Democrat, republican or centrist??

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Well I'm centre-right so I don't make hardcore leftist statements.

I didn't say "everyone who calls themselves a centrist is far-right". I said "people who identify as "centrist" tend to be far-right". This has been observed by surveys and is often much to the annoyance of genuine centrists, who like to think of themselves as a "silent minority" but are unknowingly just allying with the disillusioned. People who say "I hate both sides equally" tend to be extremists, not moderates, and because there are far more far-right people than far-left people, they tend to be far-right.

Fnord is neither an extremist ideologue nor a moderate. He likes to call himself a moderate, but actually a lot of his views are pretty darn extreme, just in incoherent ways. To me moderation isn't "a hodge-podge of extreme views with no real ideology underlying them", it should be "an ideology that lies between the two extremes". Sure, Fnord thinks that only military veterans should be allowed to hold high office, or at least some high offices (an extreme view), but he isn't "an extremist" because he doesn't have anything like an all-consuming passion for the sort of authoritarianism that individual view implies.


I think this is a poor set of definitions - for one thing, most of the characteristics you list for conservatives are actually typical characteristics of liberals. Conservatives have no particular commitment to any of the things you list except perhaps the nuclear family. There are plenty of religious conservatives who support big governments (they tend to vote Democrat in the US). There are plenty of conservatives who are opposed to free markets. And indeed, the default position for most conservatives is to be opposed to liberty.

Despite the default opposition to liberalism within much of conservativism, it is worth noting that liberalism and conservativism are not "contradictory" ideologies. There are many liberal conservatives (for example, Angela Merkel), and some conservative liberals (perhaps US Senator Joe Manchin could be defined this way). The opposite of conservativism is progressivism. The opposite of liberalism is authoritarianism. And you also have the economic axis, which you touch upon in your post. Worth noting that "economic liberalism" and "economic conservativism" mean the same thing.

Some broad-stroke things that indicate you're dealing with a conservative rather than a liberal:

- Support for traditional values
- Support for hierarchies
- Preservation of traditional institutions
- Respect for authority
- Intolerance of other ways of life
- A preference for unity ahead of freedom

While there are a variety of beliefs that could be called "liberal", including much conservative thought, there is much less that unites the disparate strands of conservativism. If you asked George Bush, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Ron Paul to sit around a table together, you'd struggle to find very much that they agreed on even though they're all conservatives. Contrastingly, if you asked Bush to sit down with Emmanuel Macron, Tony Blair, and the Dalai Lama, they'd be able to find a lot of things to agree on because, despite huge variation in their views, they are all "liberals" in the loosest sense of the word and could agree on things like the importance of the rule of law, human rights, and the role of government in preserving individual liberty.

You could be right, Wally. The definitions for "Liberal", "Moderate", and "Conservative" may depend on the perspective of who is making the definition.

Even so, I think that it's important to uses these definitions to describe one's attitude concerning important topics, like the economy, military spending, civil rights, scientific research, the arts, education, and so forth.

For instance, Abe might be conservative when it comes to scientific research, education, and the economy, but liberal when it comes to the military spending, civil rights, and the arts.

To then label Abe as a "Liberal" just because he believes in supporting the military would not make sense, right?

It gets complicated, but one could be a Liberal on one policy, and a Conservative on another.

Well that confuses me. Maybe I'm not understanding what you mean by far right, to me what I think of when people say [n]far right[/b] is...

far-right views
- Completely free market, no restrictions or regulations
- Completely opposes abortion
- Against welfare & social security
- No restrictions or regulations on Guns
- Against public schools
- Equal rights for all people

far left views
- Socialism/no free market
- You can have an abortion right before labor
- For welfare and Social Security (democratic program)
- Public schools (democratic program)
- No gun rights
- Non-equal rights, Identity Policy and enforced diversity

My Views
- Free market with restrictions and regulations, the bare minimum while ensuring fairness and limiting pollution.
- Can only have an abortion up to 3 months, only exception after three months is the mother may possibly die from giving birth or the child has very severe deformities or miscarriage
- For welfare but I think it needs a lot of improvements
- For public schools but the need improvement on operations not funds.
- Gun rights with restrictions
- Equal rights for all (Equality, not protected classes, everyone should have equal rights)





* [ Just ignore this one, It sickens me to try to debate this with people ] *
- Border security: This one is an odd ball now, everyone is suppose to want border security and zero tolerance on illegally crossing the border, once you are discovered in the US, you should be deported, people should aim to improve immigration policy if they want more immigrants, we already allow hundreds of thousands of new citizens every year. The amount of illegal, undocumented citizens in this country should be 0.

