Why The Righteous Mind may be the best common reading for incoming college students
Given the political turmoil on many college campuses, and in America more broadly, what should incoming college students read before they arrive next September?
My publishers at Random House asked me to write up something they could hand out at the annual convention of people who pick common reading books for universities, and who plan out “first year experiences” to give all incoming freshman a shared set of ideas and experiences. I think the case for The Righteous Mind is pretty clearly stated in its subtitle: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Below is the text that Random House has posted to accompany the book. It may be of use to any professor picking readings for next fall for any course with political content.
Americans have long known that they have racial, ethnic, class, and partisan divides. But the 2016 presidential election has forced all of us to recognize that these gaps may be far larger, more numerous, and more dangerous than we thought. Americans are not just failing to meet each other and know each other. Increasingly, we hate each other—particularly across the partisan divide.
Hatred and mistrust damage democracy, and they can seep onto campus and distort academic life as well. In these politically passionate times, and with all students immersed in social media, it’s no wonder that students, as well as faculty, often say that they are walking on eggshells—fearful of offending anyone by offering a provocative argument or by choosing the wrong word.
If you could pick one book that all incoming college students should read together— one book that would explain what is happening and promote discussion about how to bridge these divisions, what would it be?
My suggestion—The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
Here’s why:
1) The Righteous Mind is non-partisan, and teaches cross-partisan respect. I’m a social psychologist who has studied moral and political psychology for thirty years. I first began research for The Righteous Mind in 2004, motivated in part by a desire to help progressives do a better job of connecting with American moral values. But after immersing myself in the writings of all sides and doing my best to find the good on all sides, I became a non-partisan centrist. As I show clearly in my book, the three major philosophical camps—left, right, and libertarian—are each the guardians of deep truths about how to have a humane and flourishing society. I treat all sides fairly and respectfully and help students to step out of their “moral matrix” in order to appreciate the ways that ideological teams distort thinking, and blind us to the motives and insights of others.
2) The Righteous Mind makes big ideas accessible to eighteen-year-olds. The Righteous Mind takes students on a tour of the history of life, from bacteria through the present day, explaining the origins of cooperation and human “ultrasociality.” I explain what morality is, how it evolves—both biologically and culturally—and why it differs across societies and centuries. The book explores the fundamentals of social and cognitive psychology to explain why people are so susceptible to “fake news,” or anything else that offers to confirm our pre-existing judgments. In short, it is a book about some of the biggest and most pressing questions addressed by scholars today. This is why the New York Times Book Review hailed it as “A landmark contribution to humanity’s understanding of itself.”
The Righteous Mind has been widely praised by reviewers on the left and the right, many of whom noted that the book conveys the grandest ideas in language that makes it fun and easy to read.
From the left, The Guardian (UK) said: “What makes the book so compelling is the fluid combination of erudition and entertainment.”
From the right, The American Conservative said: “The author is that rare academic who presents complex ideas in a comprehensible manner.”
3) The Righteous Mind links together most of the academy. Like sexuality, morality is too multifaceted to fit within a single department, and I have drawn on scholarship from across the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. The Righteous Mind is one of the most interdisciplinary, trade books in recent decades, making it ideal as a common reading that professors across the university will be able to draw on. Students will be thrilled to find so many links among their classes—they’ll see that knowledge is often unified, and that the insights from each field often complement those of others. This table shows which disciplines are drawn on to a substantial degree in each of the three parts of the book:
4) The Righteous Mind comes with lots of supporting materials. I maintain and update regularly a website for the book: RighteousMind.com. The site has a tab of materials labeled “Applying Moral Psych.” There you’ll find a page of resources specifically for professors who are using the book in class. The page has links to videos to show with each chapter, links to projects, and videos created by students. It also has links to research sites, such as YourMorals.org, where students can obtain their own scores on the “Moral Foundations Questionnaire.”
