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Ideology
An organized and coherent set of attitudes about government and public policy is known as a political ideology. The word ideology, or science of ideas, originated in eighteenth-century France during the intellectual Age of Enlightenment that produced the American form of democracy.
In contemporary America people with a liberal ideology traditionally have supported a strong national government that actively promotes social welfare and equality and intervenes to regulate the economy. Holders of a conservative ideology, by contrast, have believed that government should have a limited role in regulating the economy and providing social services. They have stressed that people are primarily responsible for their own welfare.
People who fall between the liberal and conservative viewpoints are considered moderates. Other, more extreme, ideologies such as communism, fascism, and socialism have gained adherents and controlled governments in other countries, as communism does today in North Korea and Cuba. But in the United States only the Socialists, who advocate collective ownership of production and distribution, have had any measurable and sustained popularity as a third party.
Americans generally find a home in the two major political parties, liberals in the Democratic Party and conservatives in the Republican Party, with a wide range from left to right in both. For most of the twentieth century, southern Democrats were highly conservative, and by joining with the Republicans they often formed a potent conservative coalition on many votes in Congress. With the GOP's growth in the South, the coalition's importance has waned.
Ideological Self-Identification
Americans' descriptions of their own ideological positions changed relatively little from the 1970s to the 1990s. Although conservative sentiment grew somewhat in the 1980s, the proportions of the public considering themselves liberal, moderate, or conservative tended to remain stable, with moderates consistently making up the largest category and liberals the smallest.
The significance of such ideological self-identification data is limited, however, because many people do not agree on the meaning of the categories. For example, some self-identified conservatives support supposedly “liberal” policies such as increased federal spending for health, the elderly, and education.
Another difficulty in sorting out people's ideological self-identification stems from the way political discourse has changed since the middle of the twentieth century. During the 1950s and until the mid-1960s liberalism and conservatism pertained primarily to the scope of government involvement in the economy and society. Since the 1960s, however, the traditional distinction between the two ideologies has been overlaid with additional policy dimensions. In foreign policy, for example, conservatism is now also equated with supporting military expenditures, showing a greater willingness to use military force in international affairs, and giving the president the primary role in formulating policy in international affairs. By contrast, liberalism is also equated with giving less priority to military expenditures, exhibiting greater reluctance to use military power, and giving Congress a substantial role in the shaping of foreign policy.
There is also a social policy dimension to use of the terms liberalism and conservatism. On so-called lifestyle issues—abortion, law and order, prayer in the public schools, women's rights, gay rights, pornography—conservatives show a greater willingness to permit government intervention to regulate human conduct than do liberals.
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