Conservatives

[Father Time]

A commitment to unprovable hypotheses and the idea that feeling it in your heart is good enough even without evidence.

Doesn't that sound swell.

Would that include faith in the value of the dollar, or just a run-of-the-mill attack on religion?

Both.

 

[PoliticalChic]

A commitment to unprovable hypotheses and the idea that feeling it in your heart is good enough even without evidence.

Doesn't that sound swell.

Would that include faith in the value of the dollar, or just a run-of-the-mill attack on religion?

Both.

Keep in mind that a dead atheist is all dressed up with no place to go.

So, Abu Waqt, is it difficult sleeping on that mattress full of gold?

 

[Annie]

1)Conservatives believe that there are moral truths, right and wrong, and that these truths are permanent. The result of infracting these truths will be atrocities and social disaster. Liberals believe in private morality and these differ for each person. These beliefs are aimed at the gratification of appetites and exhibit anarchistic impulses. While I may or may not believe this, I don't think the government should be passing or enforcing laws that coincide with my personal belief system, anymore than they should for those I don't agree with.

2)Conservatives believe that custom and tradition result in individuals living in peace. Law is custom and precedent. Liberals are destroyers of custom and convention. To a conservative, change should be gradual, as the new society is often inferior to the old. We build on the ideas and experience of our ancestors. The species is wiser than the individual (Burke). I'd have to disagree. My folks marched and so did my brother and I for Civil Rights. I'd do the same in a minute today. While I disagree with the concept of same-sex marriage, I'd support any laws needed to allow civil partnerships so that a loved one can bequeath their estate to whom they want. Not to mention medical care. It's only right and may or may not involve sex, that's NOT the business of the state.

3)Liberals are impulsive, and imprudent. They believe in quick changes, and risk new abuses worse than the ‘evils’ that they would sweep away, since remedies are usually not simple. Plato said that prudence is the mark of the statesman. There should be a balance between permanence and change, while liberals see ‘progress’ as some mythical direction for society. Maybe or not, doesn't say anything about conservatives.

4)Conservatives believe in the principle of variety, while liberal perspectives result in a narrowing uniformity. Under conservative principles, there will be differences in class, material condition and other inequalities. The only uniformity will be before the law. Society will not be perfect. Consider the results of the rule of ideologues of the last century.If you mean the 'opportunity' to succeed, we agree. We are not all born with same talents or drive. Many a liberal has both, ask Bill Gates.

5)Freedom and property are linked. Private property results in a more stable and productive society. Private property and retaining the fruits of one’s labor has been proven successful from the Puritan’s Bradford, to the Stakhanovite Revolution! Agree.

6)Conservatives believe in voluntary community and charity, based on duties to each other, as opposed to involuntary collectivism. This explains why conservative give more charity than liberals. Agree. I also believe that is the most direct and efficient way to go. If government needs to be involved, it should be as close to the source as possible, not Federal.

7)Conservatives view people as both good and bad, and for this reason believe on restraints on power, as in checks and balances, while liberals see power as a force for good, as long as the power is in their hands. Agreed.

8)Liberals and Conservatives differ in the way to proceed. For Conservatives, data informs policy. (“More Guns, Less Crime” and “Mass murderers apparently can’t read, since they are constantly shooting up ‘gun-free zones.’”- Coulter) We use Conservative principles to the best of our ability, but when confronting new and original venues, we believe in testing, and analysis of the results of the tests. For liberals, feeling passes for knowing; it is based on emotion often to the exclusion of thinking. When it comes to gun control, your argument, agree. However there are too many instances of the 'right' trying to impose their version of 'science' on many who are liberal and conservative, ie. Intelligent Design and the insanity over evolution. One is science, the other not. There's a place in ethics for discussion, not science.

9)Conservatives view results differently from Liberals. Liberals respond to success and material wealth with envy and hostility, encourage class warfare and an attempt to obviate any chance that it might happen again. The exception is when it is a Liberal with the wealth. Conservatives see success as the validation and culmination of the application of Conservative principles, most prominently Liberty. I think that argument holds in political arena, not life. The Democrats successfully court wealth today, better than GOP.

