Who are the prominent liberal crazies?

I've noticed recently that many of my conservative friends spend a lot of time disavowing beliefs commonly associated with the extremes of their party--creationism, Obama birthplace conspiracies, and the gold standard being particularly common examples.  I've noticed, however, that though these ideas are pretty clearly wrong if you care to look at "facts" or "the world" or "logic" they tend to enjoy support from fairly prominent Republicans.  Sarah Palin is a creationist. Ron Paul is all about the gold standard, and despite the release and vetting of every form of birth certificate known to man, Obama's birthplace is still treated as suspect by many Republican lawmakers.

In the interest of balance, I was trying to figure out what the extremist ideas on the liberal side of the spectrum were, and who was giving them voice.  But I can't find anything even close to comparable.  Is this my bias, or are Dem's just more grounded in reality?

Politics and fundamental values

I think this is an important point.  Your political views don't just represent your judgments on key policy debates; they also reflect deep valuations of fundamental principles. This site does a very interesting job of showing how things break down (edit: You'll want the very first survey on the list).

Green is me, red is Republican, blue is Democrat.

Basically, liberals care a lot about leveling the playing field and avoiding harmful consequences.  Conservatives care about those things too, but they put a lot more emphasis on loyalty, authority, and purity.  Challenge for my conservative readers: why should we build public policy around these things?

Double Blind Politics

One of the consequences of uninformed and partisan politics is an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance.  Examples like the ones below make me wonder a lot how different things would be if we voted on policies rather than politicians.  No names and no parties attached to any proposal, just a list of ideas for voters to yay or nay. Just a couple examples of doublethink below the break:

I am sad now

Dear Politicians,

It has come to my attention that you are more or less incapable of doing anything in America at the moment.  Please quit mucking about and do something useful.  A couple basic guidelines:

1. Evidence - please use it, and please present it in context.  Large numbers are scary, but large numbers when compared to other historical or projected large numbers are much less so.
2. Consistency - I know it is bad politics to hold logically consistent beliefs, but I think that maybe if you don't someone should call you on it, and in a public easy to understand way, not in the clever but not terribly accessible way my favorite bloggers do.

Point 1 is for the pragmatists.  If you care about the impact of your legislation, and not terribly much on the abstract values behind the way it works, then you should be a slave to Evidence.  For those of you who are primarily interested in a legislative enactment of some value-system, you should be checking to make sure your enactment doesn't undermine your values by its effects.

Point 2 is for values-politicians.  If you're holding a core set of beliefs and want to enshrine them in law, then you should at the very least make sure that they don't contradict each other.  For pragmatists, this might not matter as much in your implementation, but you should be watching the aggregate effects to make sure they still do what you hope they will.

I know this is a hopeless and empty plea, but I'm burnt out on real world politics and needed to get that off my chest.  Expect more bounds on taxation and other abstract policy discussions in the near future.

Love,
Rory

Democrats V. Republicans

I've been thinking about what divides the Republican and Democratic parties and here's basically my take on it.

The general goal of the Republican party is to enact a set of laws which codify their party's shared values.  They want a flat tax because they think it is fair or just.  They want to end welfare because it allows people who don't work to benefit from the labor of those who do.  They want to make gay marriage illegal because they think it's wrong for people with the same combination of sex chromosomes to sex each other.  By contrast, it seems that the Democratic party generally attempts to enact legislation in order to achieve explicit goals, such as reducing the negative effects of poverty, providing people with healthcare, &c.

This naturally throws up an obstacle to useful political discourse.  Republicans tend to look bad when asked what their programs will do because they didn't come to their policy ideas based on studies, but rather came to the studies based on their policy ideas (informed by evaluations of those policies with respect to the moral code they want to enact).  Democrats look bad when asked to justify the moral legitimacy of their policies because, well, they were too busy thinking about what they wanted to do.

I think that both parties are being stupid.  In order to have a meaningful discussion you need shared assumptions.  In this case we need to have candid political discussions about what our shared values are, and the nature of our disagreements.  Some values might be hard and non-negotiable.  Differences in the abortion debate spring to mind.  Others might be more flexible.  Many people are willing to budge on completely equal treatment in order to get more equal results, even if they value both kinds of equality.  Many are willing to sacrifice some freedoms for increased security.

Issues controlled by hard values need to be decided by the voters and when it comes down to it that means that the most important thing is to recognize the value judgment, describe it accurately, and have both sides of the issue make their arguments to the people.  It might even be most appropriate for such issues to be decided by referendum.  For just about everything else, we should be agreeing on goals for the nation (informed by our values) and then asking experts for the most effective means towards achieving those goals.  We should then recognize what values might be impacted by the most effective means and weigh those values explicitly against the values we were pursuing when considering the end goal of the law.  But the most important thing to remember in those sorts of debates is that the process started with agreement that the end goal of the law was worth pursuing.  If one particular method looks to infringe too deeply on some values, other methods need to be considered.

I'd like to mention that this is basically a rehashing of my constitutional anarchy ideas within the context of our current political situation.  I'd love to add a clause to the constitution that requires a nationwide referendum on any law codifying a value.