The Great Dichotomy, Revealed.

At the pinnacle of my liberal, bleeding-hearted community conscientiousness, I helped to start a neighborhood association in a fairly affluent area of San Jose, California. Empower the citizenry! Dumpster days! That sort of thing.

After the first year of its existence, during which we had some fair semblance of success at involving our neighbors in improving our collective lot, more people wanted to get involved with running the association. Including a man who we will call Kevin, because that is his name.

Kevin provided my first up-front, in-the-flesh interaction with that sort of conservative for whom the very concept of taxation is an anathema. We spent hours collectively debating whether or not we should apply for funding from the City to provide even basic things like block parties, because Kevin hoped that, were we not to do so, his taxes might go down. Because the City didn't give us two grand.

Upon consideration of Kevin's viewpoint, and after calming down, the following occurred to me. Liberals believe in government for the people. Conservatives believe in government for the person; namely, themselves.

I was reminded of this thought recently with Representative Rohrabacher's now-famous remark that, should you oppose extraordinary rendition, he "hopes it is your famil[y]" that suffers the consequences of a terrorist attack. This is precisely the conservative mentality -- so that my family and I should be safe, it is acceptable for you and yours to suffer.

Think about the idea of capital punishment. For me, the idea that any innocent person might be put to death by the state is reprehensible and, as such, I oppose the death penalty. For a conservative, however, it is worth the sacrifice of innocent life so that there might be some illusory deterrent effect, or so that others are off the streets. They are happy to have innocent people die in the hopes that their family might be spared.

From where do these differing viewpoints come? Both are born of the same instinct: protection. For a liberal, though, that protection extends to the broader population, typically of those of lesser means or the oppressed. For a conservative, it extends as far as the person's address book.

This instinct is clearly born of the person's situation in life. The odds that a wealthy, upper middle class white conservative is going to be spirited off to Germany and tortured, or executed for a crime he didn't commit, is extremely unlikely. It is far more likely that the victim of such injustice will come from the same populations for whom we, as liberals, fight -- people of color, the underprivileged. Therefore, having untold members of those groups abused to find the one who might prevent a terrorist attack is an acceptable outcome for a conservative.

It's a long path from opposing the funding of neighborhood groups in San Jose to the abuse of Egyptian nationals at Guantanamo Bay. But recognizing the shared philosophy and solipsism in both circumstances may be a step toward understanding how to move past such petty and disappointing worldviews.