Why does anyone vote conservative

As you can infer from that set-up, Haidt considers this to be not only self-serving but self-blinding cant. Haidt offers another way to try to solve the mystery:. In most countries, the right tends to see that more clearly than the left. In America the Republicans did the hard work of drafting their moral vision in the s, and Ronald Reagan was their eloquent spokesman.

Patriotism, social order, strong families, personal responsibility not government safety nets and free enterprise. Those are values, not government programs. One reason the left has such difficulty forging a lasting connection with voters is that the right has a built-in advantage — conservatives have a broader moral palate than the liberals.

Think about it this way: our tongues have taste buds that are responsive to five classes of chemicals, which we perceive as sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savoury.

Sweetness is generally the most appealing of the five tastes, but when it comes to a serious meal, most people want more than that. In the same way, you can think of the moral mind as being like a tongue that is sensitive to a variety of moral flavors.

In my research with colleagues at YourMorals. For example, how much would someone have to pay you to kick a dog in the head? Nobody wants to do this, but liberals say they would require more money than conservatives to cause harm to an innocent creature.

But are voters really voting against their self-interest when they vote for candidates who share their values? One of the clearest differences is that most of those on the left prefer to get news online, and most of those on the right prefer to get it offline.

Even before polling day arrived some believed that the Conservatives had won the social media election. What actually counts as winning is not particularly clear, especially when we know that left-leaning people are roughly twice as likely to say that their main source of news is social media a subset of the online category in Figure 1.

Despite the recent growth of internet access among the older age groups, younger people are still more likely to use all of the most popular online social networks—and younger people tend to be left-leaning Labour voters. These differences ultimately filter down to how people interact with news on social media.

Those on the left are more likely to share news and more likely to upload news related pictures or videos, for example. The interplay between age, media habits and political attitudes results in a situation where those on the left are more likely to access news and information online, are more likely to use social media, and are more likely to interact with news online, than those on the right.

This means that what journalists and commentators saw people say online and on social media in the run up to the election was probably not a particularly useful guide to the mood of the country as a whole. There is no rational or health-related way to explain these laws. Why are grasshoppers kosher but most locusts are not? The emotion of disgust seemed to me like a more promising explanatory principle. The book of Leviticus makes a lot more sense when you think of ancient lawgivers first sorting everything into two categories: "disgusts me" gay male sex, menstruation, pigs, swarming insects and "disgusts me less" gay female sex, urination, cows, grasshoppers.

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 young adults and 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. Only one group—college students at Penn—consistently exemplified Turiel's definition of morality and overrode their own feelings of disgust to say that harmless acts were not wrong.

A few even praised the efficiency of recycling the flag and the dog. This research led me to two conclusions. First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare. In fact, many people struggled to fabricate harmful consequences that could justify their gut-based condemnation. I often had to correct people when they said things like "it's wrong because… um…eating dog meat would make you sick" or "it's wrong to use the flag because… um… the rags might clog the toilet.

If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion. The second conclusion was that the moral domain varies across cultures.

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. Drawing on Shweder's ideas, I would say that the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other as most liberals think ; it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way.

Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label "elitist. After graduate school I moved to the University of Chicago to work with Shweder, and while there I got a fellowship to do research in India.

In September I traveled to Bhubaneswar, an ancient temple town miles southwest of Calcutta. I brought with me two incompatible identities. On the one hand, I was a 29 year old liberal atheist who had spent his politically conscious life despising Republican presidents, and I was charged up by the culture wars that intensified in the s.

On the other hand, I wanted to be like those tolerant anthropologists I had read so much about. My first few weeks in Bhubaneswar were therefore filled with feelings of shock and confusion.

I dined with men whose wives silently served us and then retreated to the kitchen. My hosts gave me a servant of my own and told me to stop thanking him when he served me. I watched people bathe in and cook with visibly polluted water that was held to be sacred.

In short, I was immersed in a sex-segregated, hierarchically stratified, devoutly religious society, and I was committed to understanding it on its own terms, not on mine. It only took a few weeks for my shock to disappear, not because I was a natural anthropologist but because the normal human capacity for empathy kicked in. I liked these people who were hosting me, helping me, and teaching me.