10)Since Liberals see their view as a higher calling that that of Conservatives, they mistakenly believe that it is entirely appropriate for then to use, not logic, facts, nor accepted debating techniques, but ad hominem attacks on the physical appearance, personal history, or imaginary mental defects. Notice how the Liberal replaces intellect with emotion. This is, no doubt, based on a medieval concept of recognizing witches and demons. In fact, Liberals attempt to deal with opponents in similar fashion: recall Clarence Thomas’ “High Tech Lynching.” While certainly true with many, I've seen some on the right do the same. Whichever political direction it comes from, it's a losing argumentative tactic of a weak source.

That's the whole problem with trying to put up a 'manifesto' from any political persuasion. If the left did the same, they'd find some that agree and disagree. Truth is, we speak for ourselves, with our own prejudices and special interests.

Nicely done. Just a few comments.

In item #1, what types of laws do we want? Few, I hope, and when necessary. I don't believe in special laws to empower one group over another. Nor laws to tax AIG execs 90% of the bonuses they were contractually promised.

Item #2, 'change should be gradual," to avoid unintended consequences. Nowhere do I say that there should be no change. Although I do not have an opinion about gay 'rights,' many gay individuals would argue with you unless their right to marriage as they define it.

Item #8, Data informs policy. Feeling is not knowing. What science is being imposed? In the northeast, there is no question of whether or not to teach evolution. My science teacher explained "creationism" and said it was our choice what to believe, but he would make sure we were conversant with the evidence for evolution. And he did. It is not the 'right' imposing versions of science, global warming is leftist nonsense. And they will brook no disagreement from 'deniers.'

Item #9, you are incorrect vis-a-vis wealth: Taxation. It is the left's policy to tax, the answer to every problem, and the hallmark of the Democrat party. Have you asked yourself this question: when has a 'stimulus' historically worked on a recession, and were is the money going to come from in the next decade?

See, even those of us who basically 'agree' are talking past each other, imagine if we disagreed?

#1 agreed. The 90% was a disaster from the get go. Even more amusing was Fannie and Freddie retention bonuses. However, that won't restore confidence for those working and vilified for $1 a year salaries. Another example of unintended consequences and the inexperience/hubris of the administration.

#2 our point of disagreement was with 'gradual.' Some items, such as Civil Rights, were 100 years overdue and getting worse. Nothing gradual there. If it took arrests, it was worth it.

#8 There is nothing 'scientific' about creationism. It's biblical based and not science. There is no 'choice' here. Granted many believe in it, then again there are those that believe in other non-science based things. Me? I believe in a just and rational God. I don't think he'd/she'd give us the ability to reason, expecting us not to use it.

#9 We're talking apples and oranges here. I was referring to fund raising. The Dems out raised, by a lot.

 

[American Horse]

"War on prosperity"?! That is rich!

Since when has paying one's fair share of the cost of maintaining our nation become a "war on prosperity"?

Well-to-do people actually use some government-provided goods and services far more than do poor people. How many poor people need air traffic controllers? Or the US Passport Office? Poor people are also less likely to use federal highways as much as more well-to-do people. Many poor people don't need government-sponsored FDIC protection because they have no bank accounts. Government-provided law enforcement agencies don't have to spend time keeping an eye on poor people's businesses. Poor people are also unlikely to use state and national parks as often as more well-to-do people.

What you are describing is extreme poverty, not your citizen of ordinary means who enjoys the benefits of all those things you seem to believe only wealthy people enjoy. And still even the poorest of those people have the potential to benefit when they find themselves capable of pulling themselves out of their situation. The average person of average means enjoys the benefits of all those things more than the average very wealthy person whom you decry, simply because there are more average people on the bell-curve of wealth. Sadly those people you are most concerned about are usually people with some mental/emotional/drug problem which keeps them in their situation.

 

[Father Time]

Would that include faith in the value of the dollar, or just a run-of-the-mill attack on religion?

Both.

Keep in mind that a dead atheist is all dressed up with no place to go.

Is that a threat or a lame attempt to convince me of *scary music* "the horrors of atheism"?

 

[PoliticalChic]

"War on prosperity"?! That is rich!

Since when has paying one's fair share of the cost of maintaining our nation become a "war on prosperity"?

