conservatives and liberals

Since I have rambled on about libertarians, anarchists, Georgists, and property, I may as well look at the mainstream views.

Most people are not philosophers and take no interest in philosophy. Life is short, and evolution favors survivors, not thinkers. Most people's ideas are simply not thought out. For example, they oppose theft, but support living in a country that was stolen from others. They say they support justice, but spend almost zero time examining whether their political and economic decisions are consistent with that view.

This is taken from a review of “Winning Elections: Political Campaign Management, Strategy & Tactics” (M. Evans; $49.95). (The review was "The Unpolitical Animal" by Louis Menand). Read it and weep.

Converse [the grandaddy of political experts, who began his studies in the 1960s
but the results still hold true] claimed that only around ten per cent of the
public has what can be called, even generously, a political belief system. He
named these people “ideologues,” by which he meant not that they are fanatics
but that they have a reasonable grasp of “what goes with what”—of how a set of
opinions adds up to a coherent political philosophy. Non-ideologues may use
terms like “liberal” and “conservative,” but Converse thought that they
basically don’t know what they’re talking about, and that their beliefs are
characterized by what he termed a lack of “constraint”: they can’t see how one
opinion (that taxes should be lower, for example) logically ought to rule out
other opinions (such as the belief that there should be more government
programs).

...after analyzing the results of surveys conducted over time, in
which people tended to give different and randomly inconsistent answers to the
same questions, Converse concluded that “very substantial portions of the
public” hold opinions that are essentially meaningless—off-the-top-of-the-head
responses to questions they have never thought about, derived from no underlying
set of principles.

...Rephrasing poll questions reveals that many people
don’t understand the issues that they have just offered an opinion on.

...These people might as well base their political choices on the weather.
And, in fact, many of them do.

...In a paper written in 2004, the Princeton
political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels estimate that “2.8
million people voted against Al Gore in states were too dry or too wet” as a
consequence of that year’s weather patterns. Achen and Bartels think that in
2000 these voters cost Gore seven states, any one of which would have given him
the election.

...The most widely known fact about George H. W. Bush in the
1992 election was that he hated broccoli. Eighty-six per cent of likely voters
in that election knew that the Bushes’ dog’s name was Millie; only fifteen per
cent knew that Bush and Clinton both favored the death penalty.

...“The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field,” the economic theorist Joseph Schumpeter wrote, in
1942. “He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as
infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again.
His thinking is associative and affective.” And Fiorina quotes a passage from
the political scientist Robert Putnam: “Most men are not political animals. The
world of public affairs is not their world. It is alien to them..."