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Comment by patrickmay | Hacker News Reader

Left/right or liberal/conservative are false dichotomies, at least in U.S. politics. Both major parties are willing to use coercion to achieve their goals, and they don't even differ very much in what those goals are.

The real divide is between authoritarians and anti-authoritarians. It would be interesting to see a similar study (or the results of this study re-analyzed) with liberal/conservative replaced with authoritarian/live-and-let-live.

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No, the real divide is not between libertarians and "statists". You are simply projecting a complicated, multidimensional space down onto a single axis and then twisting it to make your ideology sound right-by-default.

For one thing, property is theft ;-).

I disagree. I find that Conservatives generally "conserve" a society's traditions, culture, religion, and way of life while Liberals "liberate" a society from it's traditions, culture, religion, and way of life. When taken to an extreme Conservatives can accidentally stagnate a society by holding it back from ideas that further it (see: conservative southern states, Islamic extremist countries), while Liberals can accidentally destroy a society altogether by giving it away in pieces (see: Israel, liberal immigration policies, Islamification of Europe).

They're both extremes on a spectrum. One prevents new ideas that a society wants, the other forces new ideas that a society isn't ready for.

What you describe is a Burkean brand of conservatism, though there are others.

If conservatism was purely about defending the status quo, it would be liberal to enact a flat tax, restructure school funding to work through vouchers, or replace social security with private savings accounts.

There are many other reasons that people are conservative or liberal. I would argue that the most prevalent are various flavors of identity politics.

Your point is internally inconsistent. Authoritarianism is one dimension along which people can differ, but empirically, most people are more or less authoritarian. It's a point which you essentially concede by noting that both parties in the U.S. are authoritarian (and so are most political parties throughout the developed world). So how can you justify calling authoritarianism versus anti-authoritarianism the "real divide" when it only separates a small minority from the great majority?

Please see my comment above. My perception is that the two major parties are controlled by authoritarians, leaving anti-authoritarians no good alternative. They can either vote with the religious fundies or vote with the Nanny statists. By the nature of the system, anti-authoritarians are disenfranchised.

Anti-authoritarians aren't disenfranchised. If there were really that many anti-authoritarians, they would vote for the anti-authoritarian parties that do exist, and those wouldn't be minority parties any more. The nearly half of Americans who don't vote aren't disenfranchised secret anti-authoritarians. They're just politically apathetic.

The difference between left and right may seem less to you than that between authoritarians and anti-authoritarians but what about the numbers? If the former has a roughly 50/50 split in the general population and the latter is 90/10 (I have no idea), then it's not surprising that the former is considered more important.

True, real numbers would be helpful.

My perception is that, in the U.S., the fiscal conservatives would be more logically aligned with the social liberals since the freedom to live as one wishes valued by the latter is more consistent with the small government ideals of the former. It seems that whether a person with such views ends up in the Republican or Democrat camp depends on if they are better able to hold their nose in the face of the odious social policies of the religious right or the equally odious and equally authoritarian fiscal and social policies of the Nanny statists.

Regardless of the reasons for the current situation, the study being discussed suffers from its poor choice of categories. As an example, consider abortion rights (a topic I chose to avoid politicizing the discussion further ;-). I fully support a woman's right to choose and for abortion to be safe and available. I've donated to Planned Parenthood in the past. However, I also think it is reprehensible to force people who believe otherwise to pay for such procedures. Am I a liberal or a conservative?

Real numbers:

http://www.electionstudies.org/nesguide/toptable/tab3_1.htm

According to those numbers, there are consistently more conservatives than liberals, but about half of the population either identifies as moderate or doesn't identify with anything.

We already have a feel for that from voting patterns. I was more curious about the authoritarian/anti-authoritarian split. My feeling is that, if you can strip out the rhetoric, buzzwords, and partisanship, most people are fine with a relatively powerful government.

Edit: From the same source: http://www.electionstudies.org/nesguide/toptable/tab4a_1.htm

"fiscal conservatives" I'm curious: could you name a few?

Of interest I suppose in the context of your comment. Bob Altemeyer's - The Authoritarians: https://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

Couldn't agree more. The classic 'false dilemma'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

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