Conservatives 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
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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None of the following positions: (1) desire to reduce taxes; (2) desire to not increase taxes; (3) desire to not close tax loopholes; (4) desire to make the tax code more regressive, either individually or grouped together, directly imply opposition to equality of opportunity.
There are (at least) two other considerations: overall level of taxation–which, right or wrong, Republicans believe is to high–and overall progressiveness of taxation and spending–the tax code is progressive (http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/piketty-saezJEP07taxprog.pdf), and Republicans believe it is too much so.
I’m not seeing a clear contradiction where you argue there is one.
Agreed.
The opposition is in the arguments and reasoning that Edsall analyzes, in which the poor are now blamed for causing their poverty. If you think that rich and poor are good and bad, respectively, you’re not going to do very much to bring about equality of opportunity
It seems like your argument is that politically-active conservatives (a sizable number of people) have lower empathy scores, therefore they oppose equality of opportunity, therefore they’re outside the historical American mainstream, therefore they’re bad.
This seems like a curiously non-Haidtian argument to make.
Thanks for pointing this out… this might well seem inconsistent for me. I don’t want to say that conservatives or Republicans are bad people. (I just changed the title of the post to refer to the Republican PARTY, not Republicans).
Being lower on empathy is not bad. Liberal positions often reflect “bleeding heart liberalism,” which leads to bad policies. Libertarians are the lowest of all on empathy, and I think they are very sincere, consistent, and constructive. My concern is that the Republican position toward the poor is not only low on empathy, it might be high on moralistic karmic condemnation, which would make them approach one of our largest national problems with a more punitive mindset. I am particularly moved by the many stories we read these days of middle class people who lost their jobs in the great recession, and have failed to find steady work since then, despite years of trying. Many people who were laid off in their 50s may never find work again. It’s very hard to say that these people deserve their fate in any way.
“My concern is that the Republican position toward the poor is not only low on empathy, it might be high on moralistic karmic condemnation”
I remember an occasion where I was talking to my Grandmother about my crazy right wing American uncle and while we usually agreed that our moderate Canadian sensibilities were superior in every way she took the time to defend him. She said the reason he resented handouts was that he was from a poor family, didn’t have two nickels to rub together and ended up rich by working very hard. I took that into consideration and admired her for defending someone whom she disagreed with.
Later while recalling this story to a friend (PhD in psychology no less) I found it curious the way he interpreted it. He replied by saying essentially “Yeah but how many people did he have to f*#^ over to get there?”. This to me illustrates a fundamental divide in our society. One side believes that to be poor is to be largely a prisoner of social circumstance and a person is essentially a confluence of forces with no basic free will and that wealth can only be obtained by stealing from others in some zero sum fallacy. The other side believes that to be poor is largely the result of poor choices and family structure and that acquiring wealth is purely an indicator of one’s work ethic and contribution to society with no regard for the amount of luck that is sometimes involved in this process. Neither caricature is correct.
In so far as taxes go it is worth noting that the Scandinavian tax systems are no more progressive than the U.S and rely on VAT, gasoline and other ‘regressive’ taxes to fund the welfare state. If the U.S was serious about increasing revenues they would create a national sales tax. It goes without saying however that this would be tremendously unpopular on both sides of the aisle. Far better to make dumb symbolic policies like “billionaire tax” or “welfare queen tax” that satisfy a political base instead of solve anything.
Beautifully put, both are caricatures. And I strongly reject the zero-sum view, the resentment-of-the-rich view, that is often found on the left.
@Jonathan, so give me an example what are examples of some of these bad policies? Is Sweden which has higher GDP per capita/
In fact, what would you have to say about liberals 200 years ago? The problem I find with you is that your OH I’M MOERATE IN BETWEEN WHICH MUST BE RIGHT!!!
example would be AFDC, welfare as it was crafted in the 1960s, which damaged poor families by lowering rates of marriage and increasing rates of dependency.
What about slavery 200 years ago? It was a radical position be an abolitionist. Please inform me what would you say then? Would you chose exactly in between?
What I disagree with you is mainly your conclusions, how the hell do you only determine your positions by picking exactly in between.
There’s mountains of empirical evidence for say liberal economic policies working, just look at the nordic model…
Do you not take issue with half the country being under the poverty line while billions in aid goes out to Isreal? Or 43% of the worlds military is the US alone?
I don’t understand, I definitely don’t side with either scumbag party but can’t you think out of the box for a second? Don’t you think there’s some serious faults in our system not being addressed by the 2 rather than both parties being too extreme?
Hmm, looking at the wiki on AFDC right now. I probably shouldn’t conclude anything from this article alone but it may have indeed been a mistake. Rather shouldn’t have society been restructured to not create poverty to begin with?
Here’s a challenge to you: in this article you mention being a partisan democrat in the past (seems like more undefinable centrist). A philosophy which I haven’t heard you mention yet is neo-conservatism.
Bush 2 had his cabinet filled with ideologues of this camp, lawyer John Yoo (look up 17th of September 2001 Yoo Memorandum). John Yoo was influenced by NAZI philosopher Carl Schmitt (who’s also largely influenced neo-conservatism, Schmitt had crafted exactly how hitler’s dictatorship would arise leaving him the ‘sovereign’ in charge of the constitution. From this came the radical power theories of bush, and also total information awareness.
Obama a democrat had campaigned on undoing these radical power theories, which while he was running were largely un-popular but have now become the bi-partisan consensus once he embraced them. Eric Holder has even taken these radical power theories a step further and asserted the right to kill american citizens with no due process which are merely accused of ‘terrorism’ such as anwar al-waki.
“Terrorism”, a meaningless term, is really no threat at all. According to a 2004 NSL study you’re 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist. As of late 90% of terrorist plots are concocted by the CIA with entrapment to people who otherwise would not have the resources to do so anyway, tell me John do you find the executive wielding this much power to be a negative thing? Or is it perfectly ok because both parties give it the green light? Do you think outside the 2 party box here or no?
Honest answer please. I seriously think the way you approach political issues is flawed by this odd partisan centrist line.
My more politically active-liberal friends are not so concerned with fairness or “equality of opportunity”… it’s “envy” they feel. They don’t want to work. They “hate” those who are successful and want to punish them. This emotional envy is human weakness and there’s no way to fix it other than to force them to work like everyone else. Look into what Obama has written in his books and said in interviews about “income RE-distribution” as a core philosophy. Such liberals are not interested in seeing educated people making their own way. They (liberals of this type) actually believe that the rich are evil and the only way to help the poor is to punish success. Fundamentally that’s one major reason why the Republicans are so extreme. They know what the left really believes and if they get the chance they’ll tax “the rich” at least 70%. They say this openly. Everyone I know who’s smart and has strong character has no problem making 6 figures. Everyone who’s not are lost and lack I think the intelligence and character to make something of themselves in an economy that has replaced factory workers with technology. Then there are those like myself who make a modest living, accept the fact that we’re not the smartest, and that our parents did the best they could, but the government & liberal colleges can’t fix our problems-we accept our lives. Politically what I’m concerned about is pollution, terrorism, and the debt. None of which is addressed by “income redistribution” and the liberal left, or the right wing.
