ABSTRACT
American ideology is often described as merely a collection of policy preferences, liberals lining up on the left side of each issue and conservatives on the right. In this view, a liberal is someone who supports legal abortion, affirmative action, environmental protection, gay marriage, gun control, inheritance taxes, national health care, and spending on the welfare state, while opposing military actions. Conservatives are the reverse. This is accurate, but does nothing to explain why this is the case, or why those issue positions go together. It is much more accurate to say that ideology is a set of beliefs that lead to those positions, rather than simply liberalism or conservatism being a collection of policy preferences. It is important to see the connection between the belief systems that we have discussed and the major political issues of the current day. This chapter illustrates in a brief fashion how the premises and values of the ideologies lead to these issue positions, and perhaps as importantly, how these same beliefs lead each side to misunderstand why the other takes the positions they do.
