# Beliefs that liberals and conservatives have about each other, that would be agreed on as accurate **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Created:** [October 25, 2019, 1:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/beliefs-that-liberals-and-conservatives-have-about-each-other-that-would-be-agreed-on-as-accurate/842273 "2019-10-25T13:32:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 18\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Velocity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/velocity/32/18006_2.png) [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2019, 3:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/beliefs-that-liberals-and-conservatives-have-about-each-other-that-would-be-agreed-on-as-accurate/842273/41 "2019-10-28T15:00:01Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > Overall its hard to look at the conservative stance on abortion as being about anything other than a proxy for something else (controlling women, especially disadvantaged women) But would conservatives agree that that’s what their stance is about? ---
**Author:** ![Author\_Balk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e0b2c6/32.png) [@Author\_Balk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Author_Balk)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2019, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/beliefs-that-liberals-and-conservatives-have-about-each-other-that-would-be-agreed-on-as-accurate/842273/42 "2019-10-28T15:28:55Z")
The \_\_\_\_\_\_ party are people who love their country, and want to make it better. They believe their ideas are the best way to improve the country. And they believe the other party is misinformed or maybe even stupid. They believe the other party’s ideas are inferior, trying to correct problems that don’t exist, etc. ---
**Author:** ![filmore](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/7993a0/32.png) [@filmore](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/filmore)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2019, 3:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/beliefs-that-liberals-and-conservatives-have-about-each-other-that-would-be-agreed-on-as-accurate/842273/43 "2019-10-28T15:51:13Z")
There was a podcast I heard called [“Red Brain, Blue Brain”](https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=654127241) which said: > [@](#): > > … showed liberals and conservatives positive and negative pictures, and he found they reacted very differently. > … > A positive picture would be something like a beautiful sunset or somebody enjoying themselves on a ski slope, a happy child. A negative picture would be things like a house that had just been leveled by a hurricane or a guy eating worms or children who are malnourished. We had people hooked up to some physiological devices. The most obvious one is electrodermal activity or skin conductance, which is a common way of seeing if somebody is just having a reaction - having a physiological arousal to that stimulus. And what we found is that people do have arousals when they see these kinds of images because they have some emotional content. **But we tended to find that liberals were more reactive to the positive images, and conservatives are more reactive to the negative images.** > … > Liberals’ brains, when they looked at mutilation images, were much more active in a part of the brain called the S2, somatosensory 2. And this is part of the brain that will be activated if you suffer pain. So if I kick you in the shin, your somatosensory 2 would be active. But it’s also active if you see pain in others While opinions can often be based on biases, these scans allowed techs to determine whether someone was a liberal or conservative just from looking at the brain scans. So these kinds of differences should be more accurate than something that is based on personal bias. ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2019, 4:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/beliefs-that-liberals-and-conservatives-have-about-each-other-that-would-be-agreed-on-as-accurate/842273/44 "2019-10-28T16:08:13Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > But is that how the opposite-of-a-liberal person would see themselves - would they agree that they are a slaver/plantation owner? That’s what this thread is about. Obviously not. That was just a little side quip. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2019, 7:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/beliefs-that-liberals-and-conservatives-have-about-each-other-that-would-be-agreed-on-as-accurate/842273/45 "2019-10-28T19:22:04Z")
I do agree that a lot posted so far is not really what both sides agree on, they are mostly items that the sides do not agree with. Having said that, after looking at the divide through the years, a very important item that affects other beliefs is about the sources of information a side uses. Right wing media like talk radio, FOX news and others are seen by both the left and the right as the sources that many on the right do see as accurate, or fair, essentially: their news. It can be argued how fair or accurate they are, but most people do agree that the right does see those sources as representing their views. The reverse tough shows how there is little to equate about what liberals do see as “their news” This is because one factor is always denied by many on the right, one that many liberals do see as important: that most of the mainstream media are in the end following the interests of corporations. Sure, there are some items were corporate media interests match the interests of the liberals, but as one study I read on the 80’s pointed out, mainstream media (before FOX, talk radio or conservative internet came) was a bit liberal on social issues, but it remained conservative about financial or business issues (not only in the US but also foreign issues) This is not new, as J.David Stern, the owner of the then “liberal” New York Post in the 1930’s reportedly said: “What do you want me to do, take a quixotic stand, print the truth about everything including bad medicine, impure food and crooked stock market offerings, and lose all my advertising contracts and go out of business- or make compromises with all the evil elements and continue to publish the best liberal newspaper possible under these compromising circumstances?” -Witness to a Century- By George Seldes. It looks like things have not changed much. The point here is that while the conservatives and the liberals do agree that media like FOX are the media for and by conservatives, the conservatives do have ignorant beliefs about what the liberals see as “their” media. ---
