Quote:
Originally Posted by AltaGuy
I think of it as everyone has a political "basket". In that basket, they've picked up a bunch of political opinions:
Gus is a low tax, free trade, enviromentalist. Those are the things he has in his basket.
Sarah is a anti-vaxxer, progressive taxation, pro pipeline, drill for oil everywhere, pro free trader.
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This is probably the best possible way to approach political belief - individual ideas have merits and drawbacks that can be debated, and most of them are totally distinct from each other. Your position on tax policy should not be in any way predictive of your position on gun control or abortion.
There are two problems, though. First, these labels are shorthands. Talking about Sarah's beliefs, you can break them down like that. Trying to deal with a country of 30 million (or 300 million), in the context of politics, these approximate groupings of people into ideological baskets of ideas is the only manageable way to approach a campaign. Then those baskets become entrenched. That's bad, but how we get there is totally understandable.
Second -and this isn't really a problem, per se, at least not for me - your paradigm basically smuggles in liberalism in its purest form. If we're going to debate, individually, the merits of particular policy positions held by people (like anti-vaccination or abortion or free trade), that inevitably carries along with it the notion of an open and competitive marketplace thought, in which those individual ideas are tested by discussion and survive or fail. Probably why I'm such a fan of it.