"Which one are you?"

Since hurricane Katrina, my wife has been working with the Vietnamese "Refugees" from New Orleans who have temporarily relocated to our city.
Some of these Refugees are second-time-around refugees.
They are the same people who were labeled "boat people" and who fled Viet Nam when things fell apart there a while back.
Some of these people are still trying to make sense of the political atmosphere they find themselves in here in the states.
Things are pretty simple in third world countries politically. Dictators do tend to cut through the red tape.
The Refugees have learned that there is an either/or mentality in American politics, and they have accepted that as the reality here, as have so many government-educated Americans.
It's a convenient way of looking at things. Convenient for the wolves as well as the sheep.
These Vietnamese, says my wife, are constantly asking her, "Which one are you?" referring to the arbitrary polarity of Democrat/Republican thinking.
She keeps telling them that she is neither. She says that she looks at what each candidate says he or she believes in and votes accordingly.
They are having a hard time assimilating this view, partly because it contrasts so glaringly with all the other information (propaganda?) they have gathered regarding American politics.
And partly because they have seen from harsh reality that what a candidate says he or she believes in rarely has any bearing on how that candidate functions once elected.
So they keep asking, perhaps rephrasing it each time within their limited English vocabularies, "Which one are you?"
The problem here is that my wife - an amazingly intelligent person, by the way - keeps telling them what she isn't.
She can't tell them what she is.
She avoids "isms."
She doesn't want to be an "ist."
Defining yourself can be so confining.
She chides me for being a Libertarian. She feels that by defining myself as such, I am now obligated to toe the line for any cause that the Libertarian "leaders" ask me to support, and that if I choose not to support a "Libertarian Cause," I will have proven myself to be a hypocrite.
That's the way it works with the two dinosaur parties, right? That's the way it works in the Left/Right, Democrat/Republican arbitrary polarity.
She doesn't want to be confined to that polarity.
Neither do I.
So she chooses to have an ill-defined philosophical construct.
I choose to be an "ist."
Actually, I am an Objectivist. And, politically, Libertarianism works best within that philosophical framework (despite the opinions of the followers of the originator of Objectivism, Ayn Rand, who felt that there is a disconnect between the two systems of thought - "philisophical protectionism?").
The real question contained within the simplicity of, "Which one are you?" is "Are you a proponent of the Left/Right arbitrary polarity - or are you a proponent of Freedom?"