| | I've had an unbelievably difficult time explaining where I stand on a political spectrum. Since I make an effort to examine issues on an a la carte basis, I end up having stances from a wide range of political camps. While most people would just call me a "moderate," I cannot adopt that term because it is imprecise: Take two "moderates" and give them a list of ten issues. Each could choose five liberal stances and five conservative stances and still have nothing in common. I had to consider another benchmark.
After taking "The World's Smallest Political Quiz" that I discovered the two-dimensional Nolan Chart:
For a while I was content thinking of myself as a Libertarian but after riding that train for a while, I started to notice a curious lack of support from left-leaning centrists. Nearly every political debate opponent would lambaste the LP for their lack of compassion for the needy and their disregard for the environment. This is when the cogs began to turn. To left-leaning individuals, the Nolan Chart makes no sense. It only measures freedom v. government. Lefties don't think of themselves as compromising economic freedom to achieve personal freedom. This chart is designed specifically to lure in disenfranchised conservatives like myself.
This revelation led me to another: Conservatives see the political spectrum as a battle for Freedom and against Big Government but what about Liberals? Obviously they aren't fighting for bigger government and against freedom. No, Liberals fight for equality and against favoritism / elitism.
So when asked by an outsider for what each side is fighting, the left shouts "EQUALITY!" and the right shouts "FREEDOM!" Really? A battle between equality and freedom? How ridiculous!
Freedom and Equality are obviously not mutually exclusive, but engineering policy to maximize both is difficult. Even more difficult is crafting policy that is agreeable to both liberals AND conservatives! This is my goal, nonetheless, and as such, I've loosely adopted the term "Egalibertarian" to describe myself as one who seeks to maximize equality AND freedom.
Recently, I stumbled upon a website, "Holistic Politics.org," the creation of a former Libertarian, Physics PhD -- this guy is like my double but smarter; fathom that if you can ;). His writings have not only corroborated my feelings on the differences between liberals and conservatives but offers a wealth of fresh, insightful ideas on how to maximize Freedom and Equality, pulling in ideas from all sorts of positions on the political spectrum.
I'll link some articles in future posts; they're all extremely interesting - especially the ones about environmentalism. Coming from a skeptic of *human-caused* Global Warming like myself, that's really saying something.
Hopefully this post made sense. It's taken me years to understand where I stand, politically, so I don't expect you to understand simply by reading a blog entry...
Anyway... who wants to be my lieutenant governor?
-Clive |
| | Posted 6/23/2009 6:07 PM - 23 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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