“Liberal coastal elite” is Fox News jargon for “rich person.”
But they know where their bread is buttered, so they never dare say disparaging things about the rich. Instead they’ve had to invent a trope of “coastal elites” as a way of bashing rich people without appearing to be talking about rich people, and limiting the damage only to those damned liberal elitists. (Because, of course, the rich Republican business owners aren’t elitists too, right? No, they’re job creators.)
The phrase has absolutely no meaning and is used nowhere outside of a few outlets like Fox which are firmly entrenched in the far-right echo chamber.
The distinction you are trying to draw doesn’t exist. If the research isn’t valid, the results aren’t valid.
For the same reasons that liberals like the research, even though it isn’t valid. Liberals are not different from conservatives - they like to be told what they want to believe, and don’t like to be told what they don’t want to believe.
Look at the discussion about how conservatives and moderates understand liberals better than vice versa. Liberals don’t accept it. Why? Because they don’t want to - it contradicts their internal narrative.
Yeah, I’m a liberal and, as much as I try because I’m surrounded by it every day, I don’t understand the conservative mindset. Believe me, it’s not because I don’t want to, I’d LOVE to be able to as it would give me some sort of peace instead of feeling like I’m in bizarro world.
My best bud/co-worker, in any other subject but politics and religion, agree on everything. We have the same sense of humor, look at situations the same way, share common interests, etc. If you could duplicate me and change my political preference, I’d be him. So it perplexes me why he can be so thorough, deep diving perfectionist in our work but yet have zero critical thinking skills when it comes to politics or religion. I know he is capable of it, I see it everyday, but he’ll even admit he doesn’t care to do it with his political positions.
Once I asked him, “so, I think you watch CNN and it makes you a little angry at the way the news is portrayed and you watch Fox news and it doesn’t. So naturally you’d prefer to watch Fox” And yes, that one was easy for him to admit. Now, the question is why? Why watch something that you know is unashamedly biased? Why watch something that you know is a propaganda machine for a political party?
My unashamed theory is that conservatives as just not good people and gravitate towards media that doesn’t make them feel bad about their hatred towards out-groups. It’s a more primitive mindset, set on survival of the tribe rather than reducing harm & suffering for all human beings. It’s making decisions based on fear and disgust rather than logic or reducing suffering.
If the world economy crashes tomorrow or a massive nuclear war starts, I’d wish to have the conservative mindset. But for now, in this reality, I think it’s a hindrance to our progress as a species.
I don’t agree with that. Someone posted a critique of a neuroscience paper about brain differences, but that doesn’t disprove the differences. I don’t have the expertise to know what is true and what isn’t, it seems like the issue may just be unresolved. There is a difference between calling something unresolved and rejecting all evidence to the contrary.
I also disagree with the mentality that liberals are no different from conservatives. Liberals engage in motivated cognition, but they are not the same group. For one example, liberals get their news from a wide range of sources (some biased, some not). Conservatives tend to prefer biased news like fox and talk radio. They aren’t the same. My impression is liberals want to get news that supports our agenda, but we also want unbiased news and we want our news to be factual. From what I"ve seen, a lot of conservatives not only just want biased news, they don’t care if it is true or false and they deride all unbiased news as fake or biased.
Also people who score higher on authoritarianism are also more like to engage in dogmatism or compartmentalized thinking than people who score low.
Same. I’m confused by conservatives who are generally decent people and capable of obtaining educations and having informed opinions about issues outside of politics, but once politics come up they believe things that are so irrational, contradictory and false that it is confusing. It is like you are talking to 2 different people inside one brain.
I’d love to understand it too. The best I can come up with is that authoritarianism and a strong emphasis on in-group/out-group dynamics plays a role. If you look at the 5 moral foundations of Haidt, the 3 morals that liberals lack (purity, authority, ingroup) 2 of them are just forms of in-group (ingroup and purity) and one is about authoritarianism (authority).
A study on Trump supporters found 5 key psychological traits seem to be common among them.
