatant effective restrictions on the poor are easy to actually enact if clothed in bullshit which the average person will not understand. In general we are blinded by the cult of success; what the wealthiest want for the economy must be good because they're so successful they obviously know best. So it seems to me.