Regardless of how rich and variegated Conservative beliefs may actually be, you'll forgive us if the reduction of expressions of that belief system to empty catchphrases such as "cut and run" has misled us into perceiving it as one-dimensional and monolithic and more than a little simplistic.

This is, to be charitable, simply the inevitable result of extreme polarization. Fierce partisan debate over time wears down nuance and subtlety to leave only the diamond-hard certainty of simplistic dogma.

You seem to be looking for a partisan fight, Tom, and I suppose we could just go over to Flame and engage in a pointless slugging match. But the kind of fight you want to pick by dissing Liberals looks like the reaction I've noticed before when I bring up "authoritarian conservatism", as I did recently. You take the word "conservative" in that term as a partisan attack, and now you're looking to retaliate by insulting Liberals.

The problem I have with that is that your affront is based on the false premise that lowercase "conservative" in this case refers to your ideology rather than a particular state of mind. I'd rather have a fight over something meaningful. Further, not only isn't this a partisan attack, I consider it a serious subject and one that I'm getting tired of being shouted-down before I can past your semantic difficulty.

While you seem to be stuck in fending off perceived partisan attacks from all sides, I've been more interested for about the last year in trying to get a better handle on the phenomenon of politics. I'm finding it useful to decompose politics into its constituent parts of ideology and psychology, because it's clear that politics arises from the interplay of the two.

The concept of "authoritarian conservatism" is the most useful result of the psychological side of the inquiry. The answer to why there's no balancing "authoritarian liberalism" (which I've never had the chance to express having been unable to get past the reframing attacks) is that while there may be an expectation that dimensions on the ideological plane are bipolar and there's always a Liberal to balance a Conserative, in the very different topology of the human mind there's no such expectation of either linearity or bipolarity. In fact, AC is a unipolar scalar perpendicular to the familiar plane of ideological representations such as the ones generated by that Libertarian site. It's a modifier of ideology whose influence is measured on a scale from zero to (asymptotically) 100%. It's a sideways vector whose action produced both an authoritarian-conservative Soviet Union and an authoritarian-conservative Nazi Germany without paradox.

Imagine the familiar ideological plane with its four corners. A perpendicular axis extends upward from its center representing the quantity authoritarian-conservatism. Lines drawn from the four corners and edges show catenary curves converging asymptotically at a point above the plane along the AC axis, forming a tapered pyramidal space that is politics. Somewhere in the region near that apex psychology overwhelms ideology, and in that mental state, communism or fascism or Islamofascism or Branch-Davidian, it's all the same to an authoritarian-conservative. The line from the Communism corner will eventually meet up with the line from the Fascism corner, and you won't be able to distinguish any differences between authoritarian-conservatives without an ideological dictionary.

Still here, Tom? Or did the red haze block your vision around about the first time I used the term "authoritarian-conservative"?

I think it's a fascinating subject, myself, and one I'd rather talk about than which side of the political spectrum contains the bigger poopy-heads. Suit yourself.