Exploring my political views

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Most people on WP know me as being somewhat liberal, then last week, I switched to being conservative.

But to be totally honest, I am not sure what my political identity is.

I was wondering if anyone on here knows of any tests, quizzes, etc. that could help me discover which viewpoint most closely matches me?

Most quizzes I've seen (and I've taken more than a few) are either biased towards giving you a certain result or are just sloppily done.

My advice: for a time, say "screw it" to politics. Then, come back and look at things on an issue-by-issue basis, without regard for whether you are being consistent with any underlying principle or any given ideology. Then look at the stances you have on given issues, try to understand the reasons behind (and resolve) any obvious discrepancies and contradictions in those views, and then decide where you stand on by comparing your set of beliefs to other ideologies. Chances are you won't match up 100% with any ideology. That's OK. You'll have to decide what politicians to support on the basis of who supports the issues you care the most about.

Thanks for your advice.

http://www.politicalcompass.org/

I found this one somewhat useful. If you google "political questionnaire" you can get a few
interesting options.

I'd actually advise you to do the opposite of what Orwell recommends.

Policy stances are meaningless without a broader scope of what society means, and each stance on an issue should take other ideas with some level of consideration. For example, let's say that you believe in an active fiscal policy, but you distrust the ability of politicians to implement difficult policies, then it would not make much sense to push for active fiscal policy. Or let's say that you don't like racist expressions, but you also believe in the freedom of speech, you obviously have to account for the smaller issue in the perspective of the bigger issue, otherwise you are a jumbled mess of inconsistencies.

To that end, if you are interested, I would advise taking on some research on the nature of most of the different ideological views out there, and in particular taking an interest into political philosophy/ethics, economic thought, and perhaps socio-political understandings.

That way, you can work from broad ideas down to more specific issues. A case-by-case approach will lead to being bogged down by the sheer number of cases, and the amount of data that exists for a particular case, so instead, I would argue to work from general principles first, then for perhaps a big important issue, taking more time.

Anything in particular trigger this change?

I find such reversals interesting - have gone through them myself on several issues over the past decade or so. For some narrow issues, the change was relatively sudden, but for larger/broader identification, I usually shifted over time.

Orwell is completely correct. Rarely does a person have such a selection of views that they are entirely "conservative" or "liberal," must people are some sort of moderate. I guess I could be called a libertarian, since I favor liberal social views (I support gay marriage and abortion, for example), but I also have conservative stance (I like laissez-faire capitalism and gun rights).

I truly doubt that you, Tim, were ever completely liberal or are now completely conservative, and I doubt that your views on an individual basis have really changed that much even in spite of you adopting a new label (I know that you lapsed briefly into religious conservatism in the past). Your views are what's important, a label is just people's attempt to sum them up in a word. Don't let it cheapen your opinions on political matters.

Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: 1.00
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 2.67

you can't just do a complete 180 on your views without any reasoning
that is just...dumb

if you can switch back and forth you are most likely moderate.

Hey, that seems about right based on what you described.

I figured I would do mine again too as long as you took the time:

Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: -7.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.56

I am right smack dab in the middle

Well, I did advise going back at the end and sorting out any contradictions, hopefully finding some underlying philosophy that seems right. The issue is when people accept a broad, overarching ideology (most commonly libertarianism, whose "core precepts" are *very* easy to accept) and then bending one's own opinions on a variety of issues to better suit that ideology.

That's one of the better ones.

I've moved closer to the center, but I still tend towards right libertarian.

First, I would love for someone to give me a great definition of liberal and conservative as far as politics goes. Many things seem liberal when they are conservative and vice versa.

I don't see a problem with an ideology-down approach, so long as efforts are taken to re-examine the ideology's relationship to the ideas. This will require re-examining issues for improvement, but really, it is not as if views on positions matter, as politicians will be unlikely to address your positions well, nor do I think that ad-hoc mixes of ideas seem powerfully persuasive to others, thus, I see your small-scale up approach as not doing as much good as a big-picture down approach, which will provide results faster, and still be likely to have good results in individuals who are determined to seek the truth about these matters.