**Author:** ![Velocity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/velocity/32/18006_2.png) [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2019, 10:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/beliefs-that-liberals-and-conservatives-have-about-each-other-that-would-be-agreed-on-as-accurate/842273/46 "2019-10-28T22:12:05Z")
I’ve often heard it said that the media is beholden to corporate interests, but how so? CNN, MSNBC, NYT, etc. seemed to have absolutely no qualms about covering the 2008 banking/Wall Street fiasco, or Boeing’s incompetence in the deadly 737 MAX crashes, or Enron corruption, or British Petroleum’s oil-rig leak, or Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2019, 12:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/beliefs-that-liberals-and-conservatives-have-about-each-other-that-would-be-agreed-on-as-accurate/842273/47 "2019-10-29T00:03:56Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > I’ve often heard it said that the media is beholden to corporate interests, but how so? CNN, MSNBC, NYT, etc. seemed to have absolutely no qualms about covering the 2008 banking/Wall Street fiasco, or Boeing’s incompetence in the deadly 737 MAX crashes, or Enron corruption, or British Petroleum’s oil-rig leak, or Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Notice that a lot of that came after the disaster, very little before it took place even if mainstream media had evidence of chicanery. Now I think you confuse the news after a train wreck, **it is natural for even FOX news to cover that** , but the reality is that there was little reported about the dubious accounting by Enron for example (and this was mentioned many times before by me BTW). In a Charlie Rose interview in PBS, circa 2002. The New York Times knew that Enron’s economic models were bananas and Enron was likely not a good investment or a coming failure. The Times economic reporter being interviewed had this commentary, on why they did not report much of that conclusion: Because “Other things came up!” Charlie Rose, by not making any follow-up questions to that whitewash of an answer just completed the picture, media that depends on corporation revenue will have many inconvenient points of view not covered much if at all. The issue of Global Warming does demonstrate this, there was a huge drop of reports on the issue, inexplicable if the media did not have issues when they depend on corporate money coming from their advertisements. > **[Climate what? Media kept on chasing Trump, not climate change, in 2018](https://grist.org/article/climate-what-media-kept-on-chasing-trump-not-climate-change-in-2018/)** > > The climate has changed, but mainstream media coverage has not. > [@](#): > > To get a full picture of 2018 climate coverage, you actually need to look further back. Check out this graph showing climate change coverage over the last three years, from January 1, 2016, to December 16, 2018. > > See that huge spike in the middle? That’s from June 1, 2017, when President Donald Trump announced that he intended to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement. No other day in the last three years saw anywhere near that much coverage. When Trump stages an event related to climate change, the media snap to attention. The rest of the time it’s like, “Climate what?” In the end liberals do not control what corporate media does report about. If there is a slight rise on reports recently is because the number of extreme weather “train wrecks” that are related to the issue grow in intensity. Many other issues that hurt “the bottom line” of corporations are not reported much about, as Bernie Sanders could tell you: > **[Bernie Sanders: Corporate Media Threatens Our Democracy](https://inthesetimes.com/features/bernie-sanders-corporate-media-threatens-our-democracy.html)** > > This is a crisis we can no longer afford to ignore. > [@](#): > > When there is very little coverage of the suffering of the 43 million Americans living in poverty, or the thousands of Americans without health insurance who die each year because they can’t get to a doctor when they should, corporately owned media is telling us that these are not issues of major concern. For years, major crises like climate change, the impact of trade agreements on our economy, the role of big money in politics and youth unemployment have received scant media coverage. Trade union leaders, environmentalists, low-income activists, people prepared to challenge the corporate ideology, rarely appear on our TV screens. > > Media is not just about what is covered and how. It is about what is not covered. And those decisions, of what is and is not covered, are not made in the heavens. They are made by human beings who often have major conflicts of interest. ---
**Author:** ![BwanaBob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bwanabob/32/2985_2.png) [@BwanaBob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BwanaBob)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2019, 12:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/beliefs-that-liberals-and-conservatives-have-about-each-other-that-would-be-agreed-on-as-accurate/842273/48 "2019-10-29T12:54:11Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > I’m a liberal democrat and I don’t agree with this though. > > one of the most effective way to reduce abortions is to have universal sex education, easy access to free contraceptives, etc will reduce abortions and conservatives are opposed to these things. I hate to say it but you need to examine their mindset down to the basic tenets. I have a family filled with them and I can speak to this. They are “driven” by the concepts of punishment and reward. Do the right thing or else be punished. The concept of do the right thing for its own sake is lost on them. As for the reward side, the tenet is “you deserve nothing, you must earn every little thing”. Sex is not a given right to them, its an earned privilege. Contraception? No that’s against God. Not married? Sorry you shouldn’t have sex. Have sex anyway and get pregnant ? You have to keep the child. Give financial aid to the single mother? Tough shit - you made the poor decision, live with it. I thank my lucky stars that I saw the light and got away from this neanderthal non-thinking mindset. ---
**Author:** ![Kearsen1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Kearsen1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kearsen1)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2019, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/beliefs-that-liberals-and-conservatives-have-about-each-other-that-would-be-agreed-on-as-accurate/842273/49 "2019-10-29T18:09:04Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > I think thats probably fair, meanwhile liberals think prosperity and poverty are a mix of factors within the control of the individual as well as forces outside the control of the individual (cultural issues, racial issues, economic issues, etc). As do conservatives, its the mix that is different. ---
**Author:** ![Velocity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/velocity/32/18006_2.png) [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2019, 6:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/beliefs-that-liberals-and-conservatives-have-about-each-other-that-would-be-agreed-on-as-accurate/842273/50 "2019-10-29T18:21:27Z")
> [@Kearsen1](#): > > As do conservatives, its the mix that is different. It’s a spectrum, like many things. Virtually all conservatives and liberals would agree that, on an end of “Your status is because your circumstances” and “Your status is because of your character traits,” that most people got to where they are today because of a mix. But conservatives might weight it as “30% circumstances, 70% character/intelligence/hard work,” and liberals might go with the opposite ratio. ---
**Author:** ![Kearsen1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Kearsen1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kearsen1)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2019, 7:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/beliefs-that-liberals-and-conservatives-have-about-each-other-that-would-be-agreed-on-as-accurate/842273/51 "2019-10-29T19:10:34Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > It’s a spectrum, like many things. Virtually all conservatives and liberals would agree that, on an end of “Your status is because your circumstances” and “Your status is because of your character traits,” that most people got to where they are today because of a mix. But conservatives might weight it as “30% circumstances, 70% character/intelligence/hard work,” and liberals might go with the opposite ratio. Correct, but both sides paint their side as the correct mix … Problematic to be sure. What liberals tend to do more so than conservatives and WHY I feel like my side is more correct than the liberal side, is that when liberals see the problem as mostly environmental, they can CHANGE the environment (or THINK they can at any rate) thus absolving the person or people of their own bad choices. I don’t feel like this helps anyone, except on a temporary basis. When the conservative side sees problems and wants to make them about the choices that you make, it is time to take a good long look at yourself and there isn’t anyone else to blame for your misfortune. And even if there is, you have to step up and make the changes to better yourself. The compromise might be to offer that safety net to those who make correct and incorrect choices, mistakes happen, but at some point it cannot be a permanent solution to a temporary problem. But alas, the problems seem to stay permanent in some cases. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2019, 1:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/beliefs-that-liberals-and-conservatives-have-about-each-other-that-would-be-agreed-on-as-accurate/842273/52 "2019-10-30T13:39:25Z")
> [@filmore](#): > > There was a podcast I heard called [“Red Brain, Blue Brain”](https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=654127241) which said: > > (Liberals react more strongly to the positive pictures, conservative to the negative ones). > > While opinions can often be based on biases, these scans allowed techs to determine whether someone was a liberal or conservative just from looking at the brain scans. So these kinds of differences should be more accurate than something that is based on personal bias. There are also differences on what is considered a positive or a negative image. And sometimes, the differences depend on context. > [@It can't happen here](#): > > Karl spoke often of photographs in the _Moscow News_ of nearly naked girls on Russian bathing-beaches as proving the triumph and joy of the workers under Bolshevism, but he regarded precisely the same sort of photographs of nearly naked girls on Long Island bathing-beaches as proving the degeneration of workers under Capitalism. I’ve known quite a few people like Karl. ---
**Author:** ![BwanaBob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bwanabob/32/2985_2.png) [@BwanaBob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BwanaBob)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2019, 2:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/beliefs-that-liberals-and-conservatives-have-about-each-other-that-would-be-agreed-on-as-accurate/842273/53 "2019-10-30T14:02:19Z")
I got into a discussion with a conservative family members and drew this tidbit out. We agreed that pretty much “no one likes cheaters and moochers” and “no one likes to see people having misfortune”. But where we disagreed was which bothered one more. To a person, all my conservative relatives were more bothered by cheaters than by people having misfortune. I think that speaks volumes about our great divide. ---
**Author:** ![Kearsen1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Kearsen1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kearsen1)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2019, 2:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/beliefs-that-liberals-and-conservatives-have-about-each-other-that-would-be-agreed-on-as-accurate/842273/54 "2019-10-30T14:15:22Z")
> [@BwanaBob](#): > > I got into a discussion with a conservative family members and drew this tidbit out. > > We agreed that pretty much “no one likes cheaters and moochers” and “no one likes to see people having misfortune”. But where we disagreed was which bothered one more. > > To a person, all my conservative relatives were more bothered by cheaters than by people having misfortune. > > I think that speaks volumes about our great divide. Probably because one speaks to one’s character/individual responsibility, while the other is just plain old luck OR a direct consequence from bad choices by an individual. They should both be important, and we should be stamping out with full force the cheaters and the moochers, while supplying those with dumb luck an opportunity to get out of the trouble. Are we? Or are we excusing all said bad decision making that goes on and/or condemning the attempts to stamp out the cheaters and moochers? ---
**Author:** ![Fiddle\_Peghead](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fiddle_peghead/32/3506_2.png) [@Fiddle\_Peghead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fiddle_Peghead)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2019, 9:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/beliefs-that-liberals-and-conservatives-have-about-each-other-that-would-be-agreed-on-as-accurate/842273/55 "2019-10-30T21:05:57Z")
> [@FlikTheBlue](#): > > In theory this question would take at least two people to answer. None the less, I’ll give it my best shot and start with a few that > > I think conservatives believe that the right to own a gun does make them safer. > > I think conservatives believe that they aren’t racist, even though we would probably disagree on what counts as racist and what doesn’t. > > I think conservatives believe that homosexuality and being transgender are wrong. I was going to respond to the OP and say I don’t always find such threads useful, because although there is a general idea of what it means to be liberal vs. conservative, there are no hard and fast rules. If I believe in capital punishment but want to allow pretty much any type of gun to be legal, which category am I in? This is of course just for two issues, but I hope the idea is clear. So, to have a meaningful discussion, it seems to me we have to clearly define each. This is never done, and I’m not sure it can be. So by its very nature, the thread is less precise than it could be. I suppose people may reply and say, “we all know very good and well what a liberal is and what a conservative is”. But this kind of thing easily lends itself to general, unsupportable statements by one group about the other, with no way to refute them, because in the end we don’t even know _precisely_ who is being talked about. I’ve just done a _ **cursory glance** _ through the thread, and I see general statements all over the place. Anyway, I respond here to you instead, because your post raises something similar. Is someone a conservative because he thinks guns make him safer, or does he come to that conclusion and then join the Republican party? A similar question could be raised about your other statements. This is not to say interesting discussions cannot be had, and I look forward to reading the rest of the thread. ---
**Author:** ![BwanaBob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bwanabob/32/2985_2.png) [@BwanaBob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BwanaBob)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2019, 5:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/beliefs-that-liberals-and-conservatives-have-about-each-other-that-would-be-agreed-on-as-accurate/842273/56 "2019-10-31T17:42:37Z")
> [@Kearsen1](#): > > Probably because one speaks to one’s character/individual responsibility, while the other is just plain old luck OR a direct consequence from bad choices by an individual. > They should both be important, and we should be stamping out with full force the cheaters and the moochers, while supplying those with dumb luck an opportunity to get out of the trouble. > > Are we? Or are we excusing all said bad decision making that goes on and/or condemning the attempts to stamp out the cheaters and moochers? I agree they’re both important but which is “more” important? Because each party has pretty much chosen one over the other as the more important ill to solve. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2019, 5:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/beliefs-that-liberals-and-conservatives-have-about-each-other-that-would-be-agreed-on-as-accurate/842273/57 "2019-10-31T17:59:52Z")
> [@Fiddle\_Peghead](#): > > If I believe in capital punishment but want to allow pretty much any type of gun to be legal, which category am I in? …conservative? I mean, you just listed two pretty standard conservative political beliefs, so I’m not sure what dilemma you’re trying to illustrate here. ---
**Author:** ![Bookkeeper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bookkeeper/32/281_2.png) [@Bookkeeper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bookkeeper)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2019, 4:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/beliefs-that-liberals-and-conservatives-have-about-each-other-that-would-be-agreed-on-as-accurate/842273/58 "2019-11-01T16:47:47Z")
> [@sps49sd](#): > > Canadian voter ID doesn’t deny voting to eligible voters? Why do USA voter ID laws deny voting to eligible voters? There are a number of differences between US and Canadian voting. Unlike in the US, Canadian citizens have a constitutional right to vote (Section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms), with only children under 18 and the head and deputy head of the agency in charge of elections excluded. Every other citizen, including prison inmates, has the right to vote. Canada also has a very specifically non-political agency in charge of administering federal elections (with similar provincial-level agencies), which defines our ID requirements very broadly to avoid preventing any eligible voter from voting. For example, my father is in a nursing home, and has no ID documents, but can vote because the staff is allowed to vouch for him to the poll clerks who come in at election time. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/beliefs-that-liberals-and-conservatives-have-about-each-other-that-would-be-agreed-on-as-accurate/842273.md?page=2)