zlacker

>>YeGobl+(OP)
I’m always confused why conservatives tend to support the death penalty. The conservative ethos is to reduce the power of the state to prevent abuse, but giving the state the right to kill a citizen clearly goes against that. How can you mistrust the state in almost every aspect of society, yet trust it to only kill people that “deserve” it?

>>dimal+zl
The two party system oversimplifies things, so you end up with "small government" and "traditional government" in the same bucket.

>>dbmiku+Mm
Exactly. This needs to be said more. The political party duopoly in the US and some other countries belies a vast range of political beliefs in the population. If you look closely at each party, there are many competing factions within, often vehemently opposed.

The words "conservative", "liberal", "right", "left", etc., are practically meaningless, and I'm old enough to have seen them change over the decades, sometimes radically. They're nothing but trendy labels.

>>lapcat+Iq
Indeed, the duopoly tends to become attached to social divisions, and you could choose any of those divisions to label the parties:

Liberal vs conservative

Secular vs religious

Governance vs identity politics

The list goes on and on. In an odd historical analogy, the electric charges were originally assigned "negative" and "positive" according to what happened when they were combined, with no hypothesis as to the underlying cause.