5) The Righteous Mind will make all other conflicts on campus more tractable. In a time of rising conflict and tension on many campuses, The Righteous Mind will calm things down and teach students skills they can use to engage in difficult conversations. As I wrote in the introduction:
Etiquette books tell us not to discuss [politics and religion] in polite company, but I say go ahead. Politics and religion are both expressions of our underlying moral psychology, and an understanding of that psychology can help to bring people together. My goal in this book is to drain some of the heat, anger, and divisiveness out of these topics and replace them with a mixture of awe, wonder, and curiosity.
There is no better way to prepare for discussions of race, gender, climate change, politics, or any other potentially controversial topic than to start your students’ college experience by assigning The Righteous Mind as the “common reading” to your incoming class.
p.s., Short of asking students to buy the book, you could send them to my “politics and polarization” page, where there are many essays and videos. Also, Random House created a very short and inexpensive “Kindle Single,” which is basically just the last chapter, here.
Read MorePolitics, Polarization, and Populism
My colleagues and I developed Moral Foundations Theory to understand differences between cultures, but early on we noticed that it was helpful for understanding the different moral “matrices” of left and right within each nation. You can see our empirical and theoretical publications here. Our main academic review paper is here.
As political polarization increased rapidly in the USA during the Bush and Obama years, I turned my attention from basic research to applied, asking: How can moral psychology help us understand the forces making American democracy so dysfunctional? And how can moral psychology help citizens understand each other across the political divide? Those were my two main goals in The Righteous Mind.
While writing that book I stepped out of the progressive moral matrix I had lived in since high school and became a committed centrist: I came to believe that each side, each political movement, understands some social processes and moral truths very well, but goes blind to others. I came to believe that partisanship of any kind causes motivated reasoning in social scientists, just as in all other human beings. I began to grow concerned about the quality of social science research, given the increasing homogeneity of political beliefs in all social sciences (with the exception of economics, in which the Democrat-to-Republican ratio is merely 4 to 1).
I co-founded several projects to apply moral psychology, including CivilPolitics.org (with Ravi Iyer and Matt Motyl) and AsteroidsClub.org (with Liz Joyner). See also the report of the AEI-Brookings Working Group on Poverty and Opportunity, which provides a model for doing evidence-based public policy in a politically polarized time.
I was working on these problems for several years when the rate of change began accelerating in 2015. There were moral meltdowns on university campuses and populist rebellions across Europe and the USA. Faith in Democracy is waning rapidly. Illiberal movements on the right (such as the Alt-right) and the left (such as identity politics and “safety culture“) are gaining strength and ramping each other up, hyper-activating the tribal psychology that I described in The Righteous Mind. I am extremely alarmed. Peaceful and open multi-ethnic democracies are wondrous creations, given our tribal heritage, and two bands of arsonists (the extremists) are flinging matches at them all across the Western world, while the more reasonable majorities on each side just point their finger at the extremists on the other side, and everyone is immersed in a river of outrage-inducing news, not all of it real (for left or right), courtesy of social media and its mobocratic algorithms.
So this is what I’m working on in 2016 and 2017: 1) repairing the intellectual climate in universities via the collaboration at HeterodoxAcademy.org, 2) writing a book on capitalism, morality, and democracy, 3) using moral psychology to improve business ethics, and 4) writing a book with Greg Lukianoff on how universities came to teach bad thinking, which is making education, workplaces, and democracy so much more dysfunctional.
Here are my major essays and talks on political psychology, polarization, and populism
**If you are interested in current events and want to read or watch just one or two things, choose from among those preceded by **
A) On Populism and Nationalism — How and why they are shaking the world now
In 2015 and 2016 I wrote a series of 3 essays that tell a coherent and cumulative story about how capitalism set in motion a series of economic and psychological changes that led to today’s battle between “globalists” and “nationalists.” It is not a coincidence that similar conflicts are playing out in diverse nations.
1) How Capitalism Changes Conscience (Center for Humans and Nature, 2015)
2) ** When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism (The American Interest, July 2016)
3) The ethics of globalism, nationalism, and patriotism (Sept. 2016)
See also:
4) Donald Trump supporters think about morality differently than other voters. Here’s how. (Vox, with Emily Ekins, Feb. 2016). An analysis of the moral foundations of voters in the US Presidential primaries.
