Were I to declare how I lean politically, I would most likely say that on some matters, I sometimes lean very conservative, on others I fall somewhere in the middle, and on others I lean very liberal.
I'm not a "party man," and I don't actually have any well defined political ideology to which I adhere. I merely look at a matter and determine what I think is the best way to handle it at any given point in time. For instance:
- Consider the matter of gun control/rights. One hundred years ago, roughly, given what I understand about American culture then and now, I would not have cottoned to notions of gun control. Americans' character, cultural and ethical values, etc. have changed; thus in the 21st century, I certainly don't out of hand oppose gun control proposals. If/when Americans' character changes again, depending on the nature of change(s), I may or may not be willing to countenance gun control proposals.
- China is governed by the its own theories of socialist communism and has been ever since Mao overthrew the Chinese nationalists. Now no matter what one thinks of democratic forms of government, the fact remains that when Mao assumed primacy in China's government, the Chinese citizenry were not at all sufficiently well educated and informed enough to make sound, or even likely sound, government policy choices that they necessarily would have had to make were Mao to have implemented a direct or republican form of democracy.
Only somewhat recently, for instance, has it come to fruition that the majority of Chinese citizens have high school degrees, but that certainly was not the case in Mao's day (mid-twentieth century). On the contrary, back then, most Chinamen were peasant farmers. Now that doesn't mean they were stupid, only that they were ignorant (through no obvious fault of their own, but ignorant nonetheless) of a "ton of stuff" that one needs to know to make sage decisions in the modern world.
Accordingly, the command approach to governance that Mao and his successors implemented was a better choice for China than was implementing a wayward democracy of some sort. I mean really. Just how much sense does it make to have literally a billion people having but adolescent levels of critical thinking skills "running the show?" One'd doesn't typically let their kids run their household, yet giving the power of democracy to the Chinamen of the mid-20th-century would have been tantamount to doing exactly that but with a nation.
Now I'm not a fan of socialistic communism, but neither am I an ideologically myopic opponent of it who's unwilling to consider it on its merits and demerits in the situation where it's been applied or eschewed. It, like many things, has times and places in which it's a better governing system than is democracy, and it has times and places whereby it's worse system of governing than is democracy.
- Another example is found in my thoughts about libertarianism. As a political philosophy, there's not much about libertarianism with which I disagree. I do, however, take ethical/moral exception with the anarchical implications intrinsic to libertarianism, and those exceptions are why I am not a libertarian. Were humanity's ethical constitution markedly less rife with avarice and its "green-eyed sibling," I might well attest to being a libertarian.
Be that as it may, human nature is what it is, and comprised in part as it is by the two traits I noted, it is the countervailing factor that, for me, makes libertarianism both unimplementable and unconscionable. Unlike our current POTUS, I will not deliberately attach my name to anything that I find unethical, unimplementable, purblind, etc. (Aspects of human nature also make communism unimplementable, but, unlike, libertarianism, communism also is grossly inefficient when applied on the scale of nations having the size and core cultural heterogeneity the U.S. does.)
From the above multidimensional overview -- one that provides the examples of a specific issue, governance and political philosophy -- of one aspect of my mindset, one should glean that I'm a person who does not see that which is different from what I'd choose for myself as being necessarily bad/inferior merely because it is different. In short, one should conclude that I'm not ideological; therefore simplistic labels like "right," "left," "conservative," "liberal," etc. do not apply at the level they must for me to accurately answer the thread's poll question.
Principles aren't what one chooses to think and do. They guide how one arrives at the decision to choose and think the things one does.
-- Xelor