I find envy ugly, and I agree that envy and resentment of the rich are more common on the left. But in your comment you said this: “Everyone I know who’s smart and has strong character has no problem making 6 figures.” This is true for me too, but this tells us more about the social circles we move in than it does about America. This is the karmic mindset that I am concerned about.
OH MAN YOU BETTER WATCH OUT FOR DEM TERRORIZERS!! 8 TIMES MORE LIKELY TO BE KILLED BY A COP, CAN’T TAKE ANY CHANCES!!!
Jon, I think your natural liberal inclinations have carried you away! I think you’re on strong ground with Mann and Ornstein, but Edsall appears to be misreading Cantor.
Edsall portrays Cantor as saying the poor who don’t pay any net federal taxes (after tax credits) are “free riders.” (Edsall doesn’t add “lazy.”) Cantor doesn’t say that in what Edsall quotes. His point is that the poor want to move up the ladder, to earn more, and taxing the well-off more won’t help the poor do that; it will have the opposite effect. That’s a principled conservative view that, it seems to me, goes out of its way not to blame the poor but to say they want what we all want and would work to get it if they had the opportunity.
As for the fact that raising taxes is against Republican policy, Cantor puts this in the context of lowering the burden on those who already pay. That may be a technical violation, but it seems in the spirit of the basic Republican policy.
I think Cantor’s wrong, but I don’t see on the basis of Edsall’s evidence that he’s showing a lack of empathy, blaming the poor, engaging in class warfare, or being unprincipled about taxes. Of course, you can find Republicans who do all those things.
If you leave out the stuff based on Edsall’s misreading of Cantor, your new position sounds like what you said in the book, where you also singled out the Republican Party for special blame.
SanPete, as always, you are the voice of reason and a model of fairness. I watched the Cantor clip again, and you’re right, what he says is thoughtful and consistent with a principled view. My concern is that we would not find prominent republicans thinking in this open-minded, nuanced way if it led to raising taxes on the wealthy. I think Edsall is right to point that out. But i think i might edit my original post to be more charitable. Thank you!
Jon, I started something on this and it got inappropriate for the forum – sent it via email instead, if you’d like my thoughts.
sanpete, it’s a class reunion! Waddup, dude. Still slanging that brilliant thang, I see…I meant to get ahold of you- one of the commenters on a review of the book Jon mentions here cleared up the whole business for us nicely: “It would be much easier to be civil if it weren’t for the fact that most liberals are clearly mentally retarded.” Yeah. I guess you and I were way off.
Hi Scott! I haven’t had the courage to look at the reviews of the Mann-Ornstein book yet. I’m sure they and the comments will be quite enlightening.
Jon, great comment. However, this cuts both ways. Liberals become unhinged when you start talking about abortion.
Republicans certainly aren’t playing nice right now – because they have a mandate not to from the electorate. America saw what happened when democrats acquired a super-majority: OBAMACARE, AND NO BUDGET. It would certainly be nice if people would grow up in Washington, but our entitlement culture got us here today – America gets the government it deserves.
Ethan, Prof. Haidt hasn’t argued for simply seeking the middle. He’s argued that each well established view typically has something to offer that should be understood and taken into account. That may often lead to a middle path, but not always. He favors same-sex marriage, for example, and though he does present that as a middle view of a sort, in that it honors the conservative respect for marriage, as he sees it, it’s actually the liberal position.
He’s said that in his lectures.
Sure and anybody that doesn’t support same sex marriage is a down-right bigot and retard (oh no they’re not they just place an emphasis on tradition! YOU SEE BECAUSE I CAN EXPLAIN IT, IT SOMEHOW MAKES THAT POSITION RESPECTABLE!), not to mention that in the past marriage was a PROPERTY transaction.
Haidt’s conclusions (which I quite frankly find err misguided and filled with idiocy most of time- but the research is very illuminating) work very well to the advantage of those power. Liberals are just too extreme and misguided in their beliefs, and man oh those conservative views they have a lot to tell us about well being (even though their leaders outright despise endorphins such as Santorum saying he thinks the pursuit of happiness is hurting america). And him basically saying we need to respect authoritarianism, how could he possibly just miss all the psychological work done on this such as the stanford prison experiment and milgram experiment.
I really could go on for a while about this but I ought not to.
How can he so oblivious to economic equality quite frankly for the most part (not to that Europe doesn’t have conservatives) but wipes out a large part of their false moral compass that has no utility. Once standards of living raise, religion leaves with it. The swedish neo-nazi’s are anti-war and anti-fascist, to even equate that with the republicans is beyond me.
his positions are that of basically a reactionary liberal/false centrist like Tom Friedman.
For fuck’s sake he said he was against how the 60’s counterculture and the new left, just what the hell. It makes me question whether or not he’s really knowledgeable on the all the gains made or respects the idea of human freedom.
Brilliant guy but how he could possibly hold some of his views, if not for the waning of power of religious institutions and liberal democracy he would never be able to express these. How can he say there’s just as much to be learned from medieval values compared to enlightenment ones.
And I seriously want a yes/no to the questions I previously asked him.
Ethan:
This is a new blog, and i must set some norms. You are the only person who has posted who has repeatedly used obscenity and insult. Please feel free to call me wrongheaded, or to say i’m a hypocrite if you can back it up, but when you start using words like “idiocy” i have to pull the plug. My whole book is about how our righteous minds turn us into lawyers who use reasoning not to find truth but to make powerful rhetorical statements — such as equating authority with authoritarianism (which I never do, but you accuse me of). You are demonstrating many of the mechanisms of moral reasoning that I describe in chapters 2-4. And you are arguing in a way that is angry, insulting, and not constructive. Please either go back and edit your various posts on this blog to remove the obscenity and insults, or I’ll have to block you from further posts. I’ll be glad to answer your questions if you show me the sort of basic civility you would show in a face to face interaction.
Ethan, there are good reasons for people to respect each other where possible. It facilitates communication and understanding (including self-understanding), cooperation, and is essential to deeper human connections like friendship.
Merely explaining a view doesn’t make it respectable. It depends on the explanation. If you can’t see the value of tradition in binding together a group and maintaining order, you won’t find the conservative position respectable. That doesn’t mean it isn’t. Prof. Haidt explains in the book why religion appears to be a good thing on the whole.
