Prompts for conservative/liberal/progressive
Why this exists
Left/right labels often function as lagging indicators; they compress multiple axes (institutional trust, economics, culture, identity, nation/global, etc.) into one word. This page is a prompt bank to replace the label with verbs.
Related spine: Identities at Work
Conservative → What do you conserve?
Prompts (choose a few)
- What do you want to conserve (a practice, an institution, a norm, a story, a boundary, a way of life)?
- What makes that thing conservable rather than disposable? What evidence would change your mind?
- What do you think is fragile (and therefore needs protection)? What do you think is resilient enough to tolerate change?
- What do you believe is legitimate authority (family, faith, constitution, market, science, tradition, local community, a leader, something else)?
- Which institutions do you treat as already corrupted? What would “restoration” look like in concrete steps?
- What kinds of change do you see as repair vs revolution?
- What are you willing to trade off to conserve what matters (efficiency, equality, freedom, comfort, purity, growth, stability)?
- What do you refuse to conserve even if it’s “traditional” (and why)?
Pushback / refinement prompts
- Are you conserving today’s institutions — or a deeper order you think institutions have betrayed?
- If you say “tear it down,” what exactly do you intend to rebuild (and who decides)?
Liberal → What do you liberate? What is liberty for?
Prompts (versions you can mix)
- What do you want to liberate people from (coercion, poverty, discrimination, ignorance, violence, arbitrary power)?
- What do you want to liberate people for (choice, dignity, participation, mobility, creativity, pluralism)?
- Which liberties do you privilege when liberties conflict (speech vs safety; property vs welfare; privacy vs security; autonomy vs solidarity)?
- What is your default stance toward institutions: reform, regulate, insulate, democratize, professionalize, decentralize?
- What do you think creates liberty: rights, markets, laws, norms, education, material security, social trust, community?
- When does protection become paternalism? When does tolerance become enabling harm?
- What do you think the state should guarantee, and what should it refuse to manage?
Pushback / refinement prompts
- Are you emphasizing negative liberty (freedom from interference) or positive liberty (the conditions that make freedom usable)?
- What’s your rule for when “harm prevention” justifies restriction?
Progressive → Where do you see progress? By what metric?
Prompts
- What do you mean by progress (more equality, less suffering, more inclusion, more capability, more agency, more truth, more sustainability)?
- What do you see as the most meaningful leading indicators of progress? What are the misleading lagging indicators?
- Where do you see real gains that deserve celebration?
- Where do you see stagnation or backsliding — and what would count as improvement?
- What harms do you think are systemic (requiring redesign) vs situational (requiring targeted repair)?
- What is your approach: expand, redistribute, repair, protect, decolonize, decarbonize, democratize — and why those verbs?
- What tradeoffs are you willing to accept (growth vs sustainability; speed vs deliberation; universalism vs targeting)?
Pushback / refinement prompts
- When you reject “progress,” are you rejecting the headline metric, the distribution, or the hidden costs?
- What’s your test for when a reform is performative vs structural?
Cross-cutting: identity verbs (for any label)
- What do you defend?
- What do you refuse?
- What do you permit even when you dislike it?
- What do you enforce (and with what legitimacy)?
- What do you fund / subsidize / tax / ban?
- What do you teach (and what do you treat as taboo)?
- Who do you treat as “us” (belonging) vs “them” (boundary)?