Funny is I heard republicans used to be the only ones for illegal immigration so they can extort people who aren't suppose to be here for slave labor, now the democrats seem to be for slave labor also(and draining our welfare system(about 10%)) , that's why Trump is having a hard time with the wall, he is fighting two corrupt parties over border security.

People are going to vote centrist because admitting to skew in a direction takes away credibility, and the parties right now are defined off of hostility towards an other. Any realization that this other does not exist and that we are all Americans is threatening to the ideology. In short: there is no right or left, there is only anti-right and anti-left, and people buy into one of those two.

With that said, there seems to be a slight skew to the right, but not the real right. A lot of the modern right is defined in opposition to a supposed liberal threat. The same pattern is seen on a primarily left-leaning website, where members will vote centrist and conservatives there will start to stand out.

Why do you assume people will vote centrist out of embarrassment? No one can see how you vote, I'm assuming it reflects population, most people are moderate/cetrist/middle of the road. People's opinions in conversation reflect that also. In fact, I have only ran into two hard left leaning people, I imagine that is why their are two votes for progressive.

My assumption is most people don't fall to either extremes, and I haven't honestly ran into anyone here that matches my definition of hard right lean. What I have experienced talking to people here pretty much matches the votes. People just argue on the specifics of what's best within moderate views (in my opinion)

Which sucks because the poll really doesn't show anything other than most people hold moderate views/centrist. It would be nice to have a poll with basic views, showing the individual views, odds are it would reflect about the same, the only accept ion would be a few people that don't believe in abortions at all, which I suspect would also be low if not any.

Saying that anyone is going to vote a certain way is presumptuous.

Saying why they will vote the way they do is even more presumptuous.

"People will vote the way they will vote and for reasons of their own" is closest to the truth.

Definitions of conservative and liberal, are variable depending who you talk to. When I search into the internet:

Conservative
1. holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation, typically in relation to politics or religion.

Liberal
1. open to new behavior or opinions and willing to discard traditional values.

The problem is what is considered "traditional" changes with time. One could make a very good argument based on these definitions that being "anti-abortion" was a liberal position since the status quo and traditional view in 2019 is that abortion should exist as a legal right. However, the vast majority of people who consider themselves liberal will overwhelmingly be pro-choice.

When people try to define liberalism or conservatism by unifying ideology, these definitions tend to fall flat, because the "right" and the "left" have adopted weird hodgepodge ideologies. There is no logical reason for being pro-gun rights and anti abortion ideologies to be linked together, but overwhelmingly people will think of someone who is pro-gun anti-abortion as "conservative."

so what makes some ppl switch between trump and sanders or between modi and gandhi ...

Alt-centrism maybe..? whatever that means to anyone .. lol .. Alt-world-citizen ? idk .. Alt-humanism .. sounds creepy ..

Some users only participate at elections, and they may post like five anti-Republican propaganda articles per day.

So, after the elections, the site may appear to change from being like a "left wing site" to a "conservative site".

However, it will switch back soon.

None of the above....

I'm a libertarian socialist or to be a little more blunt, an Anarchist. I detest both democrats and republicans like the bubonic plague in all honesty.

Democrats - welfare capitalism
Republicans - war capitalism

Simply put, all talk no action.

If anything, my views are a combination of classical liberalism's staunch adherence to individual rights and free markets along with the socialist commitment to emancipating the working class from the wage slavery of capitalism. Some might look at this unique fusion as being pure insanity but alas if one looks into the history of anarchism in the US one is bound to hear the names of Josiah Warren and Benjamin Tucker.

Yea, I've talked with people about that, anarchist means no government, If you do any governing at all you have a government. Anarchy is the absence of law and government, which is a system of pure chaos, without police and government, we would be in pure chaos.

Being that politics is confusing for me anyway, what I should have done was only have 3 options and just ask people which do you typically vote for, republican, democrat or independent.

i think they all lost their mind .

I'm a centrist, leaning very lightly to the right. I feel like the truth has been replaced with whatever they want the truth to be and I'm tired of listening to the echo chambers, tired of losing friends over it, and tired of being called a neo-Nazi by ex-friends because I'm not convulsing over the fact that Trump is President.

Anarchist