Liberal “Elites” are well educated, scientists, business leaders, artists.
Conservative “Elites” are Preachers, Singers and Talking Heads*.
- Not David Byrne.
I can’t speak for conservatives, not being one, but my understanding of what they mean when they say ‘liberal elites’ is usually entertainers and naive people pushing for policies that’ll make problems worse or that they feel are hypocritical.
Liberal Entertainers calling for renewable energy while living in mansions powered by coal and flying jets everywhere. Liberal academics that have nice theories that don’t work in reality. Liberal economists pushing for a just economic system that’ll make the business climate so hostile that it’ll cause businesses to go under. Stuff like that.
I have to say I’m shocked, considering the top-quality local news reporting and the famously burgeoning North Dakotan entertainment industry, that there would be any demand for content from foreign sources.
You are mostly correct. Chimera isn’t.
I got curious and perused the reviews of this book to learn a little more about it. It seems to be little if any reasearch… mostly opinion and unrelated citations stitched together with dubious reasoning.
Take this gem here:
This is… highly questionable. I agree it’s clear that conservatives love to describe themselves this way. But when you look at how they vote and how they govern… well… they conveniently tighten the definition of these noble institutions to fit only their own. A polity that elects Donald Trump, a party who fails to rein him in, validates morally dubious Roy Moore, absolutely loathes Muslims. Can you say with a straight face this is a movement that reveres laws, institutions, traditions, religions?
In hindsight, I hope he’s not putting that on his resume.
It’s been verified with brain scans that conservatives notice and respond more strongly to threats. They see and respond to threats more than liberals.
That’s why they admire the police and military so much (they defend against threats), why they obsess over guns (to feel safe) why they react so strongly to having a porous border or fear Muslims more than liberals do, etc. Conservatives see threats liberals do not. So to liberals, conservatives seem aggressive, militant and paranoid. To conservatives, liberalism means letting criminals and terrorists walk all over us while liberal policies collapse the economy
Having said that, I think you are missing the appeal of Moore and Trump. They are both deeply criminal deranged men and both are remorseless sex criminals.
But both represent a bulwark of patriarchal Christian white nationalism in the face of an America rapidly becoming more and more multicultural, egalitarian and secular. The fact that they are deeply flawed people isn’t important per se.
When Trump goes on Twitter and gets into a rage about black people in the NFL protesting police brutality he is defending Christian white nationalism. When he threatened to deport all Latino immigrants or ban Muslim immigrants he was defending Christian white nationalism. Roy Moore refusing to remove the ten commandments or blocking gay marriage was upholding Christian white nationalism.
Conservatives do revere institutions, traditions and religions. But only theirs. And they defend them by electing aggressive people to defend them like Trump and Moore in the face of what they consider threats to those values. Patriarchal Christian white nationalism is under threat and they want aggressive defenders of it.
I would like to see the research and challenge it with the question “a threat to what?”
When considering the current political behavior of conservatives, the category of “threat” seems highly selective as well as contingent on one’s tribal membership.
To me this is just a variant of the flawed “values survey” that describes conservatives as high on loyalty, laws, religion, etc. Conservatives will rabidly attack these structures if it is too different from their own, or the people it benefits are too different from them.
I do suppose that what you are learning from us is not something that is visible in your posting.
Do you actually have any liberals IRL that you hang out with? They are probably better at humanizing those positions than some random guy spouting words on a screen. I live in conservative country, so I get plenty of exposure to conservative mindset. If I want to talk to people far more to the right than you are, I can go talk to my parents. If I want to talk to someone so far off the libertarian path that they have gone full sovereign citizen, I can talk to my brother. If I want to talk to a pro-lifer for any and all reasons, including rape, including medical concerns, I can talk to one of my sisters.
Do you have anyone in your life like that on the liberal front?
This is a thread about the differences in conservative and liberal mindset, so anything goes along those lines. I am curious as to why pro-lifers would lose their shit there?
Sure, if you redefine an embryo or a fetus as a person, with all the rights that a person has, then you would think that a statement like ““How can we ensure that everyone has a chance for a meaningful and productive life?”” would include the unborn among the “everyone”, but that would be ridiculous, because you have to exist in order to be included in “everyone”. Do you think that that would also include unfertilized eggs and sperm?
I don’t consider a clump of cells to be a person, with all the rights that a person has, so they would not be included under “everyone”. Now, once we have learned to take care of the people who are born, and currently exist, maybe then we can look into rights for those who don’t yet, once human suffering is minimized, something that conservatives seem to be fairly callous in addressing.
At the same time, I am not a big fan of abortion, and would be more than happy to implement policies that would reduce, but not restrict, its use. The main policies would be sex education and access to birth control, which are things that are opposed by the pro-life side. This is actually one of the harder things for me to get my head around about conservative ideology. To oppose the things that would reduce abortion significantly, and to not care about a person after they have been born doesn’t make any sense to me from the aspect of people saying that they are motivated by the welfare of the unborn.
Anyway, I stand by the statement that “How can we ensure that everyone has a chance for a meaningful and productive life?” is as good an aspirational statement that motivates liberals as any. That you can twist any statement into a different meaning by redefining the words in it is not an impressive trick, and it is one that does tend to widen the gap between liberal and conservative. If you have questions about how a statement would work with redefined terms, it is better to ask if the statement is still valid, after you have redefined terms, than to assume that redefining terms invalidates the entire ideology.
What mission statement would you say motivates conservatives? I do stand by my perspective of it being “Got mine, how do I ensure that it is not taken?”, but I welcome your perspective.
