a curious thing.........................

 

One of the curious things about political opinions is how often the same people line up on the opposite sides of different issues.  The issues themselves may have no intrinsic connection with each other.  They may range from military spending to drug laws to monetary policy to education.  Yet the same familiar faces can be found glaring at each other from opposite sides of the political fence, again and again.  It happens too often to be coincidence and it is too uncontrolled to be a plot.  A closer look at the arguments on both sides often shows that they are reasoning from fundamentally different premises.  These different premises—often implicit—are what provide the consistency behind the repeated opposition of individuals and groups on numerous, unrelated issues.  They have different visions of how the world works.

-Thomas Sowell,  A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles