Why do conservatives (in the US) hate the left so much

Politics & Elections
1

So I feel like it is more clear why the left hates the modern right.

  • Because the right wants to oppress and victimize marginalized and vulnerable groups who need protection and inclusion.
  • Because they place their racial hatred above their own economic interests, creating a miserable economic situation for everyone (including themselves).
  • Because the modern right rejects democracy and human rights.
  • Because the right is destroying our alliances and reputation, making America weaker, and making it easier for China to overtake us.
  • Because the right is more prone to victimizing marginalized brown people overseas via wars and economic exploitation (not that the democrats are much better)

But why do the right hate the left so much? I would assume it comes down to various answers. And I know some people will say ‘just ask people on the right’. One of the problem is people on the right score higher on authoritarianism, and literally some of the symptoms of being high in authoritarianism is things like dogmatism, lack of self-awareness, compartmentalized thinking, etc. People who score high in that won’t have insights into their own motivations.

So I’m going to assume some reasons people on the right hate the left so much are as follows:

  • The right see the world as more dangerous and full of internal and external threats. They see the left as too naive to see this, and see the left as opening the floodgates to dangerous out-group criminals and terrorists. They also see the left as anti-military, anti-police and anti-firearms, all of which conservatives feel are necessary to protect themselves from all these domestic and foreign threats. They see the left as opening the floodgates for dangerous black criminals, dangerous latino immigrant gangs, dangerous muslim terrorists, dangerous transgender child molesters, etc. while destroying the military, police and personal firearms needed to stay safe in a dangerous world.

  • Masculinity also plays a role. The left are seen as limp wristed pussies who won’t defend themselves, which fills conservatives with disgust and contempt.

  • Conservatives like the privileges they get from their status. Leftists promoting a more equal society means conservatives have to compete with women, immigrants and POC for careers, mates and status. This offends them because they benefit from America’s traditional system which is an unequal system that is basically DEI and affirmative action for white male christians.

  • Republicans are seen as the party of societies ‘winners’ and democrats are seen as the party of societies ‘losers’, and nobody wants to respect or associate with a loser.

  • Conservatives score higher on metrics like disgust and in-group preference. So they find the left’s association with what they view as deviant lifestyles and deviant people disgusting.

  • Conservatives value tradition more, and see leftists as tearing down tried and true traditions.

  • Conservatives feel an unquestioned, all powerful god and capitalist market system agrees with them, and feel that any opinions which do not align with their are a slap in the face of all powerful rules that are above human question and above human debate. Leftist values are a slap in the face of all powerful forces like god and the free market.

One major division IMO is that the right view nationalism through the lens of ethnic nationalism while the left view nationalism through the lens of civic nationalism. Both sides rightly see the other side as destroying what America is meant to be. The right feel America is meant to be a white christian patriarchy, the left feel America is meant to be an egalitarian and multicultural democracy.

Basically the right views ‘America’ as meant to be a white christian patriarchy, while the left feels everyone is welcome here as long as you pay taxes and believe in concepts like democracy and human rights.

2

Part of it is that they have been told, for decades, that giving equal rights to gays, women, immigrants, people of color, non-Christians, etc., will mean that they (the white conservatives) will get less. They’ve been told that it’s a zero-sum game, and more for someone else means less for them.

3

Yeah, that is true. Status is relative, and if everyone has the same status, than nobody has any status.

One thing I think about is how Jim Crow actually worked pretty well for middle class white men from their POV. White men maybe made up 35% of the population in the deep south, but they controlled about 100% of all the power and status in society. They had high levels of control over white women, and near total control over black women. Meanwhile they never had to worry about a black man sleeping with their white wife, while they themselves could exploit and abuse black women with zero consequences. They also had near total control over black people of both genders which they could exploit to use them as low cost servants and workers. They had high levels of economic, legal and social control over everyone else.

Now those same white men have to compete with black people and women for jobs and authority. White men have to compete with black men for women. Whites don’t have a desperate, oppressed class of black people they can financially exploit for cheap labor. Women have gained large amounts of financial and legal autonomy, reducing the leverage men have over them.

4

You list several reasons, but IMHO this part comes down to the most basic reason (and IMHO the only legitimate one). That is “I hate you because you hate me”. That’s why the left hates the right. As to the other, I really don’t know. It makes no sense to me.

5

From what I gather, a lot of conservatives think liberalism is all about taking things that are bad, and then deliberately, over decades, moving the Overton window until those things are not seen as bad anymore. Or they think liberals are always a “lawyer for the bad side.” Hence why they hate liberals so much.

The conservative viewpoint, AIUI, is like this:

When Muslim/Arab immigrants in Europe are assaulting women, liberals will be a “lawyer” for the bad side so that people can’t criticize or oppose the immigrants. Even though liberals aren’t endorsing the crimes, it can easily be seen as pro-crime.

Homosexuality used to be seen as bad, now because of consistent liberal Overton-window-pushing, now it’s seen as good.

When some heinous murderer is on death row, liberals will argue that the murderer shouldn’t be executed because the death penalty is bad. (Which, of course, isn’t the same as condoning the person’s crimes, but it can easily be perceived by the right wing as “taking the side of the murderer.”)

This is one reason why, for instance, conservatives often spout the (baseless) theory that liberals support pedophilia. Because, in the conservative mind, liberalism is all about taking what’s bad, and pushing the Overton Window on what’s bad so that it becomes no longer bad, so it follows, then, that promoting pedophilila must be the logical next stop on the train. They see pedophilia as being like LGBT, in the sense of “taboo today, but accepted tomorrow.”

And if one is a conservative Christian (as many right-wingers are,) then not only does liberalism stand in direct opposition to what Christianity is about (well, at least the MAGA version of it,) but there is often a double standard as well where liberals will treat Islam with more deference and reluctance to criticize, while not showing any fear whatsoever in bashing Christianity. Even atheist progressives like Sam Harris and Bill Maher had pointed this out before. So that’s more reason they are pissed off at the left.

6

The hatred is not a side effect, it’s the main tool. The whole point is to convince their base voters that all their problems can be blamed on somebody else.

7

The hate is almost entirely a product of the for-profit propaganda they’ve been immersed in since the Limbaugh days.

The right used to disagree with the left. Limbaugh et al taught the right to hate instead.

8

Once the fascists were able to brake basic adherence to decorum, truth, and reason; everything became allowed. The rampant lying, scapegoating, corruption, breaking of order, all became accepted daily events. The accepted social state turned into an equivalence of “the purge” but regarding reason, ethics, empathy, and compassion. A 4chan chat room.

The refusal to honestly reflect on the absurdity and outright crimes of this administration as it attacked all nations with a trade war, threaten to annex Canada and Greenland, warred upon Venezuela and Iran, did invade American cities with a special Executive police force, by-passed your congress via EO rule-by-fiat, set up multiple El Salvadorian ultra-prison black sites to disappear foreigners in the US legally and illegally, conducted rambling, fervently blind, hate towards every single western democracy in every single public event every week.

This is conservatism, as it is in America. And it still is constrained within boundaries too. It still can get a lot worse.

9

I agree. But that’s a surface level explanation. I’m not the OP, but I get why he’s asking the question. The underlying question is why those things worked. Why is it that Limbaugh, Gingrich, and all the others that have come after them, were so successful with the techniques they used. There has to be something intrinsic to being right wing that predisposes towards hate. The equivalent doesn’t seem to exist on the left, where hate seems to be restricted to the reactive “I hate you because you hate me” rather than a primary emotion.

10

I think the OP hit on the cause pretty well in the first bullet point - that conservatives are more oriented towards “defend against a threat” (I believe there have even been cerebral scans that showed that conservatives have more fearful amygdalas in their brain) - and so, then, if liberals are the ones trying to bring the threat in, or claim the threat isn’t a threat, then that triggers a “red alert, red alert” beeping alarm in the conservative mind.

Kind of like if someone is an arachnophobe, and then you tell them “We’re going to put 20 tarantulas into your home.” Of course they’re going to hate you.

11

Conservatism, by definition, does not like change, and certainly does not like rapid change. They’ve seen society change dramatically over the past couple of decades: acceptance of homosexuality, increase in the influence of Hispanic and non-Western European cultures in American culture, “political correctness,” etc.; all of that makes them uncomfortable, not just because it’s not what they grew up with/are used to, but because it’s changed so quickly.

That discomfort made it easy for messaging around “you should hate those things” take hold.

12

This. Study after study has supported the idea that ‘liberal or conservative’ is not simply a matter of disagreement on policy, but of measurable physical differences in brains.

It’s very hard on humans to be afraid all the time. One way of coping with that is to turn fear into hate and hate into action. On some level, this type of right-winger genuinely believes that if they could just get rid of all the left-wingers AND the dark people AND the non-Christian people AND the non-straight people—plus get the females under control—then they could relax and be happy. The fear would be gone.

Of course they’re quite wrong about this. Their brain chemistry assures that there will always be an Enemy to be tensed up about.

13

What’s funny is that I see those things as becoming a better version of what we’ve always been, not something brand new. Of course I could very well be wrong about that, but that’s how I felt back in the pre-2016 days. Ironically, what I do see as change that needs to be fought against is what Trump and the MAGAs have been doing to our previously great country since 2016.

14

I am in this camp. But maybe try to frame the question in a more neutral way when you ask?

~Max

15

Yup. Many conservatives today feel if we just go back to an all white America then the problems will be solved. But that won’t happen, then whites will just get divided in the social hierarchy.

A hundred years ago being white wasn’t enough. You had to be an anglo-saxon protestant. So any christian faith other than protestant, or any nationality/ethnicity other than anglo-saxon made you a minority group.

So they’d just start targeting white catholics, white atheists, whites with German/Russian/French/eastern european, etc ancestry.

16

Exactly. A certain kind of mind always needs a scapegoat. If one group of people becomes unavailable to serve as scapegoats, another group will be drafted into service.

17

Because a lot of Americans are racist morons. There is a deep thread of anti-intellectualism running through our culture and it was allowed to fester. The confederate flag has been flown openly for generations as a proud symbol of heritage and that heritage is systemic racism, incest and obesity.

18

What possible definition of progressive are you working with when to call these two that; both who have defined their entire careers around being fervently, obsessively, anti-woke and “politically centrist” (wildly anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-left).

Maher even brags to JD Vance that he’d vote for him but NEVER would vote for a progressive. Any one who has watched anything from Maher, ANYTHING, is not surprised.

19

It is surprising, because Maher was pretty liberal under Clinton, Bush jr and Obama. He gave a million dollars to the Obama campaign in 2012. He’s been moving further and further to the right the last 5-10 years.

Either way, he lives in California so his vote for president isn’t really important.

I feel like Harris and Maher are more approaching it from a POV of secularism, human rights and democracy. The fact that the modern left rejects Israel which is far more secular, modern and has far better human rights and democracy than their Islamic opponents is very off putting.

Both political sides have a history of supporting Islamic extremism when it helps them. Oliver North gave weapons to the Iranian theocracy for example. Under Bush jr, after the invasion of Iraq led to a growth in shia militant groups, the US government started funding sunni militant groups to counterbalance them. The US funded Al Qaeda against the USSR, etc.

But it feels like there is a growing consensus among the modern left feels that being a marginalized group (non-white, non-christian, non-western) is carte blanche to do evil things.

20

Of all I know about Maher’s politics comes from watching him talk on his show. And it’s a constant stream of cranky old man yells at youth. The same damn thing over and over and over and over… Woke left is destroying life itself. Will anything survive the woke mind virus!

Always the same anti-woke Dem, GOP, and “centrist” or right-wing guests. Always the same anti-woke message: woke progressives are eating our children!

It might be he wasn’t always this deaf, dumb and blind tool of fascist culture warriors, but he sure as hell has been their public mascot/soldier since I started paying attention to him during the Trump years.

Sam Harris has always been an anti-woke, racist grifter dink. I refuse to believe he took any turn.