You’re reading things into what Jon says that aren’t there, such as that he’s oblivious to economic inequality, approves of authoritarianism, and doesn’t value the social gains of the 60s. I have no idea what he thinks about the two-party system per se. Hardly anyone is happy with the two-party system, but hardly anyone is happy with any political system in practice. His ideas suggest more parties would be better, but our system would probably have to be overhauled in major ways to make that practical.
Sure, in some sort of discussion yes. But bigotry never deserves any respect. Do you find laws that write social hierarchies making a certain minority group second class citizens respectable? Which is truly caused by the way they’re raised in an authoritarian household and the output being repressed anger from authoritarianism being projected onto vulnerable groups (authoritarian personality).
“3) On what liberals should do: I agree with James Wagner that liberals can “change their spots.” I think it’s hard for any particular individual to do so. But I do hope that American liberals, as a tribe, will do so. Indeed, the reason I seem so hard on liberals is that I think they changed their spots in the 1960s and 1970s in a bad way – the turn to the “New Left” led the left away from the morality of most Americans and into some positions that I think are hard to justify, morally. If we think of liberalism as a tradition stretching back to the 18th century, then I am a liberal. I want liberals to change their spots BACK to a configuration more in harmony with their grand tradition. I am confident that this will happen as the baby boomers age out of the population. I think that libertarians and conservatives all have a piece of the grand liberal tradition, and the left needs to read writers from these groups to re-discover many great ideas that they lost touch with in the 1960s.”
You know I could almost understand something like they alienated the working class with the counter-culture or something but being a reactionary? That’s just something else….
Yes and what Jon has more or less said that the democrats are far too permissive and too far left which is plain idiocy.
To say we have anything to learn from beehive morally is just plain wrong, ultimately it needs to be eradicated and doesn’t help human flourishing. And he’ll always use these talking points more or less when it comes to conservatives: studies show they give more to charity (despite studies showing “highly religious people are less motivated by compassion than are non-believers” or his own research saying that their morality is obedience not well-being)
They lead happier lives (Despite studies showing that religiosity in countries is linked to income inequality, when certain bottom rings such as poverty aren’t filled in the hierarchy of needs such as poverty people turn to religious fanaticism. The nordic countries all rate the highest in happiness and for the most part are very secular/atheist)
In “What Evangelicals can Teach Democrats about Moral Development” he applauded santorum’s authoritarianism and “self-improvement” which means imposing his moral authoritarianism on others. As if that was a good thing… so…
Yeah… Some of these positions from any rational perspective are indefensible.
oh and him on religion. I have to say it sounds somewhat elitist to me, the masses can never be made to use reason (the way he think it’s untrue), but that it’s beneficial to keep them in line with “social cohesion”.
Unless you find patriarchy, and racism cool then it’s indefensible…. burke saying that bigotry is good….
to repeat from above:
Ethan:
This is a new blog, and i must set some norms. You are the only person who has posted who has repeatedly used obscenity and insult. Please feel free to call me wrongheaded, or to say i’m a hypocrite if you can back it up, but when you start using words like “idiocy” i have to pull the plug. My whole book is about how our righteous minds turn us into lawyers who use reasoning not to find truth but to make powerful rhetorical statements — such as equating authority with authoritarianism (which I never do, but you accuse me of). You are demonstrating many of the mechanisms of moral reasoning that I describe in chapters 2-4. And you are arguing in a way that is angry, insulting, and not constructive. Please either go back and edit your various posts on this blog to remove the obscenity and insults, or I’ll have to block you from further posts. I’ll be glad to answer your questions if you show me the sort of basic civility you would show in a face to face interaction.
Ok I apologize. I just worked up especially about what I think were the largely positive cultural gains from the 60’s.
However I don’t at all get your emphasis on being moderate. Can I get your opinion on the growing power of the executive as I explained earlier?
I don’t see how to edit, perhaps its because you’re the mod. Only a reply button. Could just bleep out the words or something?
“such as equating authority with authoritarianism” I’m not quite sure what you mean, however do you believe that santorum’s absolute hate of human flourishing and happiness is something to be respected?
And as the stanford prison experiment shows authority will always turn into authoritarianism.
Again what do you think of that specific new study which showed “highly religious people are less motivated by compassion than are non-believers”? and the link between income inequality and religiosity?
Unless you’re into S&M I can’t possibly comprehend how you can think that conservatism societies can be productive for human flourishing
Ethan, do you have any friends who oppose same-sex marriage? I do, and few if any of them are motivated by bigotry, nor do they fit your preconception of repressed anger. Speaking of which, you seem to prefer unrepressed anger! The effects of anger on one’s ability to be fair and see clearly are the same regardless of one’s politics. It short-circuits thinking, makes things easy black-and-white, prevents seeing what’s right in front of us. Respect tends to have the opposite effects, among others worth pursuing.
You interpret Santorum’s remarks in terms of authoritarianism, when what they actually say is against government authority and for family. Jon hasn’t endorsed authoritarianism.
What you quote from Jon above doesn’t say what you seem to think it does either. He’s against the excesses of the 60s, among which I’d guess he includes the broad rejection of the binding values (Authority, Loyalty, Sanctity), the reckless drug culture, “free love,” and so on. It wasn’t all good, and some of the effects are still contributing to huge social problems. He’d like liberals to value the binding foundations and associated ideals, as they did before the 60s.
If you don’t think we can learn from hive morality, compare the effectiveness of the Tea Party and the Occupy movements. Or look at the black Civil Rights movement, which was largely religiously mediated (one of the good points of the 60s). There’s great power, for good or bad, in hivishness. Your response to the data about charitable giving doesn’t show otherwise. Which is better when it comes to helping others and participating in civic organizations: caring extra, or doing extra?
Jon doesn’t say “the masses” can’t use reason and thus should be religious. He thinks we all use reason, whether we’re religious or not, to support our intuitions. I know a lot of religious believers, and many are as reasonable and thoughtful as any atheists I know (including me).
The Stanford prison experiments don’t show that authority will always turn into authoritarianism. They only tested a very limited set of circumstances. Authority is all around, and we simply cannot function effectively as groups without it. (Stanford has clear lines of authority through and through.)
I was referring to authoritarian personality and other studies I’ve read of done on conservatives were things like children who are beat grow into adults who support the death penalty. And yes I do have several family members who are against same sex marriage.
Yeah, my debate style tends to be militant on some issues at least- however I was relying on evidence.
No, santorum is not anti-government- that’s like saying alex jones or glen beck are… Families for these people are the purveyor of moral authoritarianism. Again santorum said “the pursuit of happiness is hurting america”
Excesses?
