Blue, Red,Green and ...

So, can you reject the one dimensional liberal/conservative grid – and where do you go? There are all these talking heads that say you can’t be socially conservative and fiscally liberal. The conversation they have about Bush being a social conservative and a fiscal liberal failed to ask the all the questions. Does spending money on Homeland Security make him a liberal and not raising taxes make him a conservative. According to Stockman, Reagan held the same types of fiscal positions that Bush used and I don’t see conservatives criticizing him. Of course, Reagan was gifted at holding irreconcilable views at the same time. The fact is, all of us do!
Is being socially conservative against the law because someone’s rights are potentially restricted? Check the zoning code for restricted rights. Maybe it just matters what rights are being restricted. I watched a woman representing a social organization on television indicate that someone should not be able to show a pro-life commercial during the Super Bowl. She was willing to remove someone else’s right to free speech without any reservation to protect her pro-choice position. How does she reconcile her views? Fortunately, I don’t smoke or drink or maybe I'd think these rights were being restricted.
Again – how many dimensions can your grid have? What do you call someone who believes that if the community decides to spend money, they should raise the taxes to pay the related costs? If the community decides to not spend the money, the taxes aren’t an issue. The next question becomes a social issue of how was the social equity/justice issue handled and the related moral/cultural issues. There is an assumption that the principal task of government is to secure and distribute fairly the liberties and economic resources individuals need to lead freely chosen lives. Do I believe that all American governments (federal, state, local) have an obligation to provide some balancing between individual rights and the needs of the community to provide the most freedom for all?
For example, U.S. citizens may be more willing to sacrifice a social or economic right in cases of conflict with a civil or political right: if neither the constitution nor a majority of democratically elected representatives support universal access to health care, then the right to health care regardless of income can be curtailed. In contrast, the Chinese may be more willing to sacrifice a civil or political liberty in cases of conflict with a social or economic right: there may be wide support for restrictions on the right to form independent labor associations if they are necessary to provide the conditions for economic development. Different priorities assigned to rights can also matter when it must be decided how to spend scarce resources.
I see both the left and the right being responsible for our current problems. The political left supports welfare rights economically unsustainable in an era of slow growth and aging populations. They also push for shifting power away from local communities and democratic institutions and towards centralized bureaucratic structures better equipped to administer the fair and equal distribution of benefits, thus leading to a growing sense of powerlessness and alienation from the political process. Moreover, the modern welfare state with its universalizing logic of rights and entitlements has undermined family and social ties in civil society by rendering excessive requirements to communities, by actively discouraging private efforts to help others (e.g., strict regulations in prevent people from participating voluntarily in the governance of local organization), and even by providing incentives that discourage the formation of families (e.g., welfare payments are cut off in many American states if a recipient marries a working person) and encourage the break-up of families (e.g., no-fault divorce in the US is often financially rewarding for the non custodial parent, usually the father).
I find the solutions favored by the political right have contributed directly to the erosion of social responsibilities and valued forms of communal life, particularly in the US. Far from producing beneficial community consequences, the invisible hand of unregulated free-market capitalism undermines the family (e.g., few corporations provide enough leave to parents of newborn children), disrupts local communities (e.g., following plant closings or the shifting of corporate headquarters), and corrupts the political process (e.g., US politicians are often dependent on economic interest groups for their political survival, with the consequence that they no longer represent the community at large). Moreover, the glorification of greed in our most recent era justified the extension of instrumental considerations governing relationships in the marketplace into spheres previously informed by a sense of uncalculated reciprocity and civil obligation. This trend has been reinforced by increasing globalization, which pressures states into conforming to the dictates of the international marketplace.
Wow, there are a lot of books about how to fix these problems and as soon as one’s done there’s another to criticzie it.
Where do I fit in this society?
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/communitarianism/#UniVerPar#UniVerPar