And once I liked them remember that first principle of moral psychology it was easy to take their perspective and to consider with an open mind the virtues they thought they were enacting. Rather than automatically rejecting the men as sexist oppressors and pitying the women, children, and servants as helpless victims, I was able to see a moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society, and the members of each extended family including its servants are intensely interdependent.

In this world, equality and personal autonomy were not sacred values. Honoring elders, gods, and guests, and fulfilling one's role-based duties, were more important. Looking at America from this vantage point, what I saw now seemed overly individualistic and self-focused. Back in the United States the culture war was going strong, but I had lost my righteous passion. I could never have empathized with the Christian Right directly, but once I had stood outside of my home morality, once I had tried on the moral lenses of my Indian friends and interview subjects, I was able to think about conservative ideas with a newfound clinical detachment.

They want more prayer and spanking in schools, and less sex education and access to abortion? I didn't think those steps would reduce AIDS and teen pregnancy, but I could see why the religious right wanted to "thicken up" the moral climate of schools and discourage the view that children should be as free as possible to act on their desires. Conservatives think that welfare programs and feminism increase rates of single motherhood and weaken the traditional social structures that compel men to support their own children?

Hmm, that may be true, even if there are also many good effects of liberating women from dependence on men. I had escaped from my prior partisan mindset reject first, ask rhetorical questions later , and began to think about liberal and conservative policies as manifestations of deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of the good society.

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.

But isn't it unfair to impose on all cultures a definition of morality drawn from the European Enlightenment tradition? Might we do better with an approach that defines moral systems by what they do rather than by what they value? Here's my alternative definition: morality is any system of interlocking values, practices, institutions, and psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.

It turns out that human societies have found several radically different approaches to suppressing selfishness, two of which are most relevant for understanding what Democrats don't understand about morality. First, imagine society as a social contract invented for our mutual benefit. All individuals are equal, and all should be left as free as possible to move, develop talents, and form relationships as they please. The patron saint of a contractual society is John Stuart Mill, who wrote in On Liberty that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

Psychologists have done extensive research on the moral mechanisms that are presupposed in a Millian society, and there are two that appear to be partly innate. First, people in all cultures are emotionally responsive to suffering and harm, particularly violent harm, and so nearly all cultures have norms or laws to protect individuals and to encourage care for the most vulnerable. Second, people in all cultures are emotionally responsive to issues of fairness and reciprocity, which often expand into notions of rights and justice.

Philosophical efforts to justify liberal democracies and egalitarian social contracts invariably rely heavily on intuitions about fairness and reciprocity. But now imagine society not as an agreement among individuals but as something that emerged organically over time as people found ways of living together, binding themselves to each other, suppressing each other's selfishness, and punishing the deviants and free-riders who eternally threaten to undermine cooperative groups.

The basic social unit is not the individual, it is the hierarchically structured family, which serves as a model for other institutions. Individuals in such societies are born into strong and constraining relationships that profoundly limit their autonomy. The patron saint of this more binding moral system is the sociologist Emile Durkheim, who warned of the dangers of anomie normlessness , and wrote, in , that "Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs.

To free himself from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralize him. A Durkheimian society would value self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one's groups over concerns for outgroups. These three systems support moralities that bind people into intensely interdependent groups that work together to reach common goals.

Such moralities make it easier for individuals to forget themselves and coalesce temporarily into hives, a process that is thrilling, as anyone who has ever "lost" him or herself in a choir, protest march, or religious ritual can attest. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. You can test yourself at www. 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. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment. In The Political Brain , Drew Westen points out that the Republicans have become the party of the sacred, appropriating not just the issues of God, faith, and religion, but also the sacred symbols of the nation such as the Flag and the military.

The Democrats, in the process, have become the party of the profane—of secular life and material interests. Most Democrats don't understand that politics is more like religion than it is like shopping. Religion and political leadership are so intertwined across eras and cultures because they are about the same thing: performing the miracle of converting unrelated individuals into a group. 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.

