Do you think you generally find out how you feel about some political issue by imagining how your personal values and experiences could inform an ideal society? You know, like starting from the idea of individual freedom as a goal unto itself, then trying to square existing contradictions using that goal and trying to find solutions to problems that satisfy that value?

Asking because the way you're talking about politics in this thread is pretty different from how people on here usually think about things. We try to first identify the material reality and contradictions that exist in the systems around us, and try to analyze how sectors of society (as delineated by their relationship to the means of production, i.e. are they the havers or the have-nots) are pushed, structurally, into specific actions or behaviors. Then we try to understand what is to be done to bring a possible new world, one without as many of the oppressive systems present in the current one, into existence, but not necessarily a utopia either (because we can identify that the contradictions present in the current world will necessarily be transformed, not just eradicated, when brought to their tipping points). That way, things are always based in a historical process and material reality, not just vague values, morals, or even ideology (not that those things are bad, but they are inherently contextual/local and hard to build a movement that unifies all the workers of all the world when they all have different ideas about them).

I think you probably think the former way because that's just the default in Western discourse, we call it idealism, Enlightenment Idealism, Liberal Idealism, whatever. Most members of the ruling class nowadays are idealists too, but some of the most successful among our enemies were people like Kissinger who don't really care about some utopia they want to build, instead they just do their best to analyze material reality and strategize around the real material threats and the place in history that they occupy. The most successful revolutionary leaders like Lenin, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Sankara, etc all did it too.