Well-to-do people actually use some government-provided goods and services far more than do poor people. How many poor people need air traffic controllers? Or the US Passport Office? Poor people are also less likely to use federal highways as much as more well-to-do people. Many poor people don't need government-sponsored FDIC protection because they have no bank accounts. Government-provided law enforcement agencies don't have to spend time keeping an eye on poor people's businesses. Poor people are also unlikely to use state and national parks as often as more well-to-do people.

What you are describing is extreme poverty, not your citizen of ordinary means who enjoys the benefits of all those things you seem to believe only wealthy people enjoy. And still even the poorest of those people have the potential to benefit when they find themselves capable of pulling themselves out of their situation. The average person of average means enjoys the benefits of all those things more than the average very wealthy person whom you decry, simply because there are more average people on the bell-curve of wealth. Sadly those people you are most concerned about are usually people with some mental/emotional/drug problem which keeps them in their situation.

I wonder about definitions, such as 'poor."

"When you look at the people who John Edwards insists are poor, what you find is that the overwhelming majority of them have cable television, have air conditioning, have microwaves, have two color TVs; 45 percent of them own their own homes, which are typically three-bedroom homes with 1.5 baths in very good recondition. On average, poor people who live in either apartments or in houses are not crowded and actually have more living space than the average person living in European countries, such as France, Italy or England.

Also, a lot of people believe that poor people are malnourished. But in fact when you look at the average nutriment intake of poor children, it is virtually indistinguishable from upper-middle-class children. In fact, poor kids by the time they reach age 18 or 19 are taller and heavier than the average middle-class teenagers in the 1950s at the time of Elvis. And the boys, when they reach 18, are a full one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier than the GIs storming the beaches of Normandy. It’s pretty hard to accomplish that if you are facing chronic food shortages throughout your life. "

FrontPage Magazine

 

[Said1]

"All people are born alike - except Republicans and Democrats," quipped Groucho Marx, and in fact it turns out that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are evident in early childhood. In 1969, Berkeley professors Jack and Jeanne Block embarked on a study of childhood personality, asking nursery school teachers to rate children's temperaments. They weren't even thinking about political orientation.

Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects' childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. They found arresting patterns. As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3. The reason for the difference, the Blocks hypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of tradition and authority, and they found it in conservative politics.

Psychology Today Magazine, Jan/Feb 2007

Why no link? It's not rocket science.

Psychology Today: The Ideological Animal

 

[Peejay]

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

In a simple experiment reported todayin the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

Study finds left-wing brain, right-wing brain - Los Angeles Times

To come to this conclusion the authors examined 88 different psychological studies conducted between 1958 and 2002 that involved 22,818 people from 12 different countries. They boiled that information down into a number of psychological attributes that are closely associated with people who are politically conservative.
Rigid and closed-minded
"Dogmatism has been found to correlate consistently with authoritarianism, political-economic conservatism, and the holding of right wing opinions," write the authors. Conversely, studies have found that conservatives in general have little tolerance for ambiguity. A fact that helps in decoding this statement that George W. Bush made in Genoa, Italy: "I know what I believe and I believe what I believe is right."

Conservatives Deconstructed by Joel Bleifuss

In a study that ponders the similarities between former President Ronald Reagan, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Rush Limbaugh, four American university researchers say they now have a better understanding of what makes political conservatives tick.

Underlying psychological motivations that mark conservatives are "fear and aggression, dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity; uncertainty avoidance; need for cognitive closure; and terror management," the researchers wrote in an article, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," recently published in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin.

Berkeley study links Reagan, Hitler

Liberals are more likely than are conservatives to respond to cues signaling the need to change habitual responses, according to a new study by researchers at New York University and UCLA. The findings, which show that self-rated liberalism is associated with the type of brain activity involved in regulating conflict between a habitual tendency and an alternative response, appear in the online edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience.
Previous studies have found that conservatives tend to be more persistent in their judgments and decision-making, while liberals are more likely to be open to new experiences. These differences are related to a process known as conflict monitoring-a mechanism for detecting when a habitual response is not appropriate for a new situation.

NYU > The Office of Public Affairs > Liberals More Likely Than Conservatives to Break From Habitual Responses, NYU Psychology Study Finds


These studies are many and consistant. Conservatives share psychological ticks.

Until recently, I did not consider conservatives useless. We used to able to trust them with the check book. Now that is gone and I'm not sure what use there is for conservatism in the new millenium.

 

[Avatar4321]

"All people are born alike - except Republicans and Democrats," quipped Groucho Marx, and in fact it turns out that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are evident in early childhood. In 1969, Berkeley professors Jack and Jeanne Block embarked on a study of childhood personality, asking nursery school teachers to rate children's temperaments. They weren't even thinking about political orientation.

Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects' childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. They found arresting patterns. As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3. The reason for the difference, the Blocks hypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of tradition and authority, and they found it in conservative politics.

Psychology Today Magazine, Jan/Feb 2007

So what you are trying to argue is that those people who are self reliant want the government involved in their lives while the fearful, indecisive people dont want the government in their lives and want to be free to live as they choose. The people who are resilent are the ones currently promoting a victim culture while those who are easily victimized are the ones telling people to suck it up and stop being victims.

Do you at all realize how stupid that sounds?

 

[Bfgrn]

Understanding the Contemporary Republican Party: Authoritarians Have Taken Control
Part One in a Three-Part Series
By JOHN W. DEAN
Wednesday, Sep. 05, 2007

This is the first in a three- part series of columns in which FindLaw columnist John Dean discusses his most recent book, Conservatives Without Conscience. - Ed.

Last year, I published Conservatives Without Conscience, but it struck me as a bit too self-promoting to use this space to talk about the book. The core of the book examines a half-century of empirical studies that had never been explained for the general reader. Not being a social scientist, I was thrilled when the book became a bestseller and countless political and social psychologists wrote to thank me for translating their work for the general reader.

At this point, I feel that this material is simply too crucial to understanding current politics and government for me to continue to ignore it in my columns for FindLaw. In addition, I want to refer to these findings throughout my commentary on the 2008 presidential and congressional elections, so it is time to set forth a few basics from this work.

Conservatives Without Conscience ("CWC") sought to understand the modern conservative movement, and in particular it's hard turn to the right during the past two-and-a-half decades. Conservatives have taken control of the Republican Party, and, in turn, the GOP has taken control of the government (all three branches, until 2006).

Who are these people? Of course, we know their names: Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush - to mention a few of the obvious. More importantly, what drives them? And, why do their compliant followers seem to never question or criticism them? Here, I am thinking of people like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter - to mention a few more of the conspicuous.

In this column, and those that follow, I hope to explain the rather remarkably information I have uncovered. It explained what for me what I had previously thought inexplicable. And based on my mail, it seems to have done the same for a lot of CWC readers. So let me see if I can extract a few key points that may help to understand what happened, and why it happened.

In the first two columns of this three-part series, I will offer some basics to provide context, and some of the relevant data. In the last of the three, I will drive home the points I believe are most relevant.

How Conservatives Think (Or Fail To Do So)

Most conservatives today do not believe that conservatism can or should be defined. They claim that it not an ideology, but rather merely an attitude. (I don't buy that, but that point is not relevant here.)

Conservatives once looked to the past for what it could teach about the present and the future. Early conservatives were traditionalists or libertarians, or a bit of both. Today, however, there are religious conservatives, economic conservatives, social conservatives, cultural conservatives, neoconservatives, traditional conservatives, and a number of other factions.

Within these factions, there is a good amount of inconsistency and variety, but the movement has long been held together through the power of negative thinking. The glue of the movement is in its perceived enemies. Conservatives once found a common concern with respect to their excessive concern about communism (not that liberals and progressive were not concerned as well, but they were neither paranoid nor willing to mount witch hunts). When communism was no longer a threat, the dysfunctional conservative movement rallied around its members' common opposition to anything they perceived as liberal. (This was, in effect, any point of view that differed from their own, whether it was liberal or not.)

To understanding conservatives thinking, it is important to examine not merely what conservatives believe, but also why they believe it. I found the answers to these two key questions in the remarkable body of empirical research work, almost a half-century in the making, undertaken by political and social psychologists who study authoritarian personalities.

Authoritarian Republicans: Understanding the Personality Type

While not all conservatives are authoritarians, all highly authoritarian personalities are political conservatives. To make the results of my rather lengthy inquiry very short, I found that it was the authoritarians who took control of the conservative movement in the 1980s, and then the Republican Party in the 1990s. Strikingly, these conservative Republicans - though hardly known for their timidity -- have not attempted to refute my report, because that is not possible. It is based on hard historical facts, which I set forth in considerable detail.

Authoritarian control continues to this day, so it is important to understand these people. There are two types of authoritarians: leaders (the few) and followers (the many). Study of these personalities began following World War II, when social psychologists asked how so many people could compliantly follow an authoritarian leader like Adolf Hitler and tolerate the Holocaust. Early research was based at the University of California, Berkeley, and it focused primarily on followers, culminating in the publication of a The Authoritarian Personality (1950) - a work that broadly described authoritarian personalities. The book was quite popular for decades, but as the Cold War ended, it had been on the shelf and ignored for a good while.

Given the strikingly conspicuous authoritarian nature of the contemporary conservative movement, and in turn, of the Republican Party, those familiar with the work of the Berkeley group thought it time to take another look at this work. For example, Alan Wolfe, a political science professor at Boston College, observed that the fact that "the radical right has transformed itself from a marginal movement to an influential sector of the contemporary Republican Party" called for a reexamination of this work. That is exactly what I did, although I did not discover Dr. Wolfe's call for it until well into my project.

The Authoritarian Personality relied heavily on Freudian psychology, which was not without critics, although neither Dr. Freud's work nor that of the Berkeley scientists has been proven incorrect. The weakness of this early work was the lack of empirical data backing up its conclusions. But in the half-century since its publication, that weakness has been removed, based on others' empirical work. A number of researchers have examined and reexamined the Berkeley Group's conclusions, and no one more thoroughly than Bob Altemeyer, a Yale and Carnegie-Mellon-trained social psychologist based at the University of Manitoba.

Professor Altemeyer's Findings

Altemeyer's study addressed flaws in the methodology and findings of The Authoritarian Personality, and he then proceeded to set this field of study on new footings by clarifying the study of authoritarian followers, people he calls "right-wing authoritarians." The provocative titles of his books -- Right-Wing Authoritarianism (1981), Enemies of Freedom (1988), and The Authoritarian Specter (1996) -- and of a few of his many articles found in scholarly journals -- such as "Highly Dominating, Highly Authoritarian Personalities" in the Journal of Social Psychology (2004) and "Why Do Religious Fundamentalists Tend to Be Prejudiced?" in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion (2003)--indicate the tenor of his research and the range of his interests.

Working my way through this material, with the help of a copy of the Idiot's Guide to Statistics, for Altemeyer writes for professional peers, I realized that, since I do not have a degree in psychology, I should get guidance to be certain I understood the material correctly, because it seemed to me that the information he had developed was exactly what I needed to comprehend the personalities now dominating the conservative movement and Republican Party. Altemeyer, who is the preeminent researcher in the field, graciously agreed to tutor me in his work. I introduced him to FindLaw readers in an earlier column, when I thought it would be interesting to get his take on the writings of the very authoritarian Tom DeLay, as he explained himself in No Retreat, No Surrender.

At the outset of Conservatives Without Conscience, I provided a quick and highly incomplete summary of Altemeyer's findings, explaining that his empirical testing revealed "that authoritarians are frequently enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, anti-equality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian, and amoral." To be clear, these are not assessments that Altemeyer makes himself about these people; rather, this is how those he has tested reveal themselves to be, when being anonymously examined.

Altemeyer has tested literally tens of thousands of first-year college students and their parents, along with others, including some fifteen hundred American state legislators, over the course of some three decades. He has tested in the South and North of the United States. There is no database on authoritarians that even comes close in its scope to that which he has created, and, more importantly, these studies are empirical data, not partisan speculation.

About a year after I published my outline of his work, Altemeyer prepared a digest of his research for general readers, The Authoritarians, which he has posted online for one and all to examine at no cost. In his book he walks readers thorough his research in a manner that requires neither an advanced degree nor a copy of the Idiot's Guide to Statistics.

In the next two columns, I will examine the implications of Altemeyer's findings, for they explain a great deal about the operations of the Republican Party as presently constituted.

John W. Dean, a FindLaw columnist, is a former counsel to the president.

 

[Annie]

"War on prosperity"?! That is rich!

Since when has paying one's fair share of the cost of maintaining our nation become a "war on prosperity"?

Well-to-do people actually use some government-provided goods and services far more than do poor people. How many poor people need air traffic controllers? Or the US Passport Office? Poor people are also less likely to use federal highways as much as more well-to-do people. Many poor people don't need government-sponsored FDIC protection because they have no bank accounts. Government-provided law enforcement agencies don't have to spend time keeping an eye on poor people's businesses. Poor people are also unlikely to use state and national parks as often as more well-to-do people.

What you are describing is extreme poverty, not your citizen of ordinary means who enjoys the benefits of all those things you seem to believe only wealthy people enjoy. And still even the poorest of those people have the potential to benefit when they find themselves capable of pulling themselves out of their situation. The average person of average means enjoys the benefits of all those things more than the average very wealthy person whom you decry, simply because there are more average people on the bell-curve of wealth. Sadly those people you are most concerned about are usually people with some mental/emotional/drug problem which keeps them in their situation.

Indeed, I notice the 'left' is ignoring the back and forth between myself and PC. Why? Well it doesn't fit their parameters. Geez, in some instances we are addressing the issues they are supposed to care about.

 

[Peejay]

More science about the conservative brain:

There are many possible reasons why conservatives and liberals react differently to disgust induction. Haidt’s research suggests that liberals and conservatives differ in regard to their moral emotions. In other words, conservatives and liberals base their moral judgments on different emotions. For example, liberals are more sensitive to empathy whereas conservatives are more sensitive to disgust.
One possible reason why conservatives become more prejudice when disgusted may be because they are more sensitive to disgust. But this does not help explain why liberals become less prejudice when they are disgusted.
It is possible that liberals are averse to prejudice. The aversive racism literature suggests that people avoid expressing prejudicial attitudes so they are not seen as bigots. Thus, liberals are disgusted at the prospect of being prejudice whereas conservatives are disgusted by homosexuality.

Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Brain: Why Does Disgust Induction Cause Conservatives to Become More Prejudice but Liberals Less Prejudice?

“[People displaying] measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism and gun control,” the team wrote in its report, to be published in the journal Science tomorrow.

“Individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism and the Iraq War.”

The psychology of conservatism and liberalism - Bodhi Tree Swaying


Northwestern University studied 128 church-going persons, half of whom were conservative, and half of whom were liberal. They found that

Political conservatives operate out of a fear of chaos and absence of order while political liberals operate out of a fear of emptiness.

Dan McAdams, study co-author and professor of human development and psychology at Northwestern, notes:

Social scientists long have assumed that liberals are more rational and less fearful than conservatives, but we find that both groups view the world as a dangerous place. It’s just that their fears emerge differently.

…Political conservatives envision a world without God in which baser human impulses go unchecked, social institutions (marriage, government, family) fall apart and chaos ensues. Liberals, on the other hand, envision a world without God as barren, lifeless, devoid of color and reasons to live.

Conservatives worry about societal collapse, liberals worry about a world without deep feelings and intense experiences.

Ladyblog » Blog Archive » The Fear-Based Psychology of Conservatism and Liberalism

"…[W]e consider evidence for and against the hypotheses that political conservatism is significantly associated with (1) mental rigidity and closed-mindedness, including (a) increased dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity, (b) decreased cognitive complexity, (c) decreased openness to experience, (d) uncertainty avoidance, (e) personal needs for order and structure, and (f) need for cognitive closure; (2) lowered self-esteem; (3) fear, anger, and aggression; (4) pessimism, disgust, and contempt; (5) loss prevention; (6) fear of death; (7) threat arising from social and economic deprivation; and (8) threat to the stability of the social system. We have argued that these motives are in fact related to one another psychologically, and our motivated social—cognitive perspective helps to integrate them. We now offer an integrative, meta-analytic

review of research on epistemic, existential, and ideological bases of conservatism."

Political Conservatism by Bryan Zepp Jamieson


The results are in, after years of research and the conclusion is what we suspected all along: conservatives are just scared pricks.

 

[edthecynic]

You CON$ just make this crap up out of thin air. According to the 2005 CBO report, the top 1% paid 27.6% of all federal taxes. You obviously are not counting all wealth or all taxes.

How Bush Widened The Wealth Gap
Today the top 1% of households receives more pretax income than the bottom 40%. And the distribution of wealth is even more lopsided. The top 1% of households owns nearly 40% of total household wealth -- more than the bottom 90% of households combined -- and earns half of all capital income. Income and wealth are more unevenly distributed among Americans than at any time since the Jazz Age of the 1920s.

According to the figures, the richest 1% reported 22% of the nation's total adjusted gross income in 2006. That is up from 21.2% a year earlier, and is the highest in the 19 years that the IRS has kept strictly comparable figures. The 1988 level was 15.2%. Earlier IRS data show the last year the share of income belonging to the top 1% was at such a high level as it was in 2006 was in 1929, but changes in measuring income make a precise comparison difficult.
The average tax rate in 2006 for the top 1%, based on adjusted gross income, was 22.8%, down slightly from 2005 and the fifth straight year of declines. The average tax rate of this group was 28.9% in 1996, and was 24% in 1988.
As the wealthiest Americans' share of income has risen, so has their share of the income-tax burden. The group paid 39.9% of all income taxes in 2006, compared with 27.6% in 1988."
From the WSJ, Richest Americans See
Their Income Share Grow
By JESSE DRUCKER
July 23, 2008; Page A3

Based on your attack of a completly checkable fact, you must be one of those worthless, whiney, ne'er-do-well liberals.
Would you like to retract your criticism?

Or someone who knows the difference between ADJUSTED income and total income as well as the difference between income taxes and all federal taxes.
So you unwittingly proved, just as I said, you are not counting all wealth or all fed taxes.
Would you care to retract your deliberate deception. Of course not, you are a crybaby CON$ervative and CON$ never ever admit the truth.

Mrs. Clinton Honest About Taxes
August 7, 2007
CALLER: And, you know, and the way our tax system works, we have an overly complex system, which in and of itself is a problem, but the way our tax system works and the way the tax laws are written, it's based on a few kind of like hinge numbers like adjusted gross income and taxable income, and while the soak the rich -- or however you choose to describe it -- really doesn't come down that way. It really comes down to much lower income levels.

RUSH: It does, exactly, and here's the dirty little secret if you ever to pull it off. It's hard. This is why most people don't understand the tax-the-rich business. You've got to structure your life so you have no "earned" income. I'm out of time. I'll explain that. There's a category called earned income versus other kinds of income. Earned income is what the income tax rate is on. That's how "the rich" do it. They don't have "earned" income.
END TRANSCRIPT

 

[Bfgrn]

"We are fighting today for our life, for our liberty, for our all, we cannot go on being led as we are. Somehow or other, we must get into the Government men who can match our enemies in fighting spirit, in daring, in resolution and in thirst for victory."~Leo Amery 1940, while staring at Chamberlain


Arthur Neville Chamberlain (18 March 1869 – 9 November 1940) was a British Conservative politician and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1937 to 1940.

 

[Annie]

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

In a simple experiment reported todayin the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

Study finds left-wing brain, right-wing brain - Los Angeles Times

To come to this conclusion the authors examined 88 different psychological studies conducted between 1958 and 2002 that involved 22,818 people from 12 different countries. They boiled that information down into a number of psychological attributes that are closely associated with people who are politically conservative.
Rigid and closed-minded
"Dogmatism has been found to correlate consistently with authoritarianism, political-economic conservatism, and the holding of right wing opinions," write the authors. Conversely, studies have found that conservatives in general have little tolerance for ambiguity. A fact that helps in decoding this statement that George W. Bush made in Genoa, Italy: "I know what I believe and I believe what I believe is right."

Conservatives Deconstructed by Joel Bleifuss

In a study that ponders the similarities between former President Ronald Reagan, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Rush Limbaugh, four American university researchers say they now have a better understanding of what makes political conservatives tick.

Underlying psychological motivations that mark conservatives are "fear and aggression, dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity; uncertainty avoidance; need for cognitive closure; and terror management," the researchers wrote in an article, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," recently published in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin.

Berkeley study links Reagan, Hitler

Liberals are more likely than are conservatives to respond to cues signaling the need to change habitual responses, according to a new study by researchers at New York University and UCLA. The findings, which show that self-rated liberalism is associated with the type of brain activity involved in regulating conflict between a habitual tendency and an alternative response, appear in the online edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience.
Previous studies have found that conservatives tend to be more persistent in their judgments and decision-making, while liberals are more likely to be open to new experiences. These differences are related to a process known as conflict monitoring-a mechanism for detecting when a habitual response is not appropriate for a new situation.

