For many, we have seen, conservative identification is driven by support for orthodox, traditional, and mainstream views on religious and social matters. Some conservatives are really “conservatives” in their personal lives and extend (perhaps mistakenly) this connotation of conservatism to political identification. This explanation helps to explain a substantial part of the dominance of the conservative ideological label in American politics.

There is no such ready explanation for the “conflicted conservatives,” the more puzzling group of citizens who combine self-identified conservatism with wholly liberal issue views. Depending on the survey frame, roughly one in three self-identified conservatives in the United States holds liberal views on both economic and cultural matters. “Conflicted conservatives” represent a distinct, and very large, segment of ideological identifiers – they nearly always outnumber operationally “constrained” conservatives, those who are conservative on both issue dimensions, and are about as numerous as operationally constrained liberals. They speak most directly to the disconnect between symbolic conservatism and operational liberalism in American ideological politics, as there are almost no citizens who fall into the opposite group, combining liberal identification with conservative issue views.

This asymmetry rules out simple ignorance of the meanings of ideological language as a possible explanation. Simple ignorance would produce approximately equal numbers who misapply to themselves both ideological labels. Instead we see that virtually all of the mistaken application of terms is associated with “conservative.”