American conservatism has traditionally emphasized more keeping governmental regulation of people’s lives to a minimum, in order to allow ample room for individual self-reliance. This has led to such positions as support for the right to own guns without regulation, the right of consumers to make their choices free of government oversight, and the right of businesses to operate with a minimum level of governmental regulation. In recent decades American conservatism has added to these concerns a desire to maintain common values of morality and spirituality, and opposition to legalized abortion.
American liberalism and American conservatism are not tidy ideologies. It is sometimes hard to see logical connections among the various attitudes detailed. It frequently happens that an American political figure is “liberal” on some of these issues and “conservative” on others. American labor unions, for example, have generally been quite concerned about issues of equality but have not been equally concerned about an issue such as abortion rights. There are many other complexities as well. As one more example, American conservatives generally favor free trade but are also concerned about the repression of religion in China. This leaves them to grapple with the question of what sort of trade relations the United States should maintain with China. Both ideologies are therefore mixtures, representing marriages of political convenience, and it is difficult to find internal coherence among the various parts of either one.
The two American ideologies have been shaped as coalitions largely by the American two-party system. As you will see in Chapter 10 , the American system of elections forces Americans into a system of two large parties; small parties find it very