The three Durkheimian foundations ingroup, authority, and purity play a crucial role in most religions. When they are banished entirely from political life, what remains is a nation of individuals striving to maximize utility while respecting the rules. What remains is a cold but fair social contract, which can easily degenerate into a nation of shoppers. The Democrats must find a way to close the sacredness gap that goes beyond occasional and strategic uses of the words "God" and "faith.

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. Our national motto is e pluribus unum "from many, one".

Whenever Democrats support policies that weaken the integrity and identity of the collective such as multiculturalism, bilingualism, and immigration , they show that they care more about pluribus than unum. They widen the sacredness gap. A useful heuristic would be to think about each issue, and about the Party itself, from the perspective of the three Durkheimian foundations. Might the Democrats expand their moral range without betraying their principles?

Might they even find ways to improve their policies by incorporating and publicly praising some conservative insights? A recent study by Robert Putnam titled E Pluribus Unum found that ethnic diversity increases anomie and social isolation by decreasing people's sense of belonging to a shared community.

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.

Sanctity does not have to come from God; the psychology of this system is about overcoming our lower, grasping, carnal selves in order to live in a way that is higher, nobler, and more spiritual. Many liberals criticize the crassness and ugliness that our unrestrained free-market society has created.

There is a long tradition of liberal anti-materialism often linked to a reverence for nature. But even as liberal bumper stickers urge us to "question authority" and assert that "dissent is patriotic," Democrats can ask what needs this foundation serves, and then look for other ways to meet them.

The authority foundation is all about maintaining social order, so any candidate seen to be "soft on crime" has disqualified himself, for many Americans, from being entrusted with the ultimate authority.

Democrats would do well to read Durkheim and think about the quasi-religious importance of the criminal justice system. The miracle of turning individuals into groups can only be performed by groups that impose costs on cheaters and slackers.

If Democrats want to understand what makes people vote Republican, they must first understand the full spectrum of American moral concerns. They should then consider whether they can use more of that spectrum themselves. 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.

This often divisive struggle among the parts must be balanced by a clear and oft-repeated commitment to guarding the precious coherence of the whole.

America lacks the long history, small size, ethnic homogeneity, and soccer mania that holds many other nations together, so our flag, our founding fathers, our military, and our common language take on a moral importance that many liberals find hard to fathom. Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation.

The three Durkheimian foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. 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. Two cheers for Jonathan Haidt's essay. At long last a liberal academic social scientist has recognized and had the courage to put into print the inherent bias built into the study of political behavior—that because Democrats are so indisputably right and Republicans so unquestionably wrong, conservatism must be a mental disease, a flaw in the brain, a personality disorder that leads to cognitive malfunctioning.

Thus, Haidt is mostly right when he asks us to move beyond such "diagnoses" and remember "the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other as most liberals think ; it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way.

When Republicans say that Democrats 'just don't get it,' this is the 'it' to which they refer. I allocate two instead of three cheers for Haidt's commentary because I think he does not go far enough. The liberal bias in academia is so entrenched that it becomes the political water through which the liberal fish swim—they don't even notice it. Even the question "What makes people vote Republican? It is not the data of these scientists that I am challenging so much as it is the characterizations on which the data were collected.

As all conservatives know, liberals are a bunch of sandle-wearing, tree-hugging, whale-saving, hybrid-driving, trash-recycling, peaceniks, flip-floppers and bed-wetters.

This is a crass, unfair, and inaccurate characterization, of course, and that's my point. Once you set up the adjectives in the form of operationally defined personality traits and cognitive styles, it's easy to collect the data to support them. The flaw is in the characterization process itself. The tropes are familiar: liberals are generous to a fault "bleeding hearts" , rational, intelligent, optimistic, and appeal to voters' reason through cogent arguments; conservatives are stingy "heartless" , dour, and dim-witted authoritarians who appeal to voters' emotions through threat and fear-mongering.

But conservatives win most elections because of their Machiavellian manipulation of voters' emotional brains. None of this is true.