How is ‘free love’ a bad thing? Here read this study pretty brief: http://www.violence.de/prescott/bulletin/article.html and look up the book the mass psychology of fascism by wilhelm reich. I don’t know, perhaps you just don’t believe in human freedom.
And as for the social problems coming with drugs that’s mainly the fault of the senseless drug war which has killed hunderds of thousands of people. Look for proven solutions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPok-FIKGgc
As for charity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g I’d rather live in a social democratic empathetic society which contains no poverty rather than a fundamentalist extreme capitalist one which has occasional charitable donations but hey maybe that’s just me.
1. The occupy movement I think one of it’s big strengths (and apparently weaknesses) was it being decentralized- which is the essence of anarchism (no don’t jump in your chair like I said a bad word, I’m referring to stateless direct democracy)
Besides: http://whatthefuckhasoccupydone.com/
Fighting between those in power will always be an up-hill battle.
2. The tea party is an astroturf movement much like say this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOVaPb2nVys
The experiment has been replicated several times with similar results. Btw that statement you made other than being completely ahistorical almost sounds like it was taken right out of the “crisis of democracy” part where they talk about the failed indoctrination of institutions. Look up say freetown christiana for one.
(watch this for background: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/RaceGe )
Honestly my recommendation to any one reading this please watch, and read Chomsky-one of the greatest intellectuals.
PDF of it here: http://www.trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf
A plethora of links, but take the time it’ll be worth it! may change how you think about a few things…
I think Jonathan’s criticism of the current Republican Party is quite well-founded. However, many current trends, including a decline in overall religiosity, increasingly socially liberal attitudes among young people, the growing population of non-whites in the United States, etc. will eventually force it to change in order to be competitive. (In a two-party system, politics often become a zero-sum gain. The GOP won’t go into the wilderness for 50 years simply to maintain its ideological purity.)
The question is, who and what will lead this change? The populism and anti-intellectualism of the current Right have painted the GOP into a corner. I now consider myself moderately conservative (formerly center-left), and my liberal friends find it difficult to understand how someone can be conservative without being a jerk (thanks in no small part to the uncivil, confrontational tone of conservative polemicists). I completely agree with Jonathan that conservatism does have basic insights about human societies and human nature that liberalism is blind to. Our current discourse among elites is slanted against articulating conservative truths – see the earlier commentator who so easily conflates a recognition of the necessity for social order with “authoritarianism.”
So that’s half of the problem, but the other half of the problem is that well-educated elites see conservatism embodied by politicians and talk-show hosts who are inflexible, angry ideologues who just throw the same old red meat to the base. The GOP desperately needs more responsible leadership, for two reasons. The first reason is that I believe conservatism is right about many things and thus has valuable insights to offer the national conversation (here I will list a few): its skepticism of social engineering, its emphasis on making sure government programs do not incentivize against personal responsibility, its belief that family and community stability are important, its belief that some degree of cultural unity (via assimilation of immigrants, etc.) makes society function more smoothly, its critique of the class/ race / gender conflict model of thinking about social problems.
The second major reason the GOP needs more responsible leadership is that conservative impulses (loyalty, authority, sanctity, etc.) are going to persist in a significant portion of the population. The politics that feed on people’s desire to serve God and country, and to protect their in-group (the nuclear family, the small town, the religious group, the ethnic group) from threatening out-groups (criminals, cultural nihilists, foreign threats, etc.) will be expressed one way or another. These impulses can be channeled in a responsible, wise way, that creates a self-confident society with national cohesion and civic trust but also a healthy degree of cosmopolitanism, or they can be done in a stupid way, the current path, that leads to crumbling infrastructure (in the name of purity on opposition to government spending) and needless wars (due to a misguided, paranoid nationalism).
My hope is that writers like Jonathan Haidt, David Brooks, Reihan Salam, etc. will influence a generation of intelligent, responsible conservatives to emerge and retake control of the GOP. But I don’t expect it to happen right away, and things will probably get worse before they get better.
Ethan, everyone thinks their anger is based on evidence, and everyone’s anger filters and colors the evidence to make sure! The point was that you can’t merely assume everyone who opposes same-sex marriage is a bigot who was beaten as a child. You’re looking for reasons not to respect those who disagree with you and resisting reasons to respect them. That’s a useful way to preserve one’s own views, but it’s hardly the basis for free cooperation such as you seem to favor.
If your plan is to cooperate only with those you agree with, Tea Party style, that can work where there’s a limited diversity of views, but it obviously prevents broader cooperation. In that respect the Tea Party is a great failure, but one you seem determined to emulate if you fail to respect those with other views.
The link about Occupy’s accomplishments doesn’t mention any major practical accomplishment, which is quite an accomplishment in itself, considering all the energy devoted to the movement. Its inability to see the value of authority has pretty well guaranteed it would accomplish little in comparison to the Tea Party. That’s true whether the Tea Party is “astroturf” or not (the Left accepts such ideas too eagerly).
So it appears you accept what makes the Tea Party a failure, and reject what makes it a success.
I can’t tell what relation you think the link about body pleasure and violence has with the “free love” of the 1960s, which sought to remove love and sex from personal and social commitment and responsibility. You just skip over the fact that the drug culture led to a great deal of misery, obviously not all due to the War on Drugs. Yes, the 60s were marked by excess.
I can’t tell what you want to get across by the reference to Freetown Christiania either.
The video on charity was great, made me feel good about keeping my money, until the end, where it said charity is still good. Damn!
You said Jon applauded Santorum’s authoritarianism. My point was that he didn’t. (I didn’t say Santorum is anti-government. I said his remarks quoted by Jon are against government authority, which they are.)
Well I’ll try to be quick don’t have as much time. Probably not as meaningful and well written as my other, hopefully jon can retrieve it or something.
Ethan, everyone thinks their anger is based on evidence, and everyone’s anger filters and colors the evidence to make sure! The point was that you can’t merely assume everyone who opposes same-sex marriage is a bigot who was beaten as a child. You’re looking for reasons not to respect those who disagree with you and resisting reasons to respect them. That’s a useful way to preserve one’s own views, but it’s hardly the basis for free cooperation such as you seem to favor.
– Exactly, how silly of me! Thinking that the LGBT community is entitled to rights! How close minded of me to reject people who think they aren’t!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_personality
I was referring to kids who are beat turn into social conservatives who support the death penalty , plenty of evidence to support that.
Just as there events and knowledge which shape me, just be glad I’d be that 1/3 not shocking you to death because “authority” told me so.
If your plan is to cooperate only with those you agree with, Tea Party style, that can work where there’s a limited diversity of views, but it obviously prevents broader cooperation. In that respect the Tea Party is a great failure, but one you seem determined to emulate if you fail to respect those with other views.