5) Audio of my conversation with Nick Clegg, “The rise of populism and the backlash against the elites”. At Intelligence Squared, London, Nov. 2016.
B) On the causes of dysfunction and rising polarization in American politics
1) ** The top 10 reasons American politics is so broken (Washington Post, with Sam Abrams, Jan. 2015)
2) Keynote address to American Psychological Association, on political polarization, incivility, and intolerance (August 2016)
C) On how to forgive, co-exist, and get along despite political polarization and animosity
1) We need a little fear. (New York Times, Nov. 2012). My attempt to encourage cross partisan understanding in the wake of the 2012 Presidential election. The “asteroids” idea presented there led to…
2) TED talk: How common threats can make common (political) ground (December, 2012)
3) ** How to get beyond our tribal politics. (Wall Street Journal, Nov. 2016)
4) ** TED conversation with Chris Anderson:”Can a divided America heal?” (November 2016)
D) On political polarization and rising illiberalism in American universities
See my page on Viewpoint Diversity in the Academy, especially my ** Lecture at Duke University, on Why universities must choose one telos — Truth or Social Justice.
E) On identity politics–which I believe is fundamentally incompatible with success and progress in multi-ethnic democracies. I have not yet written on this topic, but here are some essays (and one rant) that I find deeply insightful:
1) Jonathan Pie: Rant from a British comedian on how identity politics triggered the backlash that got Trump elected.
2) ** Mark Lilla: The end of identity liberalism. (NYT, Nov. 2016)
3) Richard Rorty: See this essay by Jennifer Senior, on Rorty’s prophecy about 2016 in his 1998 book Achieving our Country. (NYT, Nov. 2016)
4) Arthur Schlesinger: See this essay by Nathan Gardels, on Schlesinger’s 1992 book Disuniting America: Reflections on a multicultural society.
F) Here are some other lectures I’ve given on political psychology and polarization:
1) A lecture on political psychology I gave in Korea in 2015, on EBS, with Korean subtitles: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.
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Moral Foundations and Relationship Therapy
THIS IS A GUEST POST BY PATRICK O’MALLEY, PH.D., A PSYCHOTHERAPIST IN FORT WORTH, TEXAS
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My lifelong curiosity about human interactions led me to a career as a psychotherapist and consultant. In addition to learning the psychology of individuals, couples and families, I have also maintained the interest in social and moral psychology that I developed as an undergraduate student. Combine that with a longstanding fascination with the psychology of politics and religion and I bought Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Righteous Mind” the minute I finished reading the review.
Haidt’s book delivered what it promised – a thorough and well researched answer to the question of “why good people are divided by politics and religion”. My desire for a new and deeper way of thinking about moral and social psychology in the area of politics and religion was satisfied. What I did not expect to obtain from this book was strategic applications in my clinical practice. If moral foundations theory can explain the behavior in large systems like politics, might it be useful as an explanation of fractures in a smaller but equally powerful systems like a couple? I have experimented with three applications of Moral Foundations Theory, which I describe below.
Application 1: Changing the focus of fighting couples from what they might be fighting about to what they may be fighting for
Beth and Mike were in my office going at it. I am a seasoned (sounds better than senior) therapist so I was in practice in the days when we believed cathartic release was a good thing for couples (any of you old enough to remember couples using bataka bats on each other as a therapeutic strategy?) Now that we know more about how the primitive part of the brain works, feeding anger is not useful as a solution for anger. So, as an up to date marital therapist, I attempted to slow down the interaction of this couple, identify some communication missteps, and teach some self-regulatory skills to manage the primitive fight responses.
As this couple calmed, I flashed back to my recent reading of moral foundations theory. I asked each spouse if it was possible that the energy in this fight might come from a drive to protect something very important and perhaps even very sacred to each of them. I asked them to consider what they were fighting for rather than fighting about. It took some work but each was able identify the important belief that triggered such a primitive fast brain response.