Although Republicans defeated Democrats 25 to 20 in the 45 Presidential elections from to , in the Senate Democrats outscored Republicans to in contesting seats from to , and in the House Democrats trounced Republicans 15, to 12, in the 27, seats contested from Further, according to the National Opinion Research Center's General Social Surveys, , 44 percent of people who reported being "conservative" or "very conservative" said they were "very happy" versus only 25 percent of people who reported being "liberal" or "very liberal.

And it isn't because conservatives have more expendable income. The working poor give a substantially higher percentage of their incomes to charity than any other income group, and three times more than those on public assistance of comparable income—poverty is not a barrier to charity, but welfare is. One explanation for these findings is that conservatives believe charity should be private through religion whereas liberals believe charity should be public through government.

Why are academic social scientists so wrong about conservatives? It is, I believe, because almost all of them are liberals! A study by the George Mason University economist Daniel Klein, using voter registrations, found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans among the faculty by a staggering ratio of 10 to 1 at the University of California, Berkeley and by 7.

In the humanities and social sciences the ratio was 16 to 1 at both campuses 30 to 1 among assistant and associate professors. In some departments, such as anthropology and journalism, there wasn't a single Republican to be found. The ratio for all departments in all colleges and universities throughout the U. Smith College political scientist Stanley Rothman and his colleagues found a similar bias in a national study: only 15 percent professors describe themselves as conservative, compared to 72 percent who said they were liberal 80 percent in humanities and social sciences.

Why do people vote Republican? Because they believe their lives—and the lives of all Americans—will be better for it. And as often as not they are right. Jonathan Haidt' s analysis seems on the mark as far as it goes but, in my view, it misses half of the puzzle of why much of the American electorate votes as it does.

To be sure, the appeal of right wing ideas is clearly due in part to a Durkheimian privileging of the group over the individual; Rick Shweder is to be commended for introducing this perspective into contemporary, overly Enlightenment-oriented analyses of moral judgment. But at least with reference to contemporary American society, I would posit an equally important part of the puzzle: a combination due to Oscar Wilde and Leon Festinger.

Wilde famously quipped that "Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Consider these facts. The right wing says it cares about groups, rather than individuals; and yet it favors the most rampant form of 'dog-eat-dog' capitalism. The left wing is suspicious of markets and wants to even the playing field across citizens. The right wing claims that its positions will reduce crime and strengthen the families.

Yet it is the most left wing states that have the lowest crime rate and the strongest, most stable marriages. Happiness ratings are highest in the socialist societies, while lowest in right wing authoritarian societies. This list could be extended. Why, then, do right wing partisans ignore this evidence and continue to support policies that are patently dysfunctional? I believe it is because, having stated a position, based on either their own family values or those dictated by their religion, they are loathe to change their minds and declare that they have been wrong.

And so, following Festinger, the disconfirming evidence causes them or at least many of them to dig in their heels more deeply. Another element operates as well. Right wing positions are more frequently associated with Protestant evangelicals and with traditional Reagan Catholics.

Often the leaders of these groups e. But both of these groups embrace forgiveness, absolution, being born again. Other groups—atheists, non-fundamentalist Jews and non-fundamentalist Protestants—do not have the option of absolution; they make firmer demands on themselves and are oppressed by their superegos.

Note the 'pass' that non-combatants Bush and Cheney received, in comparison to Gore and Kerry who volunteered to serve during the Vietnam War. Note the forgiving attitude toward to Sarah Palin, with her sinning family, which would never be afforded a comparable Democrat. Given that the analyses of Durkheim and Festinger are powerful, and unlikely to disappear, my analysis does not give much solace to those of us who would prefer to see more individuals with progressive Enlightenment views secure office.

Still, a greater effort to nail hypocrisy—a so-called hypocrisy watch—might improve the quality of the campaign, if not of the candidates. I once heard John Wayne say in an interview, "They tell me that things aren't always black and white. I say, 'Why the hell not? Having spent in another life it seems more than twenty-five years as an ordained minister and missionary, I know first-hand that one of the most important messages of many organized religions is that morality is absolute and that there is always a black and white to an issue if you think about it hard enough—grayness is for fuzzy-brained liberals.

Or so I was told. At the other end of the spectrum, Noam Chomsky has often said that the choice between Democrat vs. Republican is about the same as the choice between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola, not much to get hot and bothered about.

