Professor stupidmonkey wrote:
Fear is why gbaji is a conservative, obviously. Science!
The starting failure of that study was the ludicrous assumptions about what makes one a Conservative or a Liberal in the first place. It's just as silly as their studies showing that liberals become more conservative when they feel threatened (like, say, after 9/11 when many self identified Democrats supported military action against terrorists). Reacting to a threat doesn't make you liberal or conservative, it just makes you human. In the same way, being less worried about something that isn't a threat doesn't do the opposite. Again. Human nature.
IMO, what makes one
politically Liberal or Conservative in our modern western context has nothing to do with specific likes or dislikes, or even positions on issue, but how those positions are derived and how we act on those positions.
Conservatives tend to be means focused. How we do things matters. What rules are in place. Whether they are fair. Whether they make sense. Whether they accomplish the purpose. Those are the things that matter to Conservatives.
Liberals tend to be more ends focused. What we're trying to do matters. What problem we're trying to solve. What actions we take. Whether they result in solving (or at least reducing) that problem. Those are the things that matter to Liberals.
This is why Liberals and Conservatives can look at the exact same thing and come up with different answers. A great example is Affirmative Action. Liberals will look at an inequality of college degrees by race, see this as a problem, and solve it by tweaking entrance requirements to colleges to increase the numbers of otherwise under represented racial groups. And they will likely solve (or at least reduce) the problem they've identified along the way. Conservatives will look at the same thing, but argue that tweaking the entrance requirements it the wrong method (how you do things matter to them). They'll disagree with AA because they believe that artificially adjusting the numbers doesn't actually solve the underlying problem. It just masks it. The rules should be the same for everyone.
It has absolutely nothing to do with whether you are afraid or not afraid.