There are various axis that political views are measured on, but one of the main ones is the political compass test which measures the X axis from liberal to conservative, and measures the Y axis from libertarian to authoritarian.
It’s normally called libertarian to authoritarian, as per @Wesley_Clark’s diagram, since it’s not very useful to conflate the two axes.
Inflation reached its highest level in 44 years, according to Wikipedia. It was notable enough that there’s a Wikipedia article about it, in fact. It wasn’t confined to America, and I’ve certainly noticed how alarmingly expensive everything is.
What I might not have expressed very well (OK, I expressed it poorly), is a term to describe the Y axis on that graph. I’m calling it the political axis, because it’s the axis that deals with the form of government rather than what positions the government favors. If there’s a better term (government axis?) for the Y axis, please let me know. Either way, I think the bottom / libertarian part of that axis, by it’s inherently unstable nature, ends up leading to authoritarianism (see the sovereign citizens movement here in the US, or the previously mentioned Haiti, for examples of why the libertarian end of that axis is inherently unstable).
As far as the X axis on that graph, I think it includes too many different things to really be useful, except in rare situations (admittedly the present day US seems like one of those). There’s socially liberal vs. conservative, economic liberal vs. conservative, and so on, with all those breaking down even further (where would a racist environmentalist fit, or someone who wants to help the poor but is in favor of drilling for more oil, or the TERFs, and so on?).
It’s not a simple single word, but it is accurate, so I’ll go with that.
There are more than 2 axes, and other tests measure other axes. I’m not sure what all tests there are, but there are multiple axes to look at.
As far as your view on horseshoe theory, how libertarianism leads to anarchy, I feel thats more about human development index (HDI). As a general rule, as a nation becomes wealthier, healthier, and more educated, they tend to prefer democracy and human rights. Haiti didn’t fall into dictatorship because of libertarianism, they fell because they have a low HDI because they have low levels of wealth, health and education. Also libertarians still believe in using the state to enforce property rights and prevent violent crime.
I feel the X axis measures egalitarianism vs hierarchies at root. People on the left prefer a more egalitarian social and economic system, while people on the right prefer a more hierarchical and stratified social and economic system.
I think way, way too much credit is being giving to Trump supporters.
Understanding economic policies and how it affects them? Ummm… no.
Trump supporters are bullies. Had been all their lives. BUT the new ‘Woke’ is preventing them from their lifestyle of threatening others. Trump is their ‘head’ bully and will bring it back in style.
Congress is another thing. Except for a few, they are sheep. Worried about the ‘primaries?’ Proof that you are a spinless traitor. If you won’t stand up to a traitor, what does that make you. Cowards. The lot of them.
Its basically a given that MAGA Trump supporters are pieces of shit. What’s been so hard for many of us to process is.
- How many people actually are pieces of shit as adults
- How many people who aren’t pieces of shit are willing to be enablers for the pieces of shit
I always thought maybe only 10% of adults are bad people. It looks more like 25% of adults are bad people and another 25% are enablers.
Include me in that group. I have a brother in law that I like a lot. Get along great, But he for sure voted for Trump in 2012. Not sure what in 2016 and 2020.
He’s a smart and articulate guy. Well off. Does he see Trump for what he really is? Does he like that?
Thats what I was alluding to with my OP. the vast majority of people who strongly support Trump score high in RWA, SDO or both. The vast majority of people who strongly oppose Trump score low in RWA and SDO.
RWA and SDO is what is dividing the nation. People high in RWA or SDO, and their enablers, are on one side while people low are on the other side.
These people do like Trump because of his failures as a person, not in spite of them. The only thing that would make them dislike Trump is if Trump started acted in ways that undermined the agenda of people high in RWA or SDO by promoting egalitarianism and opposing social hierarchies.
People high in RWA and SDO like social hierarchies that put them on top. Trump supports those hierarchies. The idea that certain races, genders, nationalities, ideologies, sexual orientations, religions, etc are innately superior, more deserving and more pure than others is highly appealing to these people.
If Trump supported BLM, feminism, laws to protect women from abuse, muslim immigration, immigration from the black parts of Africa, etc then his base would at first call it fake news, but eventually would turn on him.
Well duh. If Democrats started supporting bans on abortion, Muslim immigration, gay marriage etc, then the socially liberal parts of their base would turn on them. That’s what happens if you adopt policies your base hates. (Except for the bolded one; not sure why that is in the list?)
These TLAs are mostly the result of sociologists being overwhelmingly left-wing, and inventing terms to pathologize conservatives. Total lack of self-awareness in assuming their own views are normal, and anyone who thinks differently must have something wrong with them.
