If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

When I first read about the study in a Toronto Star article by Kurt Kleiner, it became immediately apparent that the research methods were poor. In fact, they sucked. Maybe that's just the hard scientist in me, lashing out at headline pop-psychology. But there is no reason why social science has to be carried out at a near-pseudoscience level of correlation-noting and post hoc ergo propter hoc conclusions.

The study followed 95 people from the Berkeley area over 20 years, whose personalities were measured subjectively by researchers who knew them personally. In fairness, Professor Block admits in his paper that Berkeley is not representative of the United States as a whole. But that isn't enough. Jonah Goldberg at Townhall.com takes a couple of shots at the methods of the study, noting

self-reliance explains seven percent of the variance between kids who bravely became liberal and tykes who supinely embraced conservative politics.

But still, what the hell is a conservative? What is a liberal? Everything else is beside the point if these two terms are not understood.

Our political beliefs are the natural extension of our personal philosophies, the groundwork for which is laid out in our earliest childhood. Do not mistake what I am saying - I would not attempt to predict the future voting patterns of 4-year-olds. But children are molded by their parents and their communities, and their personalities reflect their experiences. That really is not in debate.

It is very possible that children who desire greater structure and stability will grow into adults who value structure and stability. In fact, it is likely. And kids who desire structure and stability at 4 years of age are easy to pick out - and easy to label after subjectively evaluating how annoying you find them (let's face it, whining is a function of the personalities of the child and the interviewer - that could be avoided with better methods, but it wasn't).

Those children who desire greater structure and stability are not necessarily going to be more fiscally conservative. Nor are they necessarily going to vote Republican over Democrat, which is the implication in this study and report. But they are likely to grow into adults who are more cautious, more family and community oriented, and more interested in structured and traditional religion. This is the conservativism that the research points to. But this is not the same as saying that adults who are cautious and structured are voting for candidates we call "conservative". Democrats typically stand for many social programs that a cautious voter would not want to see eliminated. Democrats typically stand for a statist structure and government "social net" that is highly illiberal, but is misidentified as "liberal" on the political spectrum. Would a cautious voter want to see Social Security overhauled? Roe v Wade overturned? The BCS system eliminated?

Is this what you thought "conservative" meant?

From Kleiner's Toronto Star article:

The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.

The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests. The girls were still outgoing, but the young men tended to turn a little introspective.

This article and this study are describing social conservativism, which is not the same as economic or political conservativism. And both the article and the study are meaningless if they do not spell that out clearly. The terms "conservative" and "liberal" are too ambiguous and misleading. Call me conservative, but I want clarity in the language we are using in this conversation.

More from Kleiner:

Jeff Greenberg, a social psychologist at the University of Arizona... was [un] impressed.

"I found it to be biased, shoddy work, poor science at best," he said of the Block study. He thinks insecure, defensive, rigid people can as easily gravitate to left-wing ideologies as right-wing ones. He suspects that in Communist China, those kinds of people would likely become fervid party members.

Greenberg is spot on. Those children who seek stability and order are not looking for the ideals of the American GOP. They are looking for fewer challenges to the way things currently are. These are children who are stressed by moving to a new home or new school, or getting a new daily schedule, or seeing two men kiss passionately in public in downtown Richmond, Virginia. Is that conservativism? Yes, it is. And in this sense, it is conservative to vote for the incumbent, even if it is Ted Kennedy. When we choose the familiar over the unfamiliar, we are acting conservatively. Consider Merriam-Webster's definition of conservative as it relates to personal behavior:

3 a : tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions : TRADITIONAL b : marked by moderation or caution

Self-identified political conservatives may scoff at this research from Berkeley, and self-identified political liberals may smirk knowingly. But these reactions seem to be based on an imprecise understanding of the terms "conservative" and "liberal". I think this may be the biggest battle for libertarians (or other small parties); to explain what they stand for in terms that actually communicate some meaning. An understanding that there is more than one dimension of political identification is great (see the World's Smallest Political Quiz), but how many Americans know what a libertarian is?

One last note from Kleiner:

the work suggests that personality and emotions play a bigger role in our political leanings than we think. All of us, liberal or conservative, feel as though we've reached our political opinions by carefully weighing the evidence and exercising our best judgment. But it could be that all of that careful reasoning is just after-the-fact self-justification. What if personality forms our political outlook, with reason coming along behind, rationalizing after the fact?

Yes, it could be that. And that's okay, to a degree. Kleiner makes it sound as though we are self-deceiving, but I think it is instead helpful to realize that one's political position on any topic should be self-evident if one is of a clear understanding about one's personal values and philosophies. It is necessary to recognize whether we are seeking security and stability from our government, or freedom. That is what true conservativism and liberalism are all about, even if those words have been hijacked to mean something else by a large section of our media, and therefore our general population.