Those five traits are just a roundabout way of saying authoritarianism and in-group/out-group dynamics.
authoritarianism = authoritarianism
social dominance orientation = authoritarianism
prejudice = in-group/out-group dynamics
relative deprivation (the belief that white americans are losing out of foreigners and non-whites) = in-group/out-group dynamics
intergroup contact = in-group/out-group dynamics
But even that doesn’t answer everything. Why are 50-70% of conservatives likely to think that the Roy Moore allegations are false? or to believe that Obama was born in Kenya? Or to think Hillary Clinton ran a pedophile ring in a pizza shop? 9/11 truth was a belief that mostly took part among the left, because it supported the left’s emotional agenda (that Bush was a bad person who wanted to go to war). But it never became mainstream the way conspiracy theories on the right seem to.
I don’t agree that liberals and conservatives are the same. Liberals engage in motivated cognition (exaggerating or ignoring facts to support an emotion driven agenda) but the right does it in ways that I am not seeing on the left. Again, maybe it comes down to authoritarianism and in-group/out-group dynamics. But it is still hard to understand for those of us who do not subscribe to it.
Because it’s preferable to watching something that you know is biased in favor of an ideology that you think is harmful. Additionally, on Fox, Drudge, etc., you can hear discouraging words about about what Democrats/liberals are up to…things the MSM either doesn’t report or downplays if it does.
You are making the typical liberal mistake of operating on the assumption that your views are the ones that are indisputably correct and that anyone with a different view is ipso facto wrong. What you fail to understand is that to your opponents you appear to be just as wrongheaded they are to you.
Read some of the comments made following articles or stories on right-wing biased news sites and you’ll find that many conservatives make the same accusations toward liberals that liberals here make toward conservatives, i.e., they’re “stupid”, “ill-informed”, “ignorant of and uncaring about facts”, etc., etc., etc.
The reality is that on most issues, people voicing differing political viewpoints are both right, depending on the way they view the issue. For example, a free market economy advocate may stress the way it creates an abundance of goods and services and serves the majority of its populace better than any other economic system. He may also state that even the poor population in a free market economy such as exists in the U.S. has more than the average citizen in most other countries. And he would be correct. A free market opponent on the other hand, might stress that free market economies by their very nature create a certain percentage of people who are poor, and that there is a wide disparity in the distribution of income.
And the thing is, both are right! Basically the conservative looks at what’s good and wants to keep it that way, and the liberal looks at what they see as bad and therefore wants to make changes. Basically politics is an optimist vs. pessimist contest, with conservatives as society’s optimists and liberals as it’s pessimists. So the fact that you insist the glass of milk is half empty doesn’t mean that your friend is wrong if he insists that its half full. And vice-versa.
This thread has made it clear that the conflation of social-liberal (resp. conservative) with economic-liberal (resp. conservative) causes much confusion.
I am rather centrist on the social scale. I am also relatively centrist on the economic scale, but that makes me a flaming left-winger in post-rational American diction. On the “economic” and scientific fronts, America is not divided between liberals and conservatives, but between well-informed humanists and an unholy alliance of the kleptocrats and the uninformed voters they gull.
Some of this makes sense, or would make sense when “liberal” and “conservative” are defined as in earlier times. But it hardly applies to the political alignments relevant to the pressing non-social problems facing today’s America.
As just one example, do you really think Americans who think universal health care is possible are “pessimists”? And that Americans who feel there’s no hope for disadvantaged children to have affordable health care are “optimists”?
Yep. I can’t understand the thinking behind it. My parents believe all of this and it doesn’t matter what facts or sources or spokesmen on “their side” with dissenting opinions I present, there is just no penetrating the bubble. The fact that my senior parents both voted for Roy Moore really paints a scar on them that I can’t un-see when I talk to them. It’s like talking to someone with a booger hanging out of their nose… you can have a conversation but you’re constantly distracted by it. I hate it, and I blame right-wing media. I’m sure this mentality existed before, but with limited news sources it wasn’t as impenetrable.
One example that illustrates a difference: I asked a Trump supporter at work if there was anything Trump could do to lose his support. He said, “if he doesn’t build that wall, I’m not going to support him anymore.” And, just to probe to try to gain understanding, I asked “well, if you’re against illegal immigration from Mexico, would you be OK with consulting with experts on the best way to curtail it and go with that? I mean, the wall is like some 1st grade kid’s idea on what would stop illegals from crossing the border, why not go with something more effective?” And maybe he was offended by the ‘1st grade’ comment, but he insisted that it had to be the wall. the wall was the best way to keep people out. The means was important to him, not the ends. It’s crazy to me, but a majority of conservatives feel the same way.
I don’t understand the dogmatism and the hostility to facts a lot of conservatives have. The best guess I have is it is a sign of authoritarianism. Thats the best I can come up with. The whole ‘both sides have it’ doesn’t hold water from what I’ve seen. There has been a political realignment in the last 30 years where people high in authoritarian personality traitsare moving to the right while people low are moving to the left.
I’m not surprised he said not building the wall is the only thing he could think of to turn him against Trump. The wall is a metaphor for nativism, which is itself an extension of in-group/out-group dynamics. Resistance to multiculturalism, out-groups and egalitarianism are major motivating factors of the modern right. I’ve said before, if you want Trump’s followers to turn on him just make Trump give a speech in favor of black lives matter, and have him talk about how blacks have been mistreated for centuries and deserve special accommodations to make up for the injustices. That and have him invite Muslims into America by claiming this has always been a culture with a wide range of religious beliefs. Thats about the only thing that’ll turn his base on him, have him promote equality and power for out-groups.
But again, as you said, why do they demand it be a wall? Even if the goal was to keep out latino immigrants, then using less expensive technologies (drones, sensors, cameras, employer verification, visa enforcement, etc) would be more effective and easier to set up, why do they demand the more expensive, less effective, harder to build wall as the solution? I don’t get it.
Even if nativism is what motivates them on the subject of immigration (and it is), why do they want solutions that are less effective in the pursuit of nativism? An expensive wall people can easily climb over won’t be as effective as drones or visa enforcement.
One argument (usually made as a joke) is that the boomer generation were exposed to more lead as kids. WHo knows if that plays a role in why they are more dogmatic. Probably not. Either way, it wouldn’t explain why it is usually only white baby boomers and silent generation types who have these dogmatic beliefs.
As I’ve argued before, it may not be that people’s personality traits have changed. Instead the D- and R- parties have changed. Before, each party was a “big tent” party with members of both morality types. Now the humanists are concentrated in the D party while the so-called large-amygdala types are concentrated in the R party.
Thats true. I think it all comes back to the 60s when the GOP started presenting itself as the party opposed to egalitarianism (civil rights, feminism, etc). That attracted a lot of authoritarian types while repulsing those low in authoritarianism away from the GOP. There used to be conservative democrats and liberal republicans. Not so much anymore, and even when there are they are usually transient and only occur when one party gets too powerful. Those people get voted out of office the second the winds change.
But its gotten worse since the 90s according to that chart. In 1992 there was a 0.20 difference between the two parties regarding authoritarianism and presidential voting patterns, in 2016 there was a 0.49 difference.
I just can’t understand it - I keep reaching out to those people to let them know they are stupid, corrupt, and racist, but we can’t seem to find any common ground.
I try to reach out to the people in the conservative party that are not stupid, corrupt, and racist. Part of that reaching out sometimes does involve pointing out that their party has largely been taken over by the stupid, the corrupt, and the racist.
But yeah, if what you said is actually what you are doing, then it is not surprising that you are having trouble finding traction.
This reminds me of the bit I’ve heard about the ‘basket of deplorables’ speech: that it maybe would’ve worked great, if folks who heard it thought to themselves ”wow, that is a terrifc and unsettling point: I, a fine and upstanding person, am currently in the same party as people she thinks are irredeemable.” It doesn’t work so great on folks who thought, ”wow, she thinks that I’m irredeemable.”
I don’t think she ever intended for Republicans to hear it, and probably didn’t put any thought into how it would affect them (if she did, and her conclusion was “this could work well”, she’s significantly stupider than even I think she is). It was said at a private fundraiser.
They’re owning it like LGBTQ folk owned queer and fag, like black folk owned nigga etc. I think a lot of conservatives, Republicans, what have you, feel as if liberals unjustifiably look down upon them for things such as what they do for a living, educational attainment etc… Liberals don’t feel as if they are snobs - many of them are not. Many Republicans are not racist either. The problem as a moderate is that you are forced to choose between a party that is a little too accepting of various forms of economic and educational snobbery (some people are gonna see educational snobbery and not understand it to mean what I intend it to mean) and a party that is a little too unsympathetic to the systemic disadvantages suffered by minorities and women. Personally I think the Costco canned chicken is better.