– Here’s what I’d do, education can cure bigotry http://sphotos.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/560273_10150940630163013_501628012_11918760_1805581290_n.jpg
religious fundamentalism would greatly be reduced once there’s a more equal distribution of wealth (like in the nordic countries)
The link about Occupy’s accomplishments doesn’t mention any major practical accomplishment, which is quite an accomplishment in itself, considering all the energy devoted to the movement. Its inability to see the value of authority has pretty well guaranteed it would accomplish little in comparison to the Tea Party. That’s true whether the Tea Party is “astroturf” or not (the Left accepts such ideas too eagerly).
So it appears you accept what makes the Tea Party a failure, and reject what makes it a success.
– Our entire political system is broken it’s either take ineffective regulations from the democrats or none at all from the republicans. I think anyone can observe that from the reaction to peacefully assembly which was abuse and repression.
You don’t see obedient people causing revolutions do you? If it wasn’t for not valuing that they probably would’ve stayed home so as to not disturb these fine gentleman!! http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lv8jzkhaLu1qak6k6o1_1280.jpg
I can’t tell what relation you think the link about body pleasure and violence has with the “free love” of the 1960s, which sought to remove love and sex from personal and social commitment and responsibility. You just skip over the fact that the drug culture led to a great deal of misery, obviously not all due to the War on Drugs. Yes, the 60s were marked by excess.
-Good, it’s not their business just like it’s not societies business to regulate the 1st amendment. Condoms people. Besides, the red states have higher birth rates, single mothers, porn consumption,etc. Down with “original sin”
Did you see the video? usage fell greatly once it was legalized, rehabilitation works not putting humans in private prison cages which are incentived to produce more criminals. Not to mention that the FBI indirectly caused the counter culture and LSD use with MK ULTRA
I can’t tell what you want to get across by the reference to Freetown Christiania either.
– My point was that society can survive without authority, one point jon seems to disagree with and says “liberals just don’t get”. oh and that conservatives value all equally!!! how nice! you see when santorum calls obama a niggger he’s keeping within the fine american tradition of segregation! you see, we can understand him!
The video on charity was great, made me feel good about keeping my money, until the end, where it said charity is still good. Damn!
– 😀 again the point is though to create society in such a way so that poverty never surfaces, not put a little band aid on it
You said Jon applauded Santorum’s authoritarianism. My point was that he didn’t. (I didn’t say Santorum is anti-government. I said his remarks quoted by Jon are against government authority, which they are.)
– ok I’ll give you that quote may have been but his true philosophy is far from that, and he’s expressed it many times.
“5. Rampant Sexism – The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.”
http://www.rense.com/general37/char.htm
http://political-heat.blogspot.com/2011/07/bachmann-santorum-sign-marriage-pledge.html they both signed a pledge saying that slavery wasn’t so bad because blacks had families!
and bachman went as far as to say that slavery= christian bonding experience.
To me this isn’t just a mere difference of opinion.
Revisiting this essay, it comes off as Jon is incredibly ignorant outside maybe social issues…
Either that or consenting to the american empire- which I don’t think any decent person with a conscious can do, don’t the people in latin america, the middle east, and africa deserve freedom? I could get into more detail but I’ll just leave a book
http://sandiego.indymedia.org/media/2007/02/125025.pdf
compare http://politicalcompass.org/uselection2008
and
http://politicalcompass.org/uselection2012
obama is far right, now is time to examine policies…
How could he really think that the 2 sides are ideologically pure? I don’t see the democrats being civil libertarians and for a welfare state.
Ever since clinton democrats have been adopting the republican platform. It’s like choosing between coke and pepsi not ying and yang. In practice the differences are very slight. OBama has become a neocon, left/right there’s hardly any differences in FP. And the US has always been an oligopoly, although citizens united only exacerbated that.
Again I would highly suggest the chomsky linked in the last post. Generally everyone should just read more chomsky
and of course down with our treasonous congress…
I feel like I am naturally ‘both’ because my parents tend to have ‘cons/rep’ beliefs, but we’re minorities! I am the kid, all ‘multicultural’ and understanding of other’s situation.
It’s not just “me” but it’s people “like” me.. who really are the in -betweners. We have a personal attachment to conservatives, and so a loyalty and bit of ‘seeing their point’, but we have a joy and passion for everyone else.. and it’s inherited by our position as minorities. A min. CAN’T be cons (except our parents, who still are part of ‘the old school’).
I mean, you could. But you’de have no friends. Or not the ones you wanted. It’s a social stigma.
But, like I said, I see valid points on both sides. Cons, by nature, are like ‘engineers’. Precise, but sometimes angry. Engineers are so picky and fickle, but it’s because, well.. I sorta WANT that bridge carrying my car and family.. to be built correct.
You need a bit of.. picky, mean, fickleness..IE conservative personality. I feel like conservs are the, dare I say, sacrificial lambs of society?
They are not here to party. They are here to make sure nobody robs us, kills us, or if someone should happen to drink too much-they are most likely the one to start angrily telling people to back off and call 911 and get a blanket and… Or am I stereotyping them too?
Let’s just say, I love liberals on Friday night, but if I pass out or am on the verge of dying, I kinda don’t mind a conservative doctor to be present… if you know what I mean.
Re: Engineering conservatism and “conservatives as the sacrificial lambs of society”
Kipling said this a century ago, in
They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose.
They do not teach that His Pity allows them to leave their job when they damn-well choose …
Readers’ Guide for this poem is .
Sigh. Messed up the HTML. The poem is “The Sons of Martha” by Rudyard Kipling.
Readers’ Guide here.
Very disappointing to hear this viewpoint coming from you Dr. Haidt.
Consider this:
Let’s just say it: The Democrats are the problem
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/04/28/lets-just-say-it-the-democrats-are-the-problem/
I have to agree with Sanpete when he says “You’ve been carried away!”
You know I read your work extensively and closely.
When people first meet they get impressions of one another and draw conclusions about what the other person is like. But if the two people relate with one another regularly over a period of weeks, months, or years, they begin to notice patterns of behavior about each other that are not evident at first blush.
After living with you, so to speak, over the past few years by reading your work and watching your videos online I’ve begun to have the unsettling feeling that your understanding of conservatives and conservatism is mostly academic and intellectual, but you still don’t really “get” them at an intuitive level.
The disciplined, scientific approach you take to studying morality is necessarily reductive. This is not a fault, per se. All science is that way. I don’t mean to say you’re doing something wrong. But I think the result of that kind of analysis, in combination with your liberal roots, is that while on the one hand you can explain conservatives from an analytical point of view, you can’t really put yourself in their shoes and think from within the conservative moral matrix.