I think that Wayne's view is much closer to being right than Chomsky's. Chomsky's perspective seems to be based on a view of politicians rather than of their parties' political platforms—what we know that political figures are likely to do very little in all too many cases vs. Wayne's question, "Why the hell not" is an anti-cynical, pragmatic question that is intended to challenge us to think harder and act more nobly.

So I think that Haidt's view that people share a strong desire for unity and belonging guided by moral rectitude and dealing with violators of the social bonds is surely correct. But he oversimplifies by failing to consider simpler societies, such as Amazonian peoples, in which there are no social hierarchies, no civic leadership, and only ostracism as the enforcement of constraints to promote well-being and societal harmony.

His research, if he is to use lofty adjectives largely meaningless in my experience such as 'innate' to describe social structures and desires, must encompass a wider range of societies. Democrats used to be the ones with the monopoly on belonging. His picture was everywhere in my families' homes. Because he constructed social ties, based on belonging to the group of the oppressed and depressed, and he offered solutions that respected the concepts of fairness and unity simultaneously.

He no doubt was elected four times at least in part because he was perceived by people like my grandmother as satisfying both the Millian and Durkheimian views at the same time—something that we have arguably seen in no other politician or political party since. Ultimately, reflection like Haidt's is useful and there certainly is a lot worthwhile in it. But, once again, I am skeptical that much, if any, of this is innate.

And I doubt that we will ever know whether it is or not without a greater empirical coverage, taking into its scope diverse tribal societies. The Haidt article is interesting, as are the responses to it, but these pieces are written by intellectuals who live in an environment where reasoned argument is prized.

I live in Florida. When I travel, I live the life of an intellectual. In Florida, I hang out with jocks and retirees. I try not to talk politics with them. When, it happens that I have no choice but to hear what they think about politics I take note of it. Here is what I have heard:. Obama is a Muslim. His pastor hates America. In fact nearly everyone outside of America hates America.

If you travel outside of America, go on a cruise, so you won't have to eat whatever it is one eats in those places. And, anyway they all hate us for our freedoms. Obama will put Al Sharpton in the cabinet. Dick Cheney was the greatest Vice President in history. The Jews are running the country anyway. It is common to make the assumption that people are thinking when they vote and they are making reasoned choices.

I harbor no such illusion. No argument I have ever gotten into with these people, despite avoiding talking to them, I sometimes can't resist saying something true has ever convinced anyone of anything.

They are not reasoning, nor do they want to try. They simply believe what they believe. What do they believe? They don't like blacks. Forget the rest. It isn't that they are racists. They will be polite if a black person ever appears. This doesn't happen much, although I am sure they must live here too. They just don't like them. They have no reason. If you ask them today, as a result of recent remarks by Michelle Obama and their pastor, they will say that blacks hate America.

This is not the reason, but they sound more reasoned in their own minds if they say it that way. They don't like wussies. The Democrats are always nominating wussies,—men who are not men. Obama looks like his wife runs the show at home. Not real men.

Bad people are trying to kill us. We need to kill them first. Those guys wouldn't pull the trigger. I am not making this up. I wish I were. They worry about money. Who wants to take their money away? Liberals of course. They want to give it to the blacks. Where I live is not redneck country. There is a lot of church going but no talk about abortion or of being born again.

There is a just a distaste and distrust for people not like us which I am sure includes me. It is all very nice to come up with complex analyses of what is going on. As is often the case, the real answer is quite simple. Most people can't think very well. They were taught not to think by religion and by a school system that teaches that knowledge of state capitals and quadratic equations is what education is all about and that well reasoned argument and original ideas will not help on a multiple choice test.

We don't try to get the average child to think in this society so why, as adults would we expect that they actually would be thinking? They think about how the Yankees are doing, and who will win some reality show contest, and what restaurant to eat it, but they are not equipped to think about politics and, in my mind, they are not equipped to vote.

The fact that we let them vote while failing to encourage them to think for themselves is a real problem for our society. The scientific question here is how belief systems are acquired and changed. I worked on this problem with both Ken Colby and Bob Abelson for many years.