Over the course of our work together Mike had accepted he had a problem with alcohol. Mike eventually agreed with Beth that any amount of alcohol and driving was a great risk to their family’s wellbeing. Mike agreed with Beth’s sacred protection of the moral foundation of Care vs. Harm. The fight in this session was triggered because Mike came home in the afternoon smelling like alcohol after spending the night at their lake house. Mike’s defense was shaky. He admitted he had an uncounted number of beers the night before but he vehemently claimed he did not drive while intoxicated. He stated he had worked on the dock all day in the heat and had not showered. He smelled like he had been drinking because he was sweating out the alcohol. To my surprise, Beth believed his explanation. But also to my surprise, that did not matter. “No responsible adult would not know how much alcohol he had to drink in any circumstance,” said Beth. And, she questioned, “Did he not see the risk in walking around the lake and lake house drunk?” “A man ought to be able to have whatever he wants to drink as long as there is no obvious harm,” replied Mike. “I did not drive or operate any machinery after I drank. I agree driving and drinking is wrong. I cannot live in a relationship in which I do not have some freedom.” Mike had now voiced his moral foundation of Liberty/Oppression that overrode the agreed upon foundation of this topic of Care/Harm because he believed no harm occurred.
The pattern of couples polarizing over the competing needs of safety and freedom is common. The shift in my approach was to identify these beliefs as deep and sacred rather than just “differences of opinion”. This strategy deepened this couple’s level of acceptance of the other by identifying the sacredness of the territory being protected. In the session I actually used the language of moral foundations theory and described the information of Care/Harm and Liberty/Oppression as two of six possible ways people differ that can create conflict. Both agreed the other’s sacred territory had value. They were able to acknowledge they each put extra energy into their position because they believed they were the only one able to see value in their particular moral foundation. At this level of each “getting” the other we could transition to some useful work on the early formation of their positions as it related to their family of origin history. Beth talked in more depth about the terror of living with an alcoholic mother and Mike’s disclosed his historical struggle to gain his freedom from an oppressive controlling father.
Application 2: Helping couples who actually fight about politics and religion deepen their understanding of the cause of the fight
Beth and Mike were aligned in their politics. Their conflict was about a different emphasis on two moral foundations as it impacted their interpersonal dynamics. Ruth and Bill, on the other hand, were like watching a rambunctious cable television show. Ruth contended she thought they were more alike than different politically until recently. She stated that ever since Bill began listening to certain radio programs and watching certain television shows he has acted “crazy” like the people he listens to. Bill could not imagine why any sane person, particularly his wife, is not as outraged as he is about the direction of the country.
I have seen so many similar couples in the last 5-6 years that this dynamic is beginning to look like a syndrome. Typically one spouse is an avid radio listener or television watcher of conservative commentary. The conflict is obvious if the other spouse leans a different way politically. Some couples like Ruth and Bill do not differ much politically. The problem is the intensity of the presentation of the partner who is outraged.
Prior to coming to therapy, the closest Ruth and Bill had come to fixing this frustration was Bill getting a headset so Ruth did not have to listen to what he listened to each afternoon. That solution was limited because Bill continued to yell in agreement with his afternoon show hosts creating what Ruth experienced as an unsafe environment.
Again, I encouraged this couple to dig vertically to discover the roots of the conflict using Moral Foundations Theory. Interestingly, in this conflict one moral foundation seemed to be at play in two different ways. Bill was a retired physician who had been beat up financially by managed care. His original motivation of caring for patients became overshadowed by his rage at insurance companies and forced pro bono work. He primarily tuned in to political commentary that would fire up his rage about lack of fairness as proportionality. Ruth was mad about his lack of fairness in the area of equality. She did not believe it was fair that she had to hide in her own home to escape his tirades at the radio and television. She also experienced him as not attuned to her need for a psychologically safe environment (Care/Harm). When this conflict was defined as the two different aspects of the moral foundation of Fairness and Bill’s lack of sensitivity to Care, Bill and Ruth could make a connection. She could understand that the anger he displayed was related to how hurt he was that his dream of practicing medicine was impacted by the changes in his profession. He could understand that she was not just against him, but that his aggressive presentation was unfair because it made their home less safe. Bill agreed to turn down his volume and Ruth agreed to have political discussions with him if the discussions were calm and thoughtful.
Application 3: Helping single patients assess potential partners.
Jeff was single with full custody of his three young children. Our early work in therapy focused on the expected adjustment to his new life as a single parent as well as his deep sadness about the end of his marriage. After a few years, Jeff decided he was ready to date. The children were more independent and Jeff was lonely. Jeff wanted a long-term partner.
As Jeff described his dating experience to me, I noticed an emerging pattern. If Jeff was asked to describe how his political beliefs, he would quickly respond that he was a true blue conservative. Jeff was clear with his friends who wanted to set him up that he wanted a partner who was compatible with his politics. However, Jeff would often let his elephantine sexual drive override his discerning rider only to later discover the woman he had been intimate with had liberal leanings. He came to understand how his strong drive sexually impaired his judgment. Once this fact was clear, he would more quickly dismiss relationship candidates who were “bleeding hearts” before the relationship escalated to sexual intimacy. The surprise for Jeff was even after he slowed down and made sure the women he dated shared his party affiliation, he still experienced a breakdown in their shared beliefs that he could not adequately understand.
I suggested to Jeff that he read a couple of short articles by Haidt to help him develop a deeper understanding of his political preferences and how he assessed the preferences of the women he dated. Jeff determined he was actually a political hybrid rather than his previous summary of himself as “conservative”. His moral foundations matrix was high on Care, high on Liberty, very high on Fairness, moderate on Loyalty, moderate on Authority, and low on Sanctity. One strong belief in his Fairness foundation included the idea that partners in a relationship should share the financial responsibility (distributive fairness). Several significant dating relationships ended when Jeff saw in the woman an expectation that the male should be the financial provider in a relationship.
Jeff concluded that he should not assume all Republican women he dated were a fit. His ideal partner would care for children and the disadvantaged who absolutely could not help themselves. She should value liberty and not desire a hierarchical relationship with him. She should be personally self-sufficient and with a strong belief that almost everyone else in the country should be self-sufficient as well. She should have some important group alliances and a moderate, not legalistic appreciation for authority. Finally, she should not be engaged in causes related to sanctity such as abortion or sexual abstinence outside of marriage.
I have other groups of related individuals with whom I am using moral foundations theory. I currently have several consulting cases with family businesses that are benefiting from understanding their conflict based on the theory. If you are a clinician or consultant and found Jonathan Haidt’s work on moral foundations intriguing, keep a look out for applications with your patients and clients. You will be pleased how useful Moral Foundations theory is in your practice.
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Patrick O’Malley, Ph.D., is a psychotherapist and consultant in Fort Worth, Texas. He is the past chair of the American Association For Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT) Ethics Committee and the past chair of the AAMFT Judicial Committee. He also served on the Ethics Code Revision Task force for the AAMFT 2001 Code of Ethics. He has written several articles on ethical practice in marriage and family therapy. Patrick can be reached at pomalley AT swbell.net.
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For Teachers & Book Clubs
On this page you’ll find resources for anyone who assigns The Righteous Mind in classes or Book Clubs.
[If you have written discussion questions for your book club or course, please send them to me and I’ll post them for others]
— The best video to assign early on, so that students can get an overview of the book and see what the author looks and sounds like, is the Bill Moyers interview. And to start things off with humor, the Colbert interview. But there are many other videos here.
— The best assignment I’ve ever given, as a teacher, is to ask my students to do “moral fieldwork” — to spend time in a different moral community (i.e., visit a fundamentalist church, or a communist party meeting), and then explain the moral matrix they find there. Here’s the assignment sheet from when I last taught moral psychology at UVA.