I’ve heard this claim before but find it doubtful. Liberals will circle the wagons very, *very *quickly when/if someone tries to overturn gay marriage or eliminate womens’ access to abortions or pass voter-ID laws, etc. Perhaps their threat instinct isn’t exactly as strong as conservatives’, but it’s got to be pretty close.
But both sides of the gun issue are motivated by a threat perception. Gun-control advocates almost always argue that we need to restrict or ban gun ownership on the basis of the numerous deaths (accidental or intentional) that arise from 300 million guns floating around in the United States.
Wow, this could have been a blurb on the inside of the coat jacket of the book I just read: Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. AR Hochschild, an eminent sociologist straight out of Berkeley traveled to Louisiana oil country to understand the “deep story” of the American Right and why they hold the values they do. The deep story that she uncovered, that many she interviewed agreed on is summed up thusly:
Quite an eye-opener, this book. And it explains exactly why they voted for Trump.
What I’ve read is that their reactions of fear and disgust are stronger. I think this may be another way of viewing the in-group/authority/sanctity bases of their morality.
In any event, the proper stance for liberals is to acknowledge that conservative moral views have merit, that they complement the liberal emphasis on care and fairness. The more that liberals ridicule conservatives for their stances on morality, the more conservatives will turn away in disgust and embrace demagogues like Trump.
Really interesting post, Slee.
I’m liberal, particularly in the social realm, but I don’t struggle to understand conservatives because I grew up among them. I was raised by them. To a certain extent, that culture is my culture, though I never belonged in it. The liberal elite culture is equally perplexing to me. For all our shared values there is so much they take for granted and so many unfounded assumptions.
If I had to guess, absent any research of my own, why conservatives are less concerned with understanding liberals, I’d guess that it hails back to that Reaganesque standard of always appearing to be unified despite differences. While liberals argue quite, um, liberally, among themselves, I don’t get the impression that conservatives value dissent as highly. See, for example, the way McCain has been branded a traitor for refusing to pass the health bill. That would be consistent with the studies showing conservatives value community cohesion over fairness etc.
Though I will admit I still have no idea how Trump happened. And the value of dissent in liberal circles seems to be plunging precipitously.
Either side can react just fine to having a gun to their head.
It’s just that the liberals do not make the assumption that there will be a gun to their head until someone starts pulling out guns.
But liberals are concerned about people getting killed by having completely unfettered access to guns, a fairly realistic concern, as it is something that happens every day, and conservatives are concerned about the government breaking down their doors and confiscating their guns, which is, IMHO an unrealistic concern.
It seems that liberals react to actual dangers and concerns that are harming people, and conservatives react to imagined or supposed dangers that will probably not ever come to pass.
Based on brain scans, you can tell who is liberal vs conservative about 72% accuracy. Conservatives have bigger right Amygdalas which respond to threats.
Liberals score higher on fairness, care, egalitarianism, etc so yes when policy that harms the weak is passed (anti gay legislation, anti woman legislation, voter suppression targeting minorities) liberals get upset.
Can someone explain how my statement that Trump is a ‘seriously deranged, authoritarian con man who works for our enemies’ is a false statement?
I didn’t say that about mitt Romney.
There are four aspects of that insult.
Seriously deranged
Authoritarian
Con man
Works for our enemies (putin)
If anyone would like to debate me on these four issues to explain why I’m wrong for saying it, I am willing to have that debate.
Trump is also fat, but people can call him fat without it being untrue.
I feel like you guys think we should deny unpleasant reality in the name of bipartisanship. It’d be like if someone said ‘Trump is fat’ but you guys said ‘that’s insulting, in the interest of civility and bipartisanship let’s meet in the middle ground and pretend Trump is skinny’.
I’m not going to deny reality to be bipartisan.
I bet I’d test as a conservative. I definitely have some amygdala dysfunction that hypperreacts to threats. Exaggerated startle response, hypervigilance, etc. But a lot of things conservatives perceive as a threat, like terrorism, I really don’t.
I don’t think it’s a false statement. I’m not sure why you quoted my post? Is there something you find objectionable in it?
Conservatives are not less concerned with understanding liberals. We already understand them better than they understand us, for the reasons mentioned. The question is why are liberals less concerned or less able to understand conservatives.
Regards,
Shodan
Having been on this board for a bit, I find this to be a very interesting and pertinent question. Core values and whatnot have something to do with it. On the other hand it is my belief that conservatives tend to be very hard headed about certain things. I think that both sides are working off of different premises - conservatives tend to come from backgrounds where they have been treated fairly and have difficulty understanding how if you are not from a certain background you are simply not given the same opportunities as others and how that will have an effect on the world view and actions of any rational person.
On the other hand I am deeply disappointed in liberals these days. So often I see and hear among people I know and on this board not even a basic understanding of various policies and how they effect various groups they are not intimately familiar with and come to conclusions about the moral or intellectual ineptitude of such.
I’m an extreme moderate, I love everyone but they all hate my guts for one reason or another. I don’t really leave the house much any more except to go to work or go to the dollar store. My wife usually buys groceries but sometimes we go together.
Well if we take the reasons mentioned here at face value, then it’s pretty obvious a lot of liberals don’t understand as well because they aren’t inundated with, or exposed to, conservative cultures. As for not wanting to understand, you got me. I go out of my way all the time to try to understand, and I get shit for it from other liberals. Nylock’s right. People hate moderates. People hate uncertainty and complexity.
Though it’s hard to believe conservatives truly understand liberals if they swallow horseshit characterizations of us on Fox News, Breitbart et. al. I hate HuffPo and others for doing that to conservatives just as well. But I see no meaningful difference in the lies and shit-slinging based on political orientation.