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

[Hawkwings]

One way of looking at it is freedom vs justice. Liberals think freedom is more important, and conservatives think justice is more important.

[FireNexus]

The problem with that is that conservatives will probably tell you they place an equal value on both. I'm going to have to stick with the idea that it's really impossible to tell at this point.

The distinction tends to be charged with emotion and, as wong said, inconsistently applied. For instance, media pundits call Hillary Clinton liberal, while I would simply call her Satan (Maybe I've just found the secret twist to Armageddon?).

[Hawkwings]

Well of course that's what they say. And liberals will say the same thing. Examine the effects of their proposed policies.

[Pablo Sanchez]

But large parts of the conservative platform seem to have nothing to do with the welfare of the people promoting it. When middle-class people insist that the extra estate tax on $100 million estates must be abolished, there is no discernible self-interest. When people rage against abortion or gay marriage, there is no discernible self-interest. When people screech about flag-burning, there is no discernible self-interest.

Actually what you're talking about is a major thread in conservatism which goes all the way back to Edmund Burke; conservatism relies extensively on appeals to tradition and emotion, whereas liberalism is more cerebral and at least pretends to base its positions on reason. If the primary foundation of a political position is an appeal to emotion, it's a fair bet that you're talking about a conservative issue. You can see it in the way they justify most of their positions; the estate tax is bad because it is unfair, abortion needs to be stopped because it is horrible to kill babies, we need to curtail our freedoms and allow the White House to do as it pleases because the terrorists want to kill us, etc. etc.

If you look at the way that liberals reply to these points, it usually comes in the form of things like, the conservative position doesn't make logical sense, or it is bad policy that will not work correctly in the long run, etc. etc. This is also part of the reason that conservatism is so often successful--most people by nature are not very rational. Liberalism usually comes from the head, conservatism mostly from the gut.

[Darth Wong]

That sounds pretty good on some issues, but on issues like welfare, collateral damage in warfare, etc, conservatives would probably claim it's the exact opposite: liberals are being emotional and soft-hearted while conservatives are being logical rather than emotional.

[FaxModem1]

Well, for my 2 cents, from switching from a Christian conservative to a agnostic fence sitter to a liberal atheist, its about emotion.

Conservative decisions usually stem from hate, their hate of what is different, their hate of what is "wrong", of what prevents the world from being "perfect". And the Conservative method to do that, remove it, like a tumor.

Liberals base emotion seems to be empathy, of what this will do to their fellow man, about how fair it is, etc.

Course, I could be totally wrong on this and since I'm just trying to draw in on this from personal experience, I more than likely am.

[Lusankya]

That sounds pretty good on some issues, but on issues like welfare, collateral damage in warfare, etc, conservatives would probably claim it's the exact opposite: liberals are being emotional and soft-hearted while conservatives are being logical rather than emotional.

Except they're wrong. My dad is one of the most emotionally challenged people in the world, yet he generally agrees with the liberal mindset. My dad's quite happy to let boat people into the country - not because he's soft-hearted, but because he thinks that Australia could do with some resourceful people like that. He has a liberal approach on drug control - because he thinks that a hard crackdown is a waste of resources. He supports welfare - not because he cares about poor people, but because people who are too poor turn to crime, and crime is a bad thing.

Meanwhile, the "conservative" viewpoint is, "Waaah. It's not fair. I workeded for my moniez. iz mine! And what those two men are doing with that lube and that giant dildo, well that just feels wrong."

[Darth Wong]

That sounds pretty good on some issues, but on issues like welfare, collateral damage in warfare, etc, conservatives would probably claim it's the exact opposite: liberals are being emotional and soft-hearted while conservatives are being logical rather than emotional.

Except they're wrong. My dad is one of the most emotionally challenged people in the world, yet he generally agrees with the liberal mindset. My dad's quite happy to let boat people into the country - not because he's soft-hearted, but because he thinks that Australia could do with some resourceful people like that. He has a liberal approach on drug control - because he thinks that a hard crackdown is a waste of resources. He supports welfare - not because he cares about poor people, but because people who are too poor turn to crime, and crime is a bad thing.

Meanwhile, the "conservative" viewpoint is, "Waaah. It's not fair. I workeded for my moniez. iz mine! And what those two men are doing with that lube and that giant dildo, well that just feels wrong."

So what kind of litmus test are you going to apply, then? Simply say that liberal ideas are more logical? Conservatives would no doubt say exactly the opposite, thus not giving you a very useful litmus test.