I think this new position of yours vindicates my unsettling feeling.
Your intellectual academic understanding of conservatism comes from the epiphanies you experienced during your trip to India, and from reading Muller, from extensive readings of people like Hume and Burke, from similar surveys of research from the likes of E.O. Wilson, Boehm, Schweder, Durkheim, etc, and from your own wide and deep research.
But that’s all happening within your rider, while at the same time your liberal elephant is trying really hard to pull you back onto its original path. And so, when the elephant finally wins the battle and you want to conclude that the Republican Party is to blame for current problems, you abandon your disciplined scientific approach and hang your position on what is largely the motivated reasoning of essentially three people; Ornstein, Mann, and Edsall.
You may point out that your opinion is based on much more than just the three of them, and that’s fine, but my larger point remains. It seems to me that when your essentially liberal elephant wins the partisan battle with your fair minded, scientific, centrist rider, you resort to the same sort of “fuzzy thinking” The Righteous Mind seems to admonish us to avoid.
Before you hitch your wagon to Ornstein and Mann you might consider the counter argument in the blog piece on HotAir that I linked to in a previous comment, which says, among other thing,s that:
“Although Ornstein and Mann claim to “have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted,” they provide no links to all the op-eds they did about the extreme statements about Republicans being Un-American, comparing them to fascists, Nazis, racists and so on made by Democratic Reps. Nancy Pelosi (on her own and with Steny Hoyer), George Miller, Debbie Wasserman-Shultz, Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, Jerrold Nadler, Jesse Jackson Jr., Sam Gibbons, Tom Lantos, Keith Ellison, Baron Hill, Jared Polis, Steve Cohen, Sheila Jackson Lee, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Louise Slaughter. Or Senators Robert Byrd and Blanche Lincoln. Or current Califonia governor Jerry Brown. Or repeat offender Al Gore. People might be forgiven for thinking Democrats, not to mention Ornstein and Mann, take that extreme rhetoric for granted in their rush to condemn the GOP.”
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/04/28/lets-just-say-it-the-democrats-are-the-problem/
You might also consider Chris Cillizza in an article entitled “Is polarization really all Republican’s fault?” in the Washington Post, which exposes some of the weaknesses in Ornstein and Mann’s qualitative arguments:
“Mann and Ornstein cite comments made by former Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, who called his party “irresponsible”, as evidence that the GOP has moved away from its once-inclusive nature.
But, for every Chuck Hagel there’s a Joe Lieberman who fell so far out of favor with the Democratic party over his stance on the war in Iraq that he was defeated in party primary, became an independent, won that race and then went on to speak at the Republican National Convention in 2008. (Yes, it is beyond odd that all of that happened in the last six years.)
Mann and Ornstein also cite the fact that moderate statesmen in the GOP are virtually non-existent these days with the departures of the likes of former Missouri Sen. John Danforth and former Illinois Rep. Bob Michel. (They could have, but didn’t, include the retiring Olympia Snowe of Maine in that construct too.)
But, a look at the recent departures from the Senate Democratic ranks suggests their number of moderates is also very much on the decline. Already in 2012, Sens. Ben Nelson (Neb.), Jim Webb (Va.) and Kent Conrad (N.D.) have called it quits. Add to that the likes of Sens. Evan Bayh (Ind.), Byron Dorgan (N.D.), Arlen Specter (Pa.) and Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) all of whom left in 2010, and its clear that the centrist Democratic ranks have taken a major hit over the last four years too.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/is-polarization-really-all-republicans-fault/2012/04/30/gIQAJXFAsT_blog.html
And you also might consider the possibility that Mann and Ornstein are misinterpreting the data they rely on, as Sean Trende pointed out in Real Clear Politics:
“Mann and Ornstein are referring to data generated by Poole and Rosenthal’s famous DW-NOMINATE program — one of the great achievements of modern political science.
…
The claim that Republicans are mostly to blame for the increase in polarization is usually accompanied by the claim — also based upon DW-NOMINATE data — that Republicans are now more conservative than they have been at any point since the 1880s. This is a misapplication of DW-NOMINATE.
…
the DW-NOMINATE data can show that the current Congress is the most polarized in history (since that is a relative measurement), they cannot really show us who is to blame for that polarization. Without any lodestone to hold the “center” steady, we can’t tell who has moved the farthest away from that “center.” And because we have a pretty good sense that the center shifts from Congress to Congress, especially when control of that body changes hands, it becomes almost impossible to make meaningful comparisons between even two Congresses, let alone over the course of multiple decades.
Again, to illustrate this point, DW-NOMINATE suggests that Congress became much less polarized in the 1920s and 30s, which is probably true. But it suggests that both parties moved toward the center (and that both Northern and Southern Democrats, on average moved toward the center). There simply isn’t any support for the idea that the Democrats in the 1936 Congress were, on average, more conservative than Democrats in the 1926 Congress, at least in the sense that contemporary pundits use the term. But as the agenda moved leftward, the rise of the Conservative Coalition has the effect of pulling both parties toward the center, even though, overall, both were probably becoming more liberal.
DW-NOMINATE remains a powerful tool, especially if you keep its limitations in mind and are looking at discrete Congresses (or really are interested purely in polarization). It even sheds interesting light on realignment theory. But it really doesn’t do any of the things the popular press is claiming it does, at least not particularly well. “
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/05/11/what_has_made_congress_more_polarized-full.html
As far as Edsall’s analysis is concerned, the notion that “as people get more partisan, the liberals go up on empathy and the conservatives go down — they get more hard-hearted” is narrow-minded thinking that looks at only one small sliver of the picture of conservatism and then draws a conclusion about the whole picture. It’s the intellectual equivalent of the way the New Atheists think of religion, seeing it as “a set of beliefs about the world, many of which are demonstrably false.”
Further, you yourself have pointed out that the Democratic and Republican parties have become essentially ideologically pure. You’ve said that there used to be liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, but that situation essentially no longer exists, so that now the two parties are ideologically pure. It is my personal opinion, therefore, that to say that conservatives are good but the Republican Party is bad is to make a distinction without a difference. I think it’s a smoke screen, a rationalization that allows you to come out from behind the screen of impartiality you’ve beem
I respectfully suggest that in the same way “sociologists who study religion stress the role of ritual and community much more than of factual beliefs,” you might benefit from considering Cantor and Republican views from the larger perspective. Try to think of them as the Indian people you lived among, and try to see the universe from within the six-foundation moral matrix of conservatism.
I think that if you were able to do that you would find that for all the insight your reductive analyses of conservatism and liberalism through graphs of moral foundations – which show a split on the left, liberal, end of the x axis, and a tight group on the right, conservative, end of the x axis –they do not tell the whole story.
