And you’ve identified one of the main reasons why I get so impatient with the political argument today. You don’t support the war, why, you must be a traitor terrorist-lover! You’re against affirmative action, why, you must be a racist and want to keep blacks down! You don’t support gay marriage, why, you must hate gays!

But you’ve pretty much nailed it: conservatives and liberals, as fellow Americans, have the same general values when it comes to liberty, equality, security, etc., but a much different ordering of priorities.

You might find this funny, but my daughter is a public school teacher, doesn’t belong to a union, told me the other day she is probably more moderate politically than I am but she has never voted for a Democrat for president.

She absolutely hates the NCLB act because she says it doesn’t help. She has a master’s degree in reading and is a reading recovery teacher in middle school. That means she tries to get these kids up to grade level despite the fact they have been “passed on” every year without reading or comprehension skills.

I did qualify my statement by saying I don’t pretend to speak for all conservatives, and I certainly hope the stereotype of conservatives being uncaring is not painted with a wide brush.

Because I do have some liberal leanings in the social area as described I call myself a moderate.

Just as a matter of principle for me I think gay marriage is wrong but I have no desire to get into anyone’s sex life—especially theirs.

You’ve stayed away from the the common but unhelpful habit of saying that conservatives want small government and liberals like big government. Most everyone wants the government to do something, they just differ on what. So conservatives may want small government in the area of say, labor regulation, but big government in the area of sexual mores. Liberals may want big government in the area of environment, but small government in the area of security. In the recent debate over immigration, both want some sort of bigger government, either beefing up border interdiction and surveillance, or increasing the government capacity to facilitate immigration (guest worker, family reunification).

One standard way to distinguish liberals from conservatives in the U.S. is their hierarchy of values (standard in that its common in US government textbooks).

Liberals tend to push for equality, then liberty, over order (security) while conservatives tend to prefer order, then liberty, over equality.

It’s not that liberals dismiss order as a value, they just think equality is more important. Same goes for conservatives. They don’t oppose equality, they think order and liberty are more important. And please note that I said “tend.”

So think about the debate over wiretapping. Conservatives are more likely to side with the administration on this because order (our safety) matters more than liberty in this case. Or think about gay marriage. Liberals would tend to support gay marriage because equality and liberty matter more than order–in this case, tradition.

But these three values are a pretty rough way to categorize people’s political standings. For one thing, people have material interests, not just values. It’s no surprise that members of the military, folks in towns with military bases, and the managerial class in the defense sector, tend to be conservative because this profession is all about order. And they tend to vote Republican because they know which party butters their bread.

Same goes for public sector employees, like public school teachers. They tend to go Democratic because the Democrats are more likely to back public spending measures (apart from defense spending, even though it is an employment and subsidy program). They tend to be liberal because many public sector programs are supposed to work, at least a little, to provide more equality of economic opportunity.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/washington/27poll.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin