We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress.
Progress toward a society without morals is not progress. Diversity that excludes white men, Christians, and people like Trig Palin is not progress. Liberalism is a thought process that elitist professors brainwash into college students, not a workable solution for a real society.
But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death.
Uncertainty? Like the uncertainty the left now feels about our election? Handling it rather poorly, and with an unhealty dose of sexism, aren't you?
Change? Like the change the Republican ticket has proven, in contrast to the Democratic talk?
Death? The party of "fundies" is afraid of death?
Or death, like the million plus annual abortions your side supports...and wants funded by taxpayer money.
Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.
Reason? Like "lipstick on a pig?" Quoting comic strips?
In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional pleasure of shared righteous anger.
Well, your side certainly has the anger.
We can explain how Republicans exploit frames, phrases, and fears to trick Americans into supporting policies (such as the "war on terror" and repeal of the "death tax") that damage the national interest for partisan advantage.
This is an interesting thing to read on Sept 10th. And the "death tax," which you obviously misunderstand, (I know, all that "reason" clogs up those brain cells,) is a tax on the living who have the "nerve" to inherit.
Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground.
Explain that moral high ground on the foundation of millions of dead infants, ok?
Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats.
Congrats. You're getting there.
Maybe I spoke too soon...
The book of Leviticus makes a lot more sense when you...
know at least a little bit about theology. Obviously, you missed that subject somewhere in your study of morality and culture. But don't let your total ignorance distract you from saying some stupid stuff.
For my dissertation research, I made up stories about people who did things that were disgusting or disrespectful yet perfectly harmless. For example, what do you think about a woman who can't find any rags in her house so she cuts up an old American flag and uses the pieces to clean her toilet, in private? Or how about a family whose dog is killed by a car, so they dismember the body and cook it for dinner? I read these stories to 180 young adults and 180 eleven-year-old children, half from higher social classes and half from lower, in the USA and in Brazil. I found that most of the people I interviewed said that the actions in these stories were morally wrong, even when nobody was harmed.
Reading stories like this to 11 year old children may not fit your idea of "morally wrong," but my overall impression of your intelligence and morals continues to decline.
This research led me to two conclusions. First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare.
Now that almost sounds like a "fundie" position. When we must rely on our own sense of right and wrong, we get it wrong a lot. If we're smart enough to rely on God's right and wrong, things are much clearer. Somehow, I doubt you've gotten that far, yet...
Turiel's description of morality as being about justice, rights, and human welfare worked perfectly for the college students I interviewed at Penn, but it simply did not capture the moral concerns of the less elite groups—the working-class people in both countries who were more likely to justify their judgments with talk about respect, duty, and family roles.
Well, there you go. The "elites" obviously have no respect for others, no sense of duty for others, and certainly have problems relating to their families.
But how can Democrats learn to see—let alone respect—a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?
Well, they could start by taking the log out of their own eye. If I've ever seen racism, I've seen it on Democratic sites...along with tons of sexism lately. Talk about narrow-minded and dumb!
On Turiel's definition of morality ("justice, rights, and welfare"), Christian and Hindu communities don't look good. They restrict people's rights (especially sexual rights), encourage hierarchy and conformity to gender roles, and make people spend extraordinary amounts of time in prayer and ritual practices that seem to have nothing to do with "real" morality.
Perhaps if you'd actually lived with Christians the way you lived with Hindus, you wouldn't continue to sound so stupid. Try it sometime.
We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans.
Another true statement...although you probably don't see the problems with the Democrats' "much smaller part."
Democrats often seem to think of voters as consumers; they rely on polls to choose a set of policy positions that will convince 51% of the electorate to buy.
Probably why you usually remind us of used car salesmen. Those "younger voters" you depend on start getting more conservative with every increase in taxes and every time they're cheated by a salesman. If they manage to stay off drugs and stay out of the "Ivory Tower," they end up Republicans for just this reason.
Durkheim long ago said that God is really society projected up into the heavens, a collective delusion that enables collectives to exist, suppress selfishness, and endure.
Well, you must feel better now. Someone else actually said something less intelligent than you...though quoting him doesn't make you look much smarter, I'm afraid.
The Democrats must find a way to close the sacredness gap that goes beyond occasional and strategic uses of the words "God" and "faith." But if Durkheim is right, then sacredness is really about society and its collective concerns. God is useful but not necessary. The Democrats could close much of the gap if they simply learned to see society not just as a collection of individuals—each with a panoply of rights--but as an entity in itself, an entity that needs some tending and caring.
Ah...no.
The ingroup/loyalty foundation supports virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice that can lead to dangerous nationalism, but in moderate doses a sense that "we are all one" is a recipe for high social capital and civic well-being.
It's also fairly useful when trying to win a war. A real war, not the unwinnable "war on poverty."
Democrats should think carefully, therefore, about why they celebrate diversity. If the purpose of diversity programs is to fight racism and discrimination (worthy goals based on fairness concerns), then these goals might be better served by encouraging assimilation and a sense of shared identity.
The purity/sanctity foundation is used heavily by the Christian right...
Well, you just blew that sense of shared identity with that discriminatory phrase.
The Democrats would lose their souls if they ever abandoned their commitment to social justice, but social justice is about getting fair relationships among the parts of the nation.
Except the wealthy, the fundies, the uppity women, the repukes, the babies that "should have been aborted, the...
Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so.
Well, you're partly right. Until Democrats understand that their ideas of fairness, righteousness, morals, liberty, freedom, etc. etc, are completely different from Republicans, conservatives, Christians, and most rural folk, they are never going to be able to get over that "duped" talking point.