There is hostile sexism and benevolent sexism. Benevolent sexism is when you think women are incompetent and helpless and need men to guide them, provide for them and protect them. Studies show some women prefer men with benevolent sexist attitudes.
Hostile sexism is when you hate women and want to harm them. Hostile sexism is correlated with Trump support. Protecting women from abuse is contradictory to hostile sexism.
This research investigated the role of gender attitudes in the United States 2016 presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The results of three studies (combined N = 2,816) showed that, as expected, Trump voters were higher in hostile and benevolent sexism than were Clinton voters. Even after controlling for political ideology and gender (Studies 1, 2, and 3) and minority group attitudes (Study 3), greater hostile sexism predicted more positive attitudes toward Trump, less positive attitudes toward Clinton, and retrospective reports of having voted for Trump over Clinton (Studies 2 and 3). Benevolent sexism did not predict additional variation in voting behavior beyond political ideology and hostile sexism. These results suggest that political behavior is based on more than political ideology; even among those with otherwise progressive views, overtly antagonistic views of women could be a liability to women—and an asset to men—running for office. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)
This idea that science is just a liberal propaganda machine is baseless. Neurological scans will support what the social science says.
Re the “Brain scans remarkably good at predicting political ideology” study mentioned in the post immediately above:
While I am open to there being neurological explanations for everything we think, the theory here seems to me one of those extraordinary claims requiring more than one replication.
I haven’t dug into the OP’s links, but if 3/4 of Trump’s base have certain personality characteristics, that info should help with messaging. Not necessarily by the Dems. But by any friend of democracy.
I’m a guy who likes well substantiated argument. But to appeal to an authoritarian, I hypothesize that it’s best to go with assert-assert-assert. Rick Wilson, is masterful at this sort of communication. He works with repetition, repeated assertion, broken up by explanation. No need to consider the other side - that’s a distraction. He speaks slowly and deliberately - great pacing. Put him on repeat when you’re MAGA relatives arrive. Ok, maybe not.
TACO - Trump Always Chickens Out ; Wall Street’s new guideline.
The problem is that 3/4 of Trumps strong supporters score high in SDO, RWA or both. But these people do not want democracy. They want an enforced hierarchy where they are on top. These people are anti-democracy so I don’t know how you can appeal to them with pro-democracy appeals.
I guess it stood out to me because the rest are things Maga more-or-less openly opposes, whereas AFAIK Trump hasn’t done or talked about anything like repealing laws to protect women from abuse. Unless you were referring to abortion laws, and it’s hardly necessary to invoke hostile sexism or RWA to explain why Republicans would object to him changing his stance on abortion.
Firstly, you should be more skeptical of social science in general, because studies like this regularly fail to replicate. Secondly, this doesn’t address my point at all, which is not that personality doesn’t correlate with ideology, but with how that correlation is interpreted.
I don’t believe science is a liberal propaganda machine, but liberals routinely accept that they, personally, suffer unconscious bias due to sexism and racism. Is it not at least plausible that they could harbour a similar bias against conservatives, a group that many of them openly dislike and feel superior to?
Obviously people - of any views - aren’t actually rational agents freely choosing their political beliefs, and personality is logically likely to be one of the major influences. But picking out beliefs more common to the opposite political side and labelling them as a personality type (plus giving it a pejorative name) doesn’t actually help understanding.
Imagine if hypothetical conservative sociologists in the 60’s had defined a ‘hippy’ personality type that makes people want to take drugs, drop out and live in a commune, and protest against the Vietnam war. A personality type that causes people to rebel against the established order, and disrupt society (bad things in the view of these researchers). It’s a good bet there were average personality differences between young people who took drugs, dropped out, and/or joined protests, and the (implicitly assumed to be normal and responsible) ones who got a corporate job, worked hard and didn’t rock the boat - and you could create a questionnaire whose results would correlate with these differences. Maybe they would even show up on an MRI. Would doing this help us understand 60s politics? I don’t believe so, and I think it would demonstrate some pretty biased assumptions on the part of the researchers.
For a real world comparison, look at the evidence showing liberals are less happy and more likely to suffer from mental illness than conservatives:
When (predominantly liberal) researchers look at this, they tend to try an explain the results away by saying liberals are more likely to seek help and a diagnosis for mental health conditions, or they argue that depression and anxiety are reasonable responses to the state of the world. For example here:
If there were a greater number of conservative researchers (and agencies willing to fund their ideas), they might instead be investigating hypotheses like the one in this article: that newly popular socially-left ideas are directly worsening the mental health of those who subscribe to them, particularly among young white women:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/apr/22/white-liberals-more-likely-have-mental-health-cond/
It’s interesting that we saw the opposite result to what might have been expected with Covid messaging: people on the left trusted experts and obeyed authorities on masking, social distancing etc, while those on the right tended to be skeptical and refuse to follow rules. It was even right-wingers who distrusted authority on the Covid vaccine, despite it being developed under Trump and endorsed by him.
I suspect what they want is displays of dominance. Almost all of them haven’t moved to explicit opposition to democracy: they aren’t anti-democracy so much as pro-authoritarian. That means that they will respond favorably to dominance displays, especially if delivered by a married straight white male.
I realized years ago that vocal conservatives were walking glass houses with glass jaws to puree a couple of metaphors. Fat guys with pop guns posing as tough guys. They are vulnerable to down the middle attacks. TACO is but one angle.
Yeah, and this liberal responds favorably to authority, when that authority is actual expert opinion. That’s why I pivoted to dominance displays above. Rick Wilson doesn’t make numerical arguments on You-tube. He makes a bunch of declarations and explains them. Experts tend to identify phenomenon, provide possible explanations for it, and state that their review of the evidence implies that one or two explanations probably explain a larger share than others. They embrace uncertainty rather than running away from it. That’s what you do when you want to know the truth.
But if you’re making a decision, you turn to rules of thumb. The problem with conservatives is that, “Listen to experts,” isn’t one of their rules of thumb. They put a heavier weight on talking heads who fluff them or give definitive opinions. I view Rick Wilson and I say, “Entertaining, but dubious.” I suspect a conservative would respond favorable to his emphatic approach, at least if that conservative wasn’t ideologically invested in Trump.
I don’t think that’s true in general. They specifically don’t trust most US experts because they see them as being part of the liberal ‘tribe’, rather than of their own ingroup. Compare to black Americans, who showed more vaccine hesitancy than white Americans, possibly for similar reasons.
???
Quote from article:
In light of the above-mentioned patterns, we hypothesize that political beliefs may contribute to downward trends in adolescent mental health. To test this hypothesis…
Conclusion:
In conclusion, we found that worsening time trends in adolescent internalizing symptoms from approximately 2010 onward diverged by political beliefs and were most severe for female liberal adolescents without a parent with a college degree. … Taken together, political beliefs are likely one of many important factors influencing recent trends in adolescent internalizing symptoms that warrant further investigation.
I missed the part about, “Reasonable responses to the state of the world.” Would it be fair to say that the article is an example of a researcher not explaining results away in the way you asserted? Or did I miss something when I skimmed the article?
I’m saying the experts conservatives trust are quacks and they are trusted because they are quacks. They don’t seriously evaluate evidence; rather they traffic in reassurance. Which is what modern conservatives crave. African Americans have decent reasons to distrust the medical community, but they mostly don’t turn to crackpots, but rather remove themselves from the process overall. That response is… different. To falsify that hypothesis you would have to show an African American who is a) treated as an expert within that community, b) Is a crackpot, and c) is popular within that community. The first 2 are easy, but you end up with fringe people that nobody pays attention to, unlike Dr. Oz or RFK.
ETA: That was an interesting table you posted upthread (thanks). I noticed that whatever white liberals are imbibing doesn’t appear to be affecting non-white liberals nearly as much.
Oklahoma recently tried to pass a bill making it illegal for cities to do anything to aid women fleeing from domestic abuse. It was hidden inside of a bill making it illegal to do anything to aid homeless people.
I was referring to this paragraph:
My bold. The framing is “look at all these terrible events and problems with the world in the news; policymakers aren’t fixing the problems, so young people feel they have to do it”, and their theory is that poorer mental health in liberal youth is a natural response to a “growing conservative political climate”.
(The part about low SES doesn’t really make sense, since they appear to be measuring SES by parent education level, and a lower education level correlates with voting for Trump.)
Contrast with the theory in the conservative article I linked, where liberal ideas on victimhood and lack of agency are seen as directly harming mental health, and the assumption is that depressing liberal beliefs about the world are incorrect.
Kanye, maybe? Can’t say it’s something I’ve looked into. Also, wasn’t RFK Jr a Democrat until, like, yesterday?
But my point wasn’t about who conservatives trust, but why they don’t trust many government and scientific figures. Whether or not the comparison to black people is valid, it’s still true that conservatives see most experts as liberals, and thus not trustworthy.
The white guilt theory explains that. 
That’s pretty horrifying. Why on earth would they want to do that?