Conservatism, and, I’m sure, liberalism too, is no more a collection of moral foundations than a home is a collection of two by fours, wiring, plumbing, and insulation. It is a state of being. It is an intuitive sense of, and for, the social universe that is a synergistic aggregate of everything that makes up the psyche.
One’s morality is a form of existence. It is a way of inhabiting one’s self, as well as the social world. It is a way of perceiving and interpreting and interacting with all the other “selfs” in the world. It is the inherent, internal, subconscious GPS that guides the intuitive elephant during its short stay here on the planet. There’s more, much much more, to what it means to be conservative than just a simple listing of moral foundations. David Brooks does a good job of explaining this sense of being in his book “The Social Animal.”
In my view, Mann, Ornstein, Edsall, and you, in concluding that the Republican Party is “Bad” are all missing the forest for the trees; you see the two by fours but not the home. By concluding that Cantor, Tiberi, and the others seem “happy to consider raising some taxes on the poor, or of shifting more of the tax burden onto the poor,” I think you are looking only at the street those people are currently on, and you are ignoring the destination their internal GPS is trying to get us all to reach. You’re position strikes me a bit like that of an unknowing child who is resentful of a parent who is admonishing him not to stick a knife into an electrical outlet. The problem is not that the parent is wrong, the problem is that the child does not grasp the reality of the situation, but he doesn’t know it, so he lashes out at the parent.
A sacred value of the conservative state of being is the concept of negative liberty. This concept infuses every aspect of the conservative soul. It partly defines the “situated self” of the conservative elephant (as opposed to the “unencumbered self” of the liberal elephant). It is in their cell structure. This “sense” applies not just to liberty. It applies to everything including ideas like equality, justice, and especially fairness.
To illustrate, consider a weekly poker game in which I play, and in which I lose every time. To a conservative, if everyone follows the rules, and if nobody cheats, then the game is fair. But to a liberal, since everyone else in the game is obviously so much better at it than I am, then the game is inherently unfair.
To the liberal, fairness is an outcome. It is a relatively equal probability that everyone in the game will have a positive result. In order for this sense of “fairness” to be achieved, the game must be rigged – society and human nature must be “fixed” – to place a handicap on the best players, and/or to artificially elevate the worst players, so that every player has a roughly equal chance of a positive result. It means different rules for different people. It means forcing leaders into the position of playing god by making them decide which types of people are deserving of the benefits of the rigged game and who is deserving of paying for them, and it means having faith that the leaders “get it” and will pick the “right” winners and losers. This is the liberal, Democratic Party, sacred value of fairness.
To the conservative, and to the Republican Party, fairness is a process. It is one set of rules that applies, and is applied, the same to everyone. It is impartial. It does not favor one person or group of people above another. It does not force anyone to play god. This conception of fairness is a sacred value not only of conservatism, but of the Republican Party as well.
“Care” is also a sacred value of conservatism. Your own data, your own conclusions, show that conservatives care, practically speaking, every bit as much as liberals and the Democratic Party do, especially when you consider that looking out for the hive is also a form of care (but which you don’t count as care in your analyses). Conservatives and the Republican Party care so much so that they are willing to accept, and in fact have accepted, a large number of “progressive” ideas, not the least of which is progressive taxes, which go against their sacred value of fairness as a process. They balance “care” against “fairness.”
The conservative tradeoff between care and balance illustrates another sacred value of conservatism and the Republican Party: the Yin/Yang balance between the ethics of autonomy and community/sanctity. This, too, is proven by your own data and analyses. While some amount of care is great, too much of it, without the balance of the other ethics, amounts to Pathological Altruism, where “care” does more harm than good. This realization – that the balance of the Yin of autonomy against the Yang of community/sanctity – which follows from the six-foundation grasp of human nature (which you have shown is better than the three-foundation grasp) is a sacred value of conservatism and of the Republican Party as well.
It appears that the point of divergence between the ideologically pure conservative Republican Party and the ideologically pure liberal Democratic party is that the conservative Republicans understand that there has to be a limit to “care,” and to “spreading the wealth around.” They realize that the Yin of autonomy and “care” must be balanced by the Yang of community and sanctity through, among other things, placing limits on the redistribution of wealth. They realize that at some point the liberal “rigging” of the game goes so far that it begins to do more harm than good – it fouls the hive – and it has to stop.
The liberal Democratic Party fixation on care, at the expense of practically all of the other foundations, apparently sees no such limit; it embraces no such tradeoff.
I’m sure you know the numbers. I’m sure you’ve heard it all before. For example, the top 1 percent of taxpayers, who represent about 17 percent of all income in 2009, already pony up 37 percent of all federal taxes. In other words, they ALREADY pay more than TWICE their “fair share.” http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3505 I could go on and on with the numbers. I could show that similar disparities exist in every quintile. I could show, for example, that no amount of tax increases will ever be able to reduce the deficit. I could show that payroll taxes have some affect on the overall result, but not much, and that when the income of the poor is calculated it seldom, if ever, accounts for all of the benefits and transfer payments they receive from the government. For more discussion on this see Thomas Sowell’s book “Economic Facts and Fallacies.”
But the point I’m trying to make – the problem, your problem, as I see it – is not about the numbers. The problem is that the conservative Republican Party “constrained vision” of human nature, is, apparently, not part of the liberal, Democratic, “unconstrained vision” of the moral universe. No matter how progressive the taxes, no matter how disproportionately “the rich” are taxed in relation to everyone else, and no matter how totally out of control government spending gets, the liberal Democratic Party always wants more. More taxes. More spending. More. More, more, more. Care care care.
The result is, as David Brooks described just today in The New York Times on May 18th, the real reason Europe and America are failing, is that the Yin/Yang “balanced wisdom” of conservatism has been lost in favor of the unbalanced Yin of the entitlement mentality, social justice, and “care” of liberalism. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/opinion/the-age-of-innocence.html?ref=opinion
And what solution does the liberal Democratic Party propose as the solution to this overdose of Yin that is destroying the hive? Why, more of it, of course. More more more. Care care care. Yin yin yin.
At some point, Jon, you have to realize that that the constant, relentless pressure from the liberal Democratic Party for “more,” and the actual fact of ever increasing taxes AND spending – and the very real consequences in the form of the financial meltdown that virtually the entire Western world is currently experiencing – will eventually violate the conservative Republican sacred value of fairness as a process rather than as an outcome, and of the conservative Republican sacred value of the Yin/Yang balance between “care” for the individual and the needs of the greater community as a whole.
At some point, you have to stop looking at conservatives and the Republican Party the way the New Atheists look at religion, see the larger picture, and realize that the liberal Democratic Party is committing sacrilege, as you described in your CCARE talk, to such an egregious degree that the Republican Party is literally forced to “circle the wagons” around its sacred values to protect them.
Is it really that hard to see and understand that the absurdity of the position of the liberal Democratic party’s insistence on more taxes and more spending, especially when that’s what got us into this mess, is what Cantor and Tiberi and others, and the Republican Party is responding to? Can you not see that it is a deep and viscous violation of the very essence of the six foundation morality, its sense of fairness, and its cell-level sense of the “balanced wisdom” (from the David Brooks article) of Yin/Yang? Is it really that difficult to understand that Cantor and Tiberi and the Republican party have been pushed so far beyond the limits of what their morality- their “situated self” – can tolerate that they are lashing out with what amounts to an “irrational commitment” to their sense of fairness; that by saying that maybe we should raise taxes on the poor using the absurd to point out the absurdity of the Democratic Party’s positions, and it utter blindness to the fact, yes fact, that liberalism is the real cause of the current crisis?
Is it really that hard to see that the position of the Republican Party is nothing if not a “deeply principled stance?”
If so, then I am deeply disappointed in you, because apparently you’ve forgotten what The Righteous Mind is trying to teach.
(And further, as an aside, I’m stunned that, in the face of the ramming down our collective throats of Obamacare, with its massive new unfunded entitlements, that the Democratic Party committed against the American people, and proudly so, on top of, and in the midst of, a financial crises that they essentially caused through their Yin of pathological “care,” that anyone, most especially you, could possibly take the position that Republicans are to blame for what ails us today. It defies reason, and the facts of history.
And further still, with all of your insight, and what you learned from Muller – that conservatism is a reasoned, principled, approach to doing the best for the most – it is literally beyond belief, and something that I thought I’d never in a million years hear from you of all people, that “Republicans traditional favored a hand up, not a hand out. They may now favor neither, because they think the poor deserve to be poor.” Seriously, I am shocked. Truly. And deeply saddened, to hear you utter, or to see those words written by you.
I have been a great fan of yours for some time now because I had the impression that you followed the evidence of social science research even if it was counter to your own personal tendencies. I have admired your intellectual strength. This has been a large portion of the reason I have explained and advocated your ideas in practically every conversation I have regarding politics and religion.
But now, it seems, you’ve abandoned the disciplined research and science-based origins of your views and instead hitched your wagon to some articles by a small number of obviously partisan political pundits. What happened to all of your documentary research, your epiphanies, and your own statistical evidence? What happened to all the insights you gained from those things, which you described so eloquently in The Righteous Mind? Now that the book is out, is the baby gone with the bathwater?
Have I been wrong about you all this time?
If I had to guess, I’d say no. I know you better than that, and I know you’re better than that. I’d say that the onslaught of criticism and cajoling from both sides of the political aisle that have resulted from the release of The Righteous Mind, in combination with “your natural liberal inclinations,” have, as Sanpete said, “carried you away!”
Whig: You are right, I was wrong. I explain why in this new post:
http://righteousmind.com/i-retract-my-republican-party-bad-post/
To be honest, it’s a credit to your empathy and to your kindness that you accepted that long narrative as demonstrating something that goes beyond stating a principle (moral or otherwise), that is, something that has purchase.
Because it doesn’t, right now.
The fact is that the Reagan Devolution is long in the tooth and, having long since achieved its putative objectives, is now threatening the collective, the Republic with absurd claims of the kind that you note at the end of your Tavis Smiley interview.
In short, the principles outlined above no longer apply: The Republican Party is “a principle without a cause”, in the current environment. They are fighting a Liberalism that doesn’t exist.
The situation is even worse than that, for all of us, if you can believe it. They are fighting themselves, too, as JLR notes above! That might be a cause for glee, but a two-party system (tit-for-tat, in both senses of the term) amplifies these problems for all of us.
What are some easy signs that this is true?
Well Whig mentions 70% tax rates. Let’s get to reality. The GOP was willing to shut down the entire USG to avoid a comparatively minor raise in the top marginal tax bracket.
Along with our ability to share intention, to idealize, we also got a bull-o-meter. We can understand when people are putting up a moral show.
I can’t help but believe that this is what is behind the mobilization and radicalization of the decent Left that is going on, partly in backlash. In truth, no one knowledgeable believes that anyone in the GOP really _believes_ what they are saying/doing, but must conclude that they are just playing parochial power politics, right on down tot he ridiculous posturing of the Wisconsin governor over unions that had already made just about all the financial concessions asked of them.
The Right are trapped by their own ideology. The Reagan Devolution repeated that we were the blameless, shining “City on a Hill”. But, we weren’t always that. America was a scrappy new kid on the block and the wealthiest were _honored_ to do “more than their share”, to be _recognized_ as the people who built a nation. We haven’t found a way, yet, to extend that to providing basic dental care to the millions who have none and suffer so badly because of it.
Perhaps professor Haidt will find a mechanism to elucidate and to help us recover a sense of communal purpose that doesn’t depend on security/war. Because it is not coming from the Right. So many there fancy themselves the keepers of cohesion, but they are ripping us apart with their absurdities – NOT their principles, but the patently absurd application of them.
*Claps*
I should’ve been more civil earlier… My bad.
And also, further applause for you Amicus.
I wish Jon would read/get your point.
Karma is truth, yet countless examples of grace, have demonstrated that karma can be transformed thru grace. Peace and civility are from within… The Spiritual.
The “Matrix” consumes and absorbs the simple looking for the simple in the realm of the profane. A simple created by todays media demonologist and the high priests so call “politicians”. Considering an old story: that of christ and satan walking together one day… Christ reaches into a stream and hold up a bright stone and proclaims “ah truth” and so very quickly… satan snatches the stone from him and boldly exhorts “here let me organize it”
Keep up the good work, we can do so much to elevate the profane and social discourse.
We can do so much better, can we all just get along. Now??
Its the only moment we have.
I think you are missing a conservative value that would explain our obsession with insisting on no new taxes, and that is stewardship. I speak for my self and most of the conservatives I know when I say that if our government was effective and efficient in the creation and administration of all the programs it creates then I would be happy to pay more to see that they succeed, just as I support charities that are good stewards of the funds given them.
Government, especially at the federal, level is not only inefficient and ineffective, but down right wastefull, throwing our hard earned tax contributions down numerous rat holes. (this unfortunately is true no matter what party in in power, although I believe liberals are better at it.)
So, If my taxes to up, say a thousand dollars annually, I wonder what rat hole my contribution will be thrown in.
Must of us have come to the unhappy conclusion that the only way to force government to be better stewards is to starve them of the funds to waste.