I've been pondering this, and I'm finding that it's really difficult to come up with a litmus test that would actually work. Although one thing I did come up with was that a lot of conservative ideas seem to follow the Biblical line "If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out." They look for individuals or groups to blame for social problems, and once they have identified these groups, they seek to cast them out of society. That's why so many of their ideas involve either killing undesirables, deporting undesirables, or shunning undesirables (the prime example being gay marriage, which they oppose strictly because they want to make sure the gays never forget how unwelcome they are in America). Even when liberals blame people for causing problems, they seek only to redress the problem (for example, by taxing ultra-rich people until they're a bit more like everyone else) rather than trying to remove the target group from society. This is also consistent with their approach on crime, which tends to focus more on rehabilitation than punishment or elimination.

[Frank Hipper]

I doubt that an effective litmus test could be devised.

Politics of the parties in question, and intended application of whatever it is that's being examined is more informative of where a piece of legislation lies on the political spectrum than an objective review of it's content.

Richard Milhouse Nixon approved the EPA, after all...

[pucky18]

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.

[pucky18]

Ghetto Edit: change "the desire to benefit the group" to "the desire to provide for the group."

[Yogi]

So what kind of litmus test are you going to apply, then? Simply say that liberal ideas are more logical? Conservatives would no doubt say exactly the opposite, thus not giving you a very useful litmus test.

I don't give two shits what Conservatives say. Ideas are logical or not. independent of the Conservative viewpoint. Even if everyone Conservative on the planet says their idea is logical, that doesn't make it logical. So, unless there is a logical Conservative idea that I've missed, there is no real reason that "Liberal = logical" can't be a perfectly acceptable litmus test.

Of course, the above applies only to the cases where the gut reaction and the logical reaction are different.

[Sea Skimmer]

Splitting things into liberal and conservative along a line is way too simplistic. If I had to determine a method of dividing things up, I’d view the political spectrum as a disk. The less radical the idea the closer to the center it lies on the disk, with one half of the disk being conservative and one half being liberal. This also allows for radical ideas which both sides might actually agree on to lie along the dividing line, but not in the center.

[pucky18]

If I had to determine a method of dividing things up, I’d view the political spectrum as a disk. The less radical the idea the closer to the center it lies on the disk, with one half of the disk being conservative and one half being liberal. This also allows for radical ideas which both sides might actually agree on to lie along the dividing line, but not in the center.

Wouldn't you want some measure of authoritarian/libertarian in there too?

[SirNitram]

The biggest problem is bleedover. The US conservative movement has usurped ideas and credit after denouncing them hard. The liberal movement threw what are now the neocons out.

[Rogue 9]

I don't give two shits what Conservatives say. Ideas are logical or not. independent of the Conservative viewpoint. Even if everyone Conservative on the planet says their idea is logical, that doesn't make it logical. So, unless there is a logical Conservative idea that I've missed, there is no real reason that "Liberal = logical" can't be a perfectly acceptable litmus test.

Yes, because liberal ideas are all logical, all the time.

Quite aside from the left/right model being too simple to neatly categorize any given idea, "liberal = logical" is possibly the most inane statement I've seen all week. Opposition to nuclear power, to hear most people tell it, is a liberal idea, just to throw out one example.

[Civil War Man]

The distinction tends to be charged with emotion and, as wong said, inconsistently applied. For instance, media pundits call Hillary Clinton liberal, while I would simply call her Satan (Maybe I've just found the secret twist to Armageddon?).

Some southern preacher who appears on Penn and Teller's show during the armageddon episode already considered that, but was forced to recant his belief of Hillary being the antichrist due to her being female (apparently The Revelation of St. John clearly states the antichrist is male).

So far, the us versus them, protect the innocent versus punish the guilty differentiation appears to me to be the closest for providing a litmus test.

[Darth Wong]

OK, here's an idea: if an idea incorporates the notion of a dichotomy between "Good" and "Evil", it's probably conservative. That doesn't cover the whole range of liberal and conservative ideas, but this test seems to work when it is applicable.

[Turin]

OK, here's an idea: if an idea incorporates the notion of a dichotomy between "Good" and "Evil", it's probably conservative. That doesn't cover the whole range of liberal and conservative ideas, but this test seems to work when it is applicable.

Getting there, I think -- the key is tribalism.

Conservative ideas are those ideas which are tribal in nature. That is, ideas that seek to preserve The Tribe against The Other, and which seek to preserve the position of the Priesthood (i.e., politicians, the rich, etc) of the tribe with respect to the peons of the tribe. Liberal ideas are those ideas that seek to eliminate the distinction between Tribe and Other, and those ideas that seek to reduce the power of the Priesthood of the tribe relative to the rest of the tribe's members.

[Rye]

What defines liberal and conservative ideas is basically just a boring old tradition of association of allied ideologies. Those ideologies are then boiled down in the mind of the observer to a pack of semi-predictable lines that the sides take on the issue.

Take gun control. It is stereotypically a case of liberals want more, conservatives want less. This is down to some point where one lobby allied with whatever party gave them more power, or perhaps one ideological point flies well with the other ideas and rises to popularity that way. Another one might be the environment, or religion or the military and so on.

If you were to attempt a litmus test it would of course be entirely dependent on time and place to determine what notions were popular within the most powerful groups. Basically, you'd have to treat party lines as the the evening out of a load of allied but internally (potentially) distinct ideologies, and you'd probably do that with a mixture of tribalist stereotypes (which you could probably analyse with semiotics) and historical knowledge.

The reduction to good and evil strategy is a good one, though with the "extreme liberal" views out there, good and evil play just as clear parts, multinationals are evil, the bourgeois capitalist system is evil, destruction of the environment is evil, etc.

[Sam Or I]

Coming from a more conservative view than the majority of this board, I will take a stab at it.

Laws that protect the individual from themselves are considered liberal. (Any law that prohibits social darwinism. Or help out the "nanny state".)

Laws that protect the individual from an external threat are conservative. (Also anytime the law is broken, the individual should be punished and even loose rights. Or helps out the "big brother state".)

Throw religion into the mix, things change. Conservative laws promote Christianity, while liberal laws promote atheism.

[Darth Wong]

Coming from a more conservative view than the majority of this board, I will take a stab at it.

Laws that protect the individual from themselves are considered liberal. (Any law that prohibits social darwinism. Or help out the "nanny state".)

Laws that protect the individual from an external threat are conservative. (Also anytime the law is broken, the individual should be punished and even loose rights. Or helps out the "big brother state".)

The comparison between the Nanny State and the Big Brother State is an interesting one. Seems pretty good.

Throw religion into the mix, things change. Conservative laws promote Christianity, while liberal laws promote atheism.

That last part is flat-out wrong. Most liberals are religious too. Liberal laws promote equality of all religions. It's just that laws guaranteeing equality of all religions have the side-effect of making life a lot easier for atheists.

[Sam Or I]

That last part is flat-out wrong. Most liberals are religious too. Liberal laws promote equality of all religions. It's just that laws guaranteeing equality of all religions have the side-effect of making life a lot easier for atheists.

Ok, agreed.

[Turin]

What defines liberal and conservative ideas is basically just a boring old tradition of association of allied ideologies. Those ideologies are then boiled down in the mind of the observer to a pack of semi-predictable lines that the sides take on the issue.

Take gun control. It is stereotypically a case of liberals want more, conservatives want less. This is down to some point where one lobby allied with whatever party gave them more power, or perhaps one ideological point flies well with the other ideas and rises to popularity that way. Another one might be the environment, or religion or the military and so on.

I'd argue that this is why tribalism is important to understand the difference. It isn't the case that issues become arbitrarily assigned to liberal or conservative parties. The alliance of (for example) Christian conservatives in the US and their Reagonomics buddies isn't accidental. Both attempt to preserve the power elite (the "priesthood of the tribe"), just in different ways.

If you were to attempt a litmus test it would of course be entirely dependent on time and place to determine what notions were popular within the most powerful groups. Basically, you'd have to treat party lines as the the evening out of a load of allied but internally (potentially) distinct ideologies, and you'd probably do that with a mixture of tribalist stereotypes (which you could probably analyse with semiotics) and historical knowledge.

Well of course -- a position on any given issue will be "more conservative" or "more liberal" depending on the context of its time.

Throw religion into the mix, things change. Conservative laws promote Christianity, while liberal laws promote atheism.

Really, even in the Middle East? I'd also point out that liberal positions promote secularism, which isn't the same as atheism.

[Lusankya]

I don't give two shits what Conservatives say. Ideas are logical or not. independent of the Conservative viewpoint. Even if everyone Conservative on the planet says their idea is logical, that doesn't make it logical. So, unless there is a logical Conservative idea that I've missed, there is no real reason that "Liberal = logical" can't be a perfectly acceptable litmus test.

Yes, because liberal ideas are all logical, all the time.

Quite aside from the left/right model being too simple to neatly categorize any given idea, "liberal = logical" is possibly the most inane statement I've seen all week. Opposition to nuclear power, to hear most people tell it, is a liberal idea, just to throw out one example.

One test we could use is that when conservative ideas are illogical, they usually stem from fear of a percieved threat to the "tribe".

When liberal ideas are illogical, they usually stem from a certain kind of naivety or guilt by association. (For example: war = bad, militaries fight wars, therefore the military = bad.) There's no real concept of a "necessary evil".

Of course, that test only works for ideas which are illogical. I have no idea how one would test a logical idea to be certain whether it was liberal or conservative, unless you just tried looking at the easiest illogical way to reach the same conclusion - that might give some idea.