Here’s a simple definition of ideology: “A set of beliefs about the proper order of society and how it can be achieved.”8 And here’s the most basic of all ideological questions: Preserve the present order, or change it? At the French Assembly of 1789, the delegates who favored preservation sat on the right side of the chamber, while those who favored change sat on the left. The terms right and left have stood for conservatism and liberalism ever since. Political theorists since Marx had long assumed that people chose ideologies to further their self-interest. The rich and powerful want to preserve and conserve; the peasants and workers want to change things (or at least they would if their consciousness could be raised and they could see their self-interest properly, said the Marxists). But even though social class may once have been a good predictor of ideology, that link has been largely broken in modern times, when the rich go both ways (industrialists mostly right, tech billionaires mostly left) and so do the poor (rural poor mostly right, urban poor mostly left). And when political scientists looked into it, they found that self-interest does a remarkably poor job of predicting political attitudes.9 So for most of the late twentieth century, political scientists embraced blank-slate theories in which people soaked up the ideology of their parents or the TV programs they watched.10 Some political scientists even said that most people were so confused about political issues that they had no real ideology at all.11 But then came the studies of twins. In the 1980s, when scientists began analyzing large databases that allowed them to compare identical twins (who share all of their genes, plus, usually, their prenatal and childhood environments) to same-sex fraternal twins (who share half of their genes, plus their prenatal and childhood environments), they found that the identical twins were more similar on just about everything.12 And what’s more, identical twins r

You’re like liberals back when they were more reasonable before they became leftists. And now every liberal kind of has to be a leftist. If you want to be on the team, you’ve got to subscribe to the most fringe ideas that the team is promoting. You can be woke, with all the nonsense that that now implies, but don’t say that somehow it’s an extension of liberalism. Because it’s most often actually an undoing of liberalism. You can have your points of view and your positions on these things but don’t try and piggyback on what I always believe. I have always believed, as liberals do for example, in a colorblind society.

People who are liberals look upon the principles of Marxism as abstract dogma. They approve of Marxism, but are not prepared to practice it or to practice it in full; they are not prepared to replace their liberalism by Marxism. These people have their Marxism, but they have their liberalism as well - they talk Marxism but practice liberalism; they apply Marxism to others but liberalism to themselves. They keep both kind of goods in stock and find a use for each. This is how the minds of certain people work.

I have been a learner all my life, and I am a learner still. ... I have some ideas that may not be thought to furnish good materials for a liberal politician. I do not like changes for their own sake, I only like a change when it is needful to alter something bad into something good, or something which is good into something better. ... [T]he basis of my liberalism is this. It is the lesson which I have been learning ever since I was young. I am a lover of liberty; and that liberty which I value for myself, I value for every human being in proportion to his means and opportunities. That is a basis on which I find it perfectly practicable to work in conjunction with a dislike to unreasoned change and a profound reverence for everything ancient, provided that reverence is deserved.

For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashion of our garments, depend on where we were born. We are molded and fashioned by our surroundings.

I'm a liberal, I was born a liberal, and I will be a liberal till the day I die.

We naturally like what we have been accustomed to, and are attracted towards it. [...] The same is the case with those opinions of man to which he has been accustomed from his youth; he likes them, defends them, and shuns the opposite views.

A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.

I think that some people are hardwired a certain way, and they invent religions to go along with the way they are. Like they are hardwired for bigotry or violence or being ignorant—or maybe ignorance is just a kind of bigotry. People say they don’t want to know a complicated truth, you know, because they already believe something simple, some thing that’s easier on their minds.

Good for you, you have a heart, you can be a liberal. Now, couple your heart with your brain, and you can be a conservative.

Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism. Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, physically healthy, and not bankrupted in middle age by the illness of a spouse. Consider the biography of any “self-made” man, and you will find that his success was entirely dependent on background conditions that he did not make and of which he was merely the beneficiary. There is not a person on earth who chose his genome, or the country of his birth, or the political and economic conditions that prevailed at moments crucial to his progress. And yet, living in America, one gets the distinct sense that if certain conservatives were asked why they weren’t born with club feet or orphaned before the age of five, they would not hesitate to take credit for these accomplishments.

One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things. Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals'.

American libertarians should rarely be taken at face value. They generally share two characteristics. The first is that they are rich. It is as rare to find an impoverished libertarian as it is to find a wealthy socialist. The second reason is that their libertarianism rarely stretches beyond their personal freedoms, especially the liberty not to be taxed. Other people's freedom is their own lookout.

The Liberal is distinguished from the Conservative and the Radical, not only by his basic philosophy but by his methods. Never does he believe that a good end justifies and evil means. He seeks to find everything that binds men together, rather than what divides them, for he loves persuasion and detests coercion.