— Swarthmore College held 4 school-wide symposia on the book
Here’s a list of videos or other materials that you can assign along with each chapter. [in progress]
1) Where Does Morality Come From?
— Here’s a 2 minute video showing people’s immediate reactions to the “harmless-taboo” violations I used in a study I did on sexual morality violations (Haidt & Hersh, 2001). The video was made by a group of students at Ohio State in Amy Bonomi’s course on human sexuality, where they replicated the study. It was produced by Thom Tyznik. I mention this study briefly in ch. 7, but you can think of it as an extension of my dissertation studies presented in chapter 1. (Warning, the stories are about sexual perversions.)
— Here’s a 9 minute video made by students in a nursing class that recreated the dumbfounding interviews, showing great spontaneous reactions, and then summarizes the rest of the book very clearly.
–Here’s a 2 minute video by Steve Gerber, on the role of disgust in morality, and on moral dumbfounding.
2) The Intuitive Dog and Its Rational Tail
— Video (2 min) by Steve Jacobs describing moral dumbfounding, and the debate over whether we should listen to disgust.
— Video (2 min) from Jimmy Kimmel Live, of people confabulating about “who won last night’s presidential debate”, even though the interviews were conducted several hours BEFORE the second presidential debate.
— Video (7 min): 1943 Disney World-War II progaganda film on “reason vs. emotion,” urging Americans to let reason rule, so that America can win the war against the fascists, who let emotion rule. This is a great animated brief for the Platonic model of the mind (which I argue against in chapters 2-4).
3) Elephants Rule
— Video (13 minutes): 60 Minutes report on the Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom studies of babies choosing the nice/helpful puppets, as described in sub-section 5, “Babies feel but don’t reason.” This is great evidence that the Care/harm foundation is innate. Also hints of the Fairness/cheating and Loyalty/betrayal foundations.
4) Vote for Me (Here’s Why)
— I had a constructive debate in the New York Times with 2 philosophers over my claims about reason and rationalism. The two critiques came from Michael Lynch and Gary Gutting. My response is here.
5) Beyond WEIRD Morality
— Here’s the original “WEIRD people” paper. (for advanced college classes only)
6) Taste Buds of the Righteous Mind
— Video (28 min): A talk I gave at an Edge.org conference on “moral science,” where I first presented the “True Taste” metaphor, and an overview of the state of the art in moral psychology.
7) The Moral Foundations of Politics
— Go to YourMorals.org. You (the teacher) can create a “group” that will show responses just for your class, and will steer students to whichever studies you like. Here’s how to create a group.
— My first talk at TED (2008): The moral roots of liberals and conservatives.
8) The Conservative Advantage
— What the Tea Partiers really want (Wall St. Journal, 10/16/10)
9) Why Are We So Groupish?
— My second talk at TED (2012): Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence.
10) The Hive Switch
— My talk at TED 2012: Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence.
— Hive psychology and the moral life of organizations. Authors@Google talk
11) Religion Is a Team Sport
— This is the most sociological chapter. Sociology professors might want to assign this review of the book, by Steve Vaisey. Teachers who would like to find critiques of the chapter from religious readers can find some here.
12) Can’t We All Disagree More Constructively?
— Here’s my third TED talk (posted in 2013), on the causes of political polarization and a possible solution. It’s related to this New York Times Op-Ed, on political asteroids.
— Visit www.civilpolitics.org, and AsteroidsClub.org.
— My talk at The Miller Center (UVA): Civility in American Politics: How to get (some of) it back. (3/19/12).
— Three Friends at Dinner, a humorous 2 minute video by Bob Ewing showing how a liberal, a conservative, and a libertarian will shift into 2-vs-1 coalitions on so many issues: the NSA, patriotism, taxes, etc.
—Political development in one cartoon. A Brazilian law student illustrated the process by which fraternal twins can end up so different, politically.
— Here is a whole page of discussions of the book, in the context of specific political and moral controversies
Read MoreConservatives Good, Republican Party Bad
[NOTE: IN RESPONSE TO THE CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISMS AND COUNTER-EVIDENCE OFFERED BY READERS BELOW, I RETRACT AND DISAVOW THE POST BELOW. I EXPLAIN WHY HERE.]
A theme of The Righteous Mind and of The Happiness Hypothesis is that wisdom is found on both sides of any longstanding dispute. Morality binds and blinds, so partisans can’t see what the other side is right about. Studying moral psychology has helped me to step out of the “matrix” of my previous liberal team and appreciate the wisdom of social conservatives and libertarians.
But with that said, the last 2 weeks have pushed me to be more explicit about criticizing the Republican Party. First came the extraordinary Washington Post essay by Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, titled: “Lets just say it, the Republicans are the problem.” Mann is center-left and Ornstein is center-right, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. They are fed up with the press’s fear of seeming biased, which leads journalists to say that both parties are equally to blame for the dysfunction in Washington. But as long-time and highly respected congress-watchers, they believe that the Republican party since Newt Gingrich’s time is mostly at fault for damaging our governing institutions. Here’s a key quote:
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
The essay comes from their new book: It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism. I hope this book is read widely. I don’t think there’s a way forward for our country until something happens that leads to a massive reform of the Republican Party. (This is what Mann and Ornstein said when I saw them speak at NYU last week.)
Mann and Ornstein have been friends since graduate school. I think this is an important point. As I say in The Righteous Mind, personal relationships open our hearts and therefore our minds. They allow us to listen to ideas, and I think this makes the team of Mann and Ornstein a national treasure. Their wisdom is likely to be greater than any partisan — or centrist — operating alone.
The second challenge to the “both sides equal” thesis came in Tom Edsall’s powerful NYT piece, Finding the Limits of Empathy. Edsall reviews data from my team at YourMorals.org, including data analysis by Ravi Iyer, showing that liberals and conservatives who DON’T care about politics are NOT different on their level of empathy, but as people get more partisan, the liberals go up on empathy and the conservatives go down — they get more hard-hearted.
Against that background, Edsall analyzes the recent comments by House Minority Leader Eric Cantor, suggesting that it’s not fair that 45% of Americans pay no income tax, and so perhaps it would be fair to “broaden the base” and make all people pay some income tax. (Even though the poor pay around 16% of their income in taxes when you bring in all the regressive taxes that they pay, from sales tax through wage taxes.)
This bothered me. I can understand that the Republicans are committed to fighting all tax increases. Many have signed Grover Norquist’s pledge, which even prevents them from closing tax loopholes. I can understand “no new taxes.” But Cantor (and rep. Pat Tiberi and others) are happy to consider raising some taxes on the poor, or of shifting more of the tax burden onto the poor.
It seems, therefore, that their stance against new taxes may not be a deeply principled stance. It may be self-interest: no new taxes on the rich. Or, as Edsall suggests, it may reflect a kind of moral class warfare in which the rich are seen as the good people — the providers — while the poor are condemned as the bad people — the lazy free riders. If Edsall is right then this would reflect the abandonment of one of the most cherished American ideals, shared by liberals and conservatives alike: equality of opportunity. Republicans traditionally favored a hand up, not a hand out. They may now favor neither, because they think the poor deserve to be poor.
I have been trying so hard to give the Republicans the benefit of the doubt, given that I spent my whole adult life as a Democrat and know that I am emotionally biased against the party of George W. Bush. But the Mann and Ornstein book, plus the Edsall article, have changed my mind. I now say explicitly that while I find great wisdom among conservative intellectuals from Edmund Burke through Thomas Sowell, I think the Republican party deserves more of the blame for our current dysfunction. (But I’m open to counter-arguments, if anyone can point to a good counter-argument against Mann and Ornstein.)
I first articulated my new position — Conservatives Good, Republican Party Bad — near the end of my interview with Tavis Smiley, below:
Watch Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt on PBS. See more from Tavis Smiley.
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