What you might not expect as a result of this fact, however, is that one can become a Right-wing liberal, or a Left-wing conservative. The latter I am just supposing for the sake of symmetry; I don’t actually have evidence of it, but I am familiar with the Right-wing liberal, if only because I am one.

I was a left-of-center liberal for much of my life, and a firebrand one (paradoxically, a fiery moderate) from 1997-2006 or so. I began a political conversion in about 2010, but retained my adherence to moderation that kept me from joining the ranks of the Far Left previously. A Right-wing liberal, to me, is one who eschews the materialists’ aspirations and priorities — does not forsake the religious, cultural, and ethnic for the material/economic — but does not give up on the ideal of freedom of personal and artistic expression as paramount for a (Western) society’s well-being.

It is, perhaps, a rejection of Trotskyist world domination, but it also rejects the root of such thought in Europe: Christian humanism, universalism, and proselytisation.

Perhaps it’s a crooked line through a muddled plane of sociopolitical dots, clumps, and empty spaces, but I perceive some way forward, and around, the many and sundry seemingly intractable hangups in our current political climate.

Keep on the lookout for the Right-wing liberal in the future. I doubt it will become a major political phenomenon any time soon, but hopefully at least a blip on the radar here and there.

PS I often use AD&D alignments to make sense of real world moral and political positioning. Sometimes it’s an invaluable model.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_compass