i've been asserting that the left-right political spectrum is incoherent. in particular, liberalism is incoherent and conservativism is incoherent. let me try to say why: crisply, as it were.
conservativism runs aground on freedom. it's constantly invoking 'liberty' and trying to starve the state. then again, it's constantly trying to legislate morality/religion and advocating a gigantic security apparatus, both domestically and in a world-bestriding militarism. look this is just obviously a set of principles that can't be held all at once without contradiction.
leftism runs aground on equality, which it proposes to accomplish by an extreme concentration of power in the hands of state bureaucracies. this is at its most excruciating in authoritarian communism: we propose equality accomplished by giving absolute power to state/party agents and removing power entirely from the rest of the population. american liberalism just does this in a milder way, and one way the extreme inegalitarianism of liberalism is visible is in its condescension: we will educate and uplift you in the way we see fit, for your own good. that there is a profoundly hierarchical orientation.
being a moderate is a way of trying to cobble together a compromise that recognizes the legitimacy of two positions that contradict each other and each of which contradicts itself: a really impressive accomplishment in utter irrationality.
now, maybe consistency is not something you want in a politician or a political system; maybe you want a pragmatist, not a logician. however, a contradiction cannot be instantiated in reality, and every step toward victory of either side is at once a further departure from its own fundamental values. a victory for either side would be its own complete failure.
