EVER WONDER: “WHY DO PEOPLE BECOME EITHER A CONSERVATIVE OR A LIBERAL?”

…Conservatives vs Liberals, Republicans vs Democrats

 

Conservatives who love to hurl negatives at their enemies, usually have the thinnest of skins when they receive similar comments.

 

I recently came across an older study about Political Conservatism.  I was fascinated by the study because of how complete it was and how many individuals were involved in the study.  The study was sponsored by a Professor, Dr. John T. Jost from New York University.  And Dr. Jost and his collaborators published the report that had used masses of collected data.  This study is entitled: “Political Conservatism as Motivated Cognition”.  Translation: “The political conservative’s processes for decision-making and attitude change.”

 

Here is a list of the data that was used for developing the study’s report results:

The study compiled 44 years of various studies made by social scientists that had investigated conservatism using 88 different study techniques.  It also involved over 22,000 participants.  The results of the study were founded on the empirical information drawn from multiple study experiments and massive testing results.

 

Dr. Jost and company started this study by first coming up with a definition of “conservative” and “conservatism”.  This was accomplished by reviewing different dictionaries and encyclopedias as well as those definitions from multiple historians, journalists, political scientists, sociologists, and philosophers starting from the mid-1950’s.   The reason for starting with this date is that this era is, according to most conservative scholars, the beginning of what is referred to as “the modern conservative movement in the United States”, and the Jost team continued this study from the 1950’s up through the late 1990’s.

 

The study revealed a stable definition of "conservatism" that included two principle elements.  One was the idea that all conservatives would normally have a “resistance to any change”, and the second stable element was that a conservative would most likely have the “acceptance of inequality”.  This last element was for saying that conservatives generally accept that everyone is not equal, such as the differences in their social status, wealth, education, etc.  In some ways this was also a way to say that once a person is born into a certain status, there is a resistance in conservative thinking for a person to make major changes in that status.

 

Now, on the other end of the spectrum, there are areas with conservatives that do change.  Not by desire, but over time.  For example, “conservatives in the US during the 1960’s, for the most part they supported the war in Vietnam”.  However, the “conservatives in the 1990’s were more for being tough on crime and they also supported the more traditional Christian moral religious values”.

 

What was interesting is that many of those interviewed that said they had become a conservative, but they had not done so because of their beliefs to the core conservative elements.  They had instead only became conservative “because of their association with like-minded individuals”.  In other words, they just became conservatives because they and their friends and associates agreed on most of the issues of the day.

 

One of the traits that showed up in the study was that most conservatives do not see themselves as they actually are in real life.  In short, they have little facility for real-life, self-analysis.  As an example, these very conservative individuals who love to hurl negative comments at their enemies (the liberals of course), they tend to usually have the thinnest of skins when the same negatives are thrown back at them.

 

And there are many examples of this, such as the conservative talk-show attendee and author,  Ms. Ann Coulter.  Ms. Coulter will readily trash any perceived liberal, and she will do this viciously, even on national TV.  But Ms. Coulter is also well known for walking off of a stage if and when she is booed.  Or Ms. Coulter will just start crying on camera if she thinks she is being treated unfairly. 

 

Then there’s the conservative radio wind-bag, Mr. Rush Limbaugh, who has made his living for decades by saying unkind things about anyone he disagrees with.  But both he and his listeners thought Rush was being treated unfairly when his addiction to OxyContin was eventually reported to the public.  They and he also thought he was treated unfairly, even when it became known how he serviced his habit with the drugs he obtained illegally.  And this was a man that continually had previously, viscously attacked many others on his radio program only because they had also used drugs.

You may recall the politician and long-time conservative talk radio host and author, Mr. William “Bill” Bennett.  This man was sometimes referred to in his crowd as “Mr. Virtue”, as his writings and preaching were definitely for selling conservative moral “virtue”.  President Reagan had even named Bill Bennett as the Secretary of Education, and he was a major supporter in Reagan’s “War on Drugs”.  But the reality is that he never applied anything he had ever preached, to himself.  It later became very well known that Mr. Bennett had a serious gambling problem and he had lost millions of his family’s finances by gambling it away at the tables in Las Vegas.  He became viciously angry with all media when his gambling secret was eventually made public.

 

This contradictory element is very consistent with many conservatives.

 

Dr. Jost’s study therefore came up with the following conclusions:  “Conservative are often illogical, inconsistent and contradictory.”

Many conservative, specifically those who are clearly authoritarians, (such as Donald J. Trump), are not aware of their illogical, contradictory, and hypo-critical thinking.  If they are made aware of this, they either rationalize it away, neglect it, or they attack those who reveal any of their human weaknesses.

 

However, some have even turned this issue into being a positive trait.

 

A long-time writer for the conservative National Review, Jonah Goldberg, has such an approach.  Rather than finding the contradictions and inconsistencies of a conservative being a problem, he refers to them as a virtue.  “The beauty of the conservative movement is that we all understand and accept the ‘permanence of contradiction’ in our thinking.”

 

This concept is classic Orwellian “doublethink”, right out of Orwell’s “1984”.  It is not such a great revelation, as Goldberg has stated, “that Jesus was not a conservative.”….DUH!  The term “politically conservative Christian” is a an example of a pure oxymoron.  This was why the Republicans had to instead come up with their other personal term for the 2000 election of: “ a Compassionate Conservative”.

 

“Compassionate Conservative” is a bizarre term for those conservatives that believe along with Mr. Goldberg that “contradiction and inconsistency is a thing of beauty”.  That strange term will never be considered a “credible term” by most rational people.

 

The heart of Dr. Jost and his collaborator’s findings was that people become or remain political conservatives because they have a heightened psychological need to manage uncertainty and their internal fears.  More specifically, the study established that conservatives have the need to deal with their fears, their intolerance of ambiguity, a need for certainty or structure in their lives, and they usually over-react to personal threats. Thus, they feel the need to be the dominate one under any circumstance.

 

So, how did the Jost team come to all these conclusions?

 

All this data was collected from those conservatives that were willing to express their beliefs and to have their related psychological dynamics studied through various objective testing techniques. What also came out of all the testing was that none of these characteristics could ever be ascribed to anyone considered a liberal.

It is interesting that after this study was published, Dr. Jost was seriously hammered by many well-known political conservatives.

 

Dr. Jost eventually responded to them with an op-ed piece that was published in the Washington Post.

 

Dr. Jost noted in the op-ed article that those critics of the study were conspicuously less than familiar with the actual contents and results of the study. Dr. Jost also pointed out that the study had clearly not implied that conservatism was “abnormal, pathological or the result of mental illness”.  Nor had it said that conservatives were, “insane, sick, or strange”.

 

But Dr. Jost did agree that his critics were also not agreeing that the study was offering some welcome news for all conservatives.  (On that they were correct.)

 

What is so interesting is that there was a study a few years later, from a totally different point-of-view, that basically conformed many of the findings of the Jost study.

 

This later study was of all things, of nursery school children.  It revealed that the personalities of three and four year old children was indicative of their future political orientation.  Basically it said that little girls that were indecisive, inhibited, shy, extremely neat, totally compliant, and sometimes fearful, these little girls were likely to become conservative women.  Likewise, little boys who were unadventurous, uncontrollable, uncertain, total conformist, highly moralistic and that regularly would tell other little boys what to do, these little boys would become conservative adults.

 

The years of following these same youngsters, proved this statement of what would be their political orientation, to be correct at better than 75% of those that had stayed in the study.

 

So, just sayin………….

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017