Scott Poarch

Republican or Democrat?

Liberal or Conservative?

harm/care
fairness/reciprocity
ingroup/loyalty
authority/respect
purity/sanctity

If primarily just the first two are important to you (they’re important to just about all humans, it turns out), then you are a liberal.

If, on the other hand, ALL of those five are important to you, then you are a conservative.

In other words, if feelings of loyalty to your group, probably to exclusion of other groups, is very important to you, AND you place a very high value on respecting authority (as opposed to, say, challenging it), AND maintaining “purity” and “sanctity” (of things like, say, heterosexual marriage or the unborn child) are all important to you, then you are conservative.

If you are very willing to accept “others” into your group (gays, foreigners, blacks) into your group, you are comfortable challenging authority you find illegitimate, and you are comfortable with things getting a little messy, then you are liberal.

And we are all emotionally predisposed to having certain feelings about those five points. Politics, then, is coloring in the lines drawn by our emotional predispositions.

By the way, I’m just paraphrasing Jonathan Haidt:

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html