Political Alignment

What frustrates me isn't liberals, left-wingers, communists, socialists, fascists, statists, totalitarians, collectivists, or theocrats. These people, while aggravating, are nothing compared to...well, they go by many names. Centrists, moderates, political agnostics, neutrals, *Switzerland*, and undecided voters. During the course of this article, I will be giving such people the dope slap. You've all seen the dope slap. Marc Harmon on NCIS will smack his team members in the back of their head to indicate they're being morons. Much dope slapping will occur.

First off, there are only a few reasons that you're politically neutral, none of which are valid reasons to be. They are as follows.

1. You're not and you know you're not. You only say it to appear high-minded and above the fray.

2. You're liberal on some issues and conservative on others, but you refuse to evaluate which side represents your interests more often than the other, so you perpetually refuse to pick a side.

3. You're apathetic because, for whatever reason, you don't believe either side can or will carry out the interests of your political alignment, and you have mistaken this apathy for an absence of ideology.

4. You honestly haven't thought through any principles or ideas regarding politics, so you're totally lost and you know it. All the different ways of saying you're politically neutral sound a lot smarter than the word "uninformed" and you know it.

Having established that you do have a political alignment, whether you know it or not for whatever reason, here's how you figure out what it is.

There are three spheres of American politics. Financial issues, Hawkish/Foreign Policy issues, and Social Issues. With each of these, the application is whether you want more individual rights/local control/freedom or more collective rights/federal or global control/regulation.

Let's go through this one at a time.

Financial: This means taxes/land/trade and just about anything having to do with money or work.

If you're fiscally conservative you want taxes as low as possible and for the government to provide for only the most basic needs of infrastructure. To you, the private sector is better at nearly everything because of greater competition and accountability. Except in cases of true abuses of corporate power, you want the government out of the business of business. You believe where people are economically is temporary and that upward mobility is not only possible, but what makes America great, so you feel no need to spread the wealth or redress socioeconomic variation.

If you're fiscally liberal, you want taxes as high as possible in order to pay for social services that are both diverse and comprehensive. To you, government is better than the private sector at nearly everything because they were elected and you trust politicians and bureaucrats in general more than greedy evil businessmen. Business should not be able to take a breath without government say-so, and in most cases government should control the means of production anyway, just to be on the safe side. For the most part, you believe that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and you're stay in the caste you're born into, unless you're amazing lucky or cheat and steal your way to the top. America has been particularly unfair to the working man, so you feel the government should make it more fair in America by taxing, regulating, and redistributing all the wealth until everybody's equal and nobody's poor, because that's the only fair way to do it.

Foreign Policy/Hawkishness

If you're a hawk, you want American foreign policy to be strong and aggressive. We're the leader of the free world and command the most powerful military on the face of the Earth, and we ought to act like it too. Other states around the world respond to strength, not weakness, so showing any in dealings of foreign policy is always ill-advised. Diplomacy and being nice to other nations is fine and good, but only when it can be done from a position of strength, so that you can confidently threat dire results to any nation acting against American interests. When it comes to crime, you're basically in agreement with Harry Callahan. Crime is completely unacceptable in civilized society and you're fully prepared to give the cops the tools and power they need to combat it by any means necessary, including putting the bad guys in prisons where they break big rocks into small rocks or simply executing them. You don't just rely on cops to protect you though, because you support the right to bear arms, and you've got yours on you, along with a permit like a good law-abiding citizen.

If you're a dove, you want American foreign policy to be kind and empathic. We're not the leader of the free world, but just a member state among many such nations. Commanding the most powerful military on Earth is probably scary for the other states, and so we've got to take care to not be too intimidating. Diplomacy and being nice to others comes first and foremost, and we should do so with states both weaker and stronger than us in equal measure. Nations acting against American interests are probably doing so because of something we did wrong, so we need to understand where they're coming from. Crime is a result of poverty and disenfranchisement, so we need to look at ourselves before we start pointing fingers at "criminals" who are really just innocent victims of a corrupt society and system. The police must have a pacifistic and humanitarian approach to criminals, treating them no different than they would you or me, including prison, which must meet all standards of the Geneva Convention and never include the death penalty. Guns are an invention of violent and unlawful men and should never be allowed for anyone other than the military and police. Self-defense is a not a personal responsibility in a civilized society, and you are prepared to rely upon police officers as the sole protection for you and your family.

Social:

If you're a social conservative, you believe that tradition and fundamentalist Christianity has it right on all issues concerning social policy in this country. Marriage is between a man and a woman, homosexuality is an abomination, sex education is a menace, art and music need to be censored within an inch of their lives, abortion is never acceptance, and drugs of any manner are of the devil. Evolution is a plot of secular progressives to undermine the values of this country and to turn our children against God. Separation of church and state does not guarantee you freedom from religion, because it only guarantees that religion will remain free from government. Ultimately, you believe that humanity is a sinful and amoral lot who need to be perfected by Jesus Christ if they are to ever succeed in having a sustained civilized society. Where government cannot and should not help to perfect the people, religion shall.

If you're a social liberal, you believe in individual liberty for every person regarding how they live their own life. So long as they don't hurt you or anyone else that isn't a consenting adult, their behavior and their private lives are exactly that, their own. Marriage is people's own business, homosexuality is a beautiful quality of humanity, sex education is vital to a better understanding of a universal aspect of human life and to human health, art and music need the freedom to breathe so they may create and inspire, abortion is a personal and individual decision that should come up as infrequently as possible, and drugs are the business of the person taking them, as long as they're not hurting anybody else. Evolution is a scientific fact, insomuch as gravity, electromagnetism, and tectonic plates are. Separation of church and state, in fact, means that nobody should be forced to acknowledge or participate in a faith they do not believe in, especially in a public institution of any kind. Ultimately, education and science will rise humanity above anything we can conceive of now. We are on an amazing journey as a species that, on the scale of geological time, was just concerned with throwing a spear as accurately as possible and running after our prey as fast as we can. Questions of the origin of the universe, the nature of subatomic particles, and activity within black holes should all be beyond our primitive brains to even ask, and yet here we are on the brink of enlightenment that is nearly impossible to overstate. Neither government nor religion shall perfect us, for we are on a journey quite beyond what either would conceive of as perfection, so wondrous is the natural world.

So, simply put, you're not politically agnostic. If you're educated and reasonably introspective, you've already thought this through and you know what is true about your thoughts and what is not. If you're not education and you're not introspective, I encourage you to change both aspects of yourself. No undecided voters should exist in a nation with near-universal access to libraries, the Internet, and political pundits of all stripes. So if you're really undecided, get decided, and if you're claiming to be neutral while doing lots of complaining about Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin, cut the crap. Your intellectual dishonesty is nauseating.

-Frank