The Conservative Cat

A more common classification system is the libertarian diamond. The diamond recognizes two types of rights-- economic and civil-- and this creates four possible political philosophies, depending on which rights you think the government should be controlling and which you think it shouldn't. If your social studies teacher finds the diagram confusing, I compiled a much simpler explanation a few years ago. A variation of the libertarian diamond is used by the Political Compass Project, but as I have pointed out, that study is deeply flawed, and most conservatives show up as moderates.

The libertarian diamond was developed by people who don't understand why conservatives even exist (which, by the way, is the reason that the Political Compass Project isn't working). Many long years before I was born, Jerry Pournelle-- who understands us better than most-- wrote about research he had conducted on political beliefs, and produced a diagram more or less like the one shown here. Rather than splitting between civil and economic liberties. Pournelle creates a graph of statism vs. rationalism. Rationalism is the belief that society can be perfected. The rationalism axis is a sliding scale between those who believe bad things are inevitable and those who think we can achieve utopia. Statism is the belief that the state should be powerful. The statism axis ranges from those who think government is the ultimate evil to those who think it is the ultimate good. At the stateless utopian corner we have the objectivists who believe that things would turn out okay if the government would just go away. At the hopeless dictatorship corner we have the fascists who believe the government should control everything or we'll have chaos. At the hopeless anarchy corner we have the nihilists who think blowing up things is a fun way to make the world a better place. At the utopian state corner we have the communists. See, communists believe the state should be all-powerful, its just that the withered state isn't as organized as the proletarian dictatorship that precedes it.

None of this explains why politics continues to be dominated by conservatives and liberals. This question was studied extensively by Thomas Sowell when he produced his book A Conflict of Visions. Why this book is not required reading in every high school in America is a complete mystery to me. (No, that's wrong. I know exactly why: Sowell also wrote Inside American Education.) Anyway, Sowell identified two distinct visions of human capability: the constrained vision, which starts from the belief that the consequences of large-scale policy directives are not predictable, and the unconstrained vision, which starts from the view that those consequences are predictable. A follower of the constrained vision is going to be more likely to trust what has worked in the past, which is why we ended up with the label conservative. A follower of the unconstrained vision is going to believe that great things are possible if we journey boldly into the new and different, which is why they're called liberal. Sowell shows how the two visions place conservatives and liberals on opposite sides of issue after issue. He also argues that the founding principles of the American Revolution were based on the constrained vision. It is therefore no surprise the conservatives have an affection for the constitution as written.

I know many of you have children in school, and those children are likely to be exposed to all sorts of wacky ideas about our great political divide. If so, I hope this brief survey will help you to give them a more sensible picture of what's really going on. We're not going to get anywhere unless we learn to understand each other.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat