Most people don’t become liberal. Stereotypically, young people are more liberal and they become more conservative as they age. Perhaps it’s less tempting to try to change the world when you have more invested in the current one.
US politics, of course, is somewhat ‘special’, so this may not apply.
Hmm, although there certainly are many liberals who can be dogmatically anti-factual, I don’t think this phenomenon “facts just happen to be on the side of liberals” is as much of a coincidence as you make out.
In general, in a modern society with active scientific research cultures and rapid technological development, our understanding of the world around us is going to be changing and adapting more swiftly than was the case in most pre-modern societies. The “liberal” mindset that identifies with concepts like progress, openness, change, improvement, and so forth will be more sympathetic to this rapid evolution of facts than the “conservative” mindset identifying with stability, caution, tradition, sustainability and so forth.
It’s not so much that “facts have a liberal bias” as that liberals on average tend to be more disposed to adapting to what the facts are, and less bothered about facts contradicting authority and tradition.
Apparently not as true as the stereotype assumes:
This may be an instance of the “American exceptionalism” that you noted, but the researchers seem to think otherwise.
I think of it more as, “human organizations naturally have a (small c) conservative bias”. Anyone with above average power or control over an organization benefits from the conditions under which they arrived at that power and control not changing, lest they be displaced by someone else who is better suited to gaining power or control under the new conditions.
I don’t know that GMO distrust is a uniquely liberal position; I’ve met lots of conservatives who distrust GMOs because they think it’s playing God or some BS like that. But the liberals who do mistrust GMOs don’t have trust in science in general - they’re also the ones who buy into BS like “healing crystals” or “alternative medicine” (there’s the old joke - what do you call alternative medicine that’s proven to work? Medicine!).
On the other hand, this is a fair point. I know the kinds of people you are talking about; you are right, they don’t arrive at their liberal ideology by thinking things through. They may even say that they trust science because that’s the liberal thing to do. In practice, though, they certainly don’t trust science when it says that western medicine is backed by research while their magnets and crystals and homeopathic remedies are full of shit. They gush about ghosts and UFOs and reincarnation. Science may tell them that mushrooms are not addictive and not likely to cause permanent harm, but it certainly doesn’t tell them that the spiritual experiences they rave about mean anything.
These are the people I had in mind in another thread when I said that believing the right thing for the wrong reason can be just as bad as believing the wrong thing. But you are right, they fall under the “liberal” umbrella too. They didn’t get there through reason, and it is important that if we want facts to continue to have a liberal bias that we do not let them hijack our movements.
I think you raise a good point that I hadn’t realized, in that the straight laced bookworm archetype is now more likely to be liberal than conservative. Although I would say that the emergence of characters like Rambo and Mad Max as more a a symptom than a cause. I think it really has to do with the fact that cultural attitudes have been changing and leaving conservatives in the dust. So that while previously they could comfortably exist right smack dab in the middle of the status quo, they now find that their attitudes are no longer mainstream. So they become fighters against the system instead of preservers of the system.
Which is another way of saying liberal attitudes have become mainstream and been adopted by the establishment. Although really it’s more complicated than that.
Clarifying: Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that fictional characterizations in Rambo and Mad Max and their ilk actually caused the shift in conservative mindset from “establishment traditionalist” to “badass rebel”. I was just thinking of those figures as “avatars” of the transition, as it were. The causes themselves, as you note, were much more diverse and deep-rooted.
The crystal woo types aren’t the only ones who arrive at their ideology without thinking it through. I’d say it’s true of the majority of people I’ve encountered, of every political stripe. They base their beliefs on what people around them think and where their own sympathies naturally lie. It’s hard to change your mind even in the face of strong evidence, as you attest.
Sure, but there’s a definite correlation between higher education and how closely aligned your beliefs are with reality.
And I’ve met conservatives that think that global warming is the single most important issue facing mankind. I think we are talking in generalities. This is not me saying “both sides do it” this is me saying that this is part of the human condition.
There is a category of liberals that would be conservative with equal vigor if they had been raised in a different environment. They are liberals for the same reason so many
italians are catholics. Same with conservatives.
Since I was the one who brought it up, there was no intent to say that anti-GMOs are solely liberal. It was simply an example of where liberals can also exhibit anti-intellectualism. As
damuriajashi said, there is a lot of diversity within groups. There are not monololithic in thought and belief.
I wonder if there are any studies on that?
Thanks for this. Every time I see that “observation,” I cringe a little. With almost 60 years of data gathering to support its findings, Pew has clearly debunked the theory that individuals generally grow more conservative as they age. What has fed this misconception is that older voters are relatively more conservative than younger ones but those same older voters are also relatively more liberal than two generations before them.
My grandparents were born before 1900; to a millennial voter they might as well have been from a different planet in their political and cultural views.
Speaking only for myself, I have 100% become more liberal as I’ve aged. I think this is in part, I’ve moved a bit to the left, and also the right has moved away from me (giving an apparent shift to the left).
How is it then, that at my university supporters of the Conservative party were about as numerous as supporters of the Socialist Worker’s party? I guarantee that is not the case among those same people today.
I’m not really interested in addressing an anecdote.
How on earth would that be evidence that individual voters become more conservative as they age?
Same. Over 30 years I’ve got from “conventional big-city college liberal” to “raging Marxist.”
How else do you explain why those university radicals become non-radical young professionals?