Where Do Conservatives Come From?
From the Toronto Star:
Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.
This makes perfect intuitive sense, when you stop to think about it. However, one critic, social psychologist Jeff Greenberg, had this reaction:
"I found it to be biased, shoddy work, poor science at best," he said of the Block study. He thinks insecure, defensive, rigid people can as easily gravitate to left-wing ideologies as right-wing ones. He suspects that in Communist China, those kinds of people would likely become fervid party members.
It's not a matter of right versus left, it's a matter of authority and security versus freethinking and intellectual curiosity. In the West, conservatism is the dogmatic, authoritarian mode; in China, it's the Party. Maybe it's time to rethink the terms "liberal" and "conservative" to reflect the actual mechanics of what's going on. It's not a matter of tax-and-spend liberals versus borrow-and-spend conservatives, Andrew Sullivan notwithstanding, but a matter of authoritarian political philosophies.
I strongly suspect that, with a broader study, you will find insecure kids turning as readily to PC liberalism as to conservatism, depending on what influencing factors they encoutered growing up. As far as I'm concerned, it's the same mindset.
For conservatives whose feelings are still hurt, there is a more flattering way for them to look at the results. Even if they really did tend to be insecure complainers as kids, they might simply have recognized that the world is a scary, unfair place.
Their grown-up conclusion that the safest thing is to stick to tradition could well be the right one. As for their "rigidity," maybe that's just moral certainty.
The grown-up liberal men, on the other hand, with their introspection and recognition of complexity in the world, could be seen as self-indulgent and ineffectual.
Whether anyone's feelings are hurt or not, the work suggests that personality and emotions play a bigger role in our political leanings than we think. All of us, liberal or conservative, feel as though we've reached our political opinions by carefully weighing the evidence and exercising our best judgment. But it could be that all of that careful reasoning is just after-the-fact self-justification. What if personality forms our political outlook, with reason coming along behind, rationalizing after the fact?
I've run across other polls and studies lately that indicate that personality influences political philosophies heavily, but the article again misses the real connection -- it's a matter of spin, if you like. For example, I take moral certainty to be a symptom of rigidity, not the other way around -- morality is as fluid as anything else, if you're going to take it seriously. Nor does introspection necessarily lead to ineffectuality -- it can as easily lead to a willingness to make the hard decisions and to act on them in the face of necessity. It's just that the consequences of action are more likely to be carefully considered
Thanks to AmericaBlog for the link.
This is Really Scary:
Americans, especially Catholics, approve of torture
But the portion of Catholics who justify torture is even higher, according to the survey. Twenty-one percent of Catholics surveyed said it is “often” justified and 35 percent said it is “sometimes” justified. Another 16 percent said it is “rarely” justified, meaning that nearly three of four Catholics justify it under some circumstances. Four percent of Catholics “didn’t know” or refused to answer and only 26 percent said it is “never” justified, which is the official teaching of the church.
As it turns out, Catholics and evangelical Christians in general are more in favor of torture than secular respondents. Think about that.
During Lent especially, he says, the image of Jesus, who was tortured to death, should be powerful for Catholics, reminding them that “Christ is being crucified today through the practice of torture.”
Link from Andrew Sullivan.
Marriage:
Interesting statistics.
Gay marriage remains a divisive issue, with 51 percent opposing it, the poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found. But almost two-thirds, 63 percent, opposed gay marriage in February 2004.
"Most Americans still oppose gay marriage, but the levels of opposition are down and the number of strong opponents are down," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. "This has some implications for the midterm elections if this trend is maintained. There are gay marriage ballot initiatives in numerous states."
. . .
The number of people who say they strongly oppose gay marriage has dropped from 42 percent in early 2004 to 28 percent now. Strong opposition has dropped sharply among senior citizens and Republicans.
People are now evenly split on allowing adoptions by gay couples and six in 10 now favor allowing gays to serve openly in the military.
I've been pointing to the processes of history in this and related issues. The other factor, of course, is that familiarity breeds acceptance. That's one reason the Christianists have been so vehement about the urgency of passing anti-marriage amendments: they had a very small window when they could count on knee-jerk reactions (aside from their core, of course, who are nothing more than knee-jerks), and now it's passing.
This e-mail from Andrew Sullivan explains part of it:
As such, let me tell you and your readers this: this amendment never had any chance of passage from the start, for political "inside pool" reasons as well as our "Live Free or Die" motto. The widely-held view by state legislators (off the record, of course), was that the committee's recommendation of an amendment to ban gay marriage was more indicative of the committee chair's views than a general consensus of what the state felt on the matter.
That's been the case across the board, I think, plus the usual barrage of lies and distortions from the Christianists. Didn't work this time, and (prediction time) it's going to work less and less, simply because, as far as we have a set of national traits, it's un-American.
Gore, Again:
Interesting article from The American Prospect on Al Gore. I think I'll vote for him in 2008, whether he's running or not. (I did it in 2000 -- maybe next time it will work.)
One thing mentioned in the article struck me:
The reason Gore sought this out, as former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, Gore’s friend since 1961, told me, is that “Gore wants to make change, not be part of the distortive, stifling process of the mainstream media.” Speaking into the cameras, the former VP had learned, was like talking into one of those gag gift bullhorns -- what came out had little relation to what went in. “Gore’s own view,” says Hundt, “is that he sighed noisily in the debate and used the wrong telephone line to ask for money and the media said these are momentous events. Meanwhile, they ignore global warming and the failure to catch Osama and the destruction of the safety net.”
One thing that the debate over the "role of journalism" in contemporary political discourse has missed is that the major media outlets are no longer "journalists." They are major corporations, and their goals and philosophies are those of major corporations. Their newspapers and broadcasts are bottom-line driven, and the bias is going to be toward those politicians who will satisfy their needs as corporations. It's the stock market that's shaping the news today, not any idea of public discourse. Both the NYT and WaPo periodically takes steps to "balance" their liberal bias (WaPo's latest is being treated to something an order of magnitude above scorn on the blogosphere right now). I've always wondered, "What liberal bias?" I haven't seen any evidence of it.
The Democrats:
Pam's House Blend linked to this article from the New York Observer:
“Both Democratic politicians and pundits are afraid,” Mr. Feingold said on March 21 by phone. He was between constituent tours during the week’s Congressional recess. “Time and again, they allow themselves to be intimidated from taking a strong stand against the administration.”
Pam comes up with this analysis:
In a related development, evolutionary scientists researching today's Democrats are confused, as there is no evidence in the fossil record of a vertebrate species ever de-evolving into an invertebrate.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
Next time. . . .
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