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Notes -
Why is it that a person can prefer someone who disagrees with them politically on more items than someone who disagrees on fewer items that are a strict subset of the other person's disagreements, so that it cannot be explained by priority of items?
Let me give a toy diagram to clarify. Suppose we have six areas where the people in question can disagree: ABCDEF. Now, if Alice cares mostly about A, I can see her preferring Bob, who agrees with her on A, but disagrees on B-F, over Carol, who agrees on B-F but disagrees on A. But what I'm talking about is when Bob disagrees with Alice on all of A-F, while Carol agrees with Alice on ABC and disagrees on DEF. Carol's disagreements with Alice are a strict subset of Bob's disagreements with Alice, so there's no way of prioritizing items that should make Alice prefer Bob over Carol…
…and yet, I've found people who express exactly this sort of preference. What is this?
Are A-F correlated in any meaningful way? I prefer the interlocutor that just disagrees with me in a consistent, predictable way to the guy that says, "I like to think through each issue" and winds up with an incoherent dog's breakfast of views.
In the case I'm thinking of, yes. Here, "ABC" stand for social issues, "DEF" for economic/government size issues. Specifically, I'm referring to certain "small government conservatives" who express a preference for "big government social progressives" — whom these same conservatives regularly call "socialists" or even "communists" — over "big government social conservatives."
Sounds like the object-level positions are secondary to some underlying value or ethos that is perceived to be shared with Bob but not Carol. In Walterodim's read, this value would probably be "logical consistency." But it could just as well be a certain type of class consciousness: both anarcho-libertarians and socialists have a kind of working-class, artisanal sensibility that values the individual worker's control over what he creates. Or a perceived character feature: maybe they're small-government conservative because they value tight communities of mutual aid, which socialists could also be perceived as chasing even if they go a bit astray with it.
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