NYU > The Office of Public Affairs > Liberals More Likely Than Conservatives to Break From Habitual Responses, NYU Psychology Study Finds


These studies are many and consistant. Conservatives share psychological ticks.

Until recently, I did not consider conservatives useless. We used to able to trust them with the check book. Now that is gone and I'm not sure what use there is for conservatism in the new millenium.

Wow, I'm shocked, 2 MS and 3 BA's later, we can make the studies fit the malady. Zmog....

 

[Annie]

"We are fighting today for our life, for our liberty, for our all, we cannot go on being led as we are. Somehow or other, we must get into the Government men who can match our enemies in fighting spirit, in daring, in resolution and in thirst for victory."~Leo Amery 1940, while staring at Chamberlain


Arthur Neville Chamberlain (18 March 1869 – 9 November 1940) was a British Conservative politician and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1937 to 1940.

LOL! Good job of getting rid of the Gladstone quote in your signature. You didn't even give me a thank you rep for that. Ingrate.

 

[Indiana Oracle]

That's the whole problem with trying to put up a 'manifesto' from any political persuasion. If the left did the same, they'd find some that agree and disagree. Truth is, we speak for ourselves, with our own prejudices and special interests.

Nicely done. Just a few comments.

In item #1, what types of laws do we want? Few, I hope, and when necessary. I don't believe in special laws to empower one group over another. Nor laws to tax AIG execs 90% of the bonuses they were contractually promised.

Item #2, 'change should be gradual," to avoid unintended consequences. Nowhere do I say that there should be no change. Although I do not have an opinion about gay 'rights,' many gay individuals would argue with you unless their right to marriage as they define it.

Item #8, Data informs policy. Feeling is not knowing. What science is being imposed? In the northeast, there is no question of whether or not to teach evolution. My science teacher explained "creationism" and said it was our choice what to believe, but he would make sure we were conversant with the evidence for evolution. And he did. It is not the 'right' imposing versions of science, global warming is leftist nonsense. And they will brook no disagreement from 'deniers.'

Item #9, you are incorrect vis-a-vis wealth: Taxation. It is the left's policy to tax, the answer to every problem, and the hallmark of the Democrat party. Have you asked yourself this question: when has a 'stimulus' historically worked on a recession, and were is the money going to come from in the next decade?

See, even those of us who basically 'agree' are talking past each other, imagine if we disagreed?

#1 agreed. The 90% was a disaster from the get go. Even more amusing was Fannie and Freddie retention bonuses. However, that won't restore confidence for those working and vilified for $1 a year salaries. Another example of unintended consequences and the inexperience/hubris of the administration.

#2 our point of disagreement was with 'gradual.' Some items, such as Civil Rights, were 100 years overdue and getting worse. Nothing gradual there. If it took arrests, it was worth it.

#8 There is nothing 'scientific' about creationism. It's biblical based and not science. There is no 'choice' here. Granted many believe in it, then again there are those that believe in other non-science based things. Me? I believe in a just and rational God. I don't think he'd/she'd give us the ability to reason, expecting us not to use it.

#9 We're talking apples and oranges here. I was referring to fund raising. The Dems out raised, by a lot.

Annie --
Usually agree with you but #8 needs to be delved into. It takes work and ends up in the area of philosophial argument, but its out there.

Here is one source: The Kalam Cosmological Argument: A Summary
The Kalam Csomological Argument: A Summary

 

[Bfgrn]

"All people are born alike - except Republicans and Democrats," quipped Groucho Marx, and in fact it turns out that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are evident in early childhood. In 1969, Berkeley professors Jack and Jeanne Block embarked on a study of childhood personality, asking nursery school teachers to rate children's temperaments. They weren't even thinking about political orientation.

Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects' childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. They found arresting patterns. As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3. The reason for the difference, the Blocks hypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of tradition and authority, and they found it in conservative politics.

Psychology Today Magazine, Jan/Feb 2007

So what you are trying to argue is that those people who are self reliant want the government involved in their lives while the fearful, indecisive people dont want the government in their lives and want to be free to live as they choose. The people who are resilent are the ones currently promoting a victim culture while those who are easily victimized are the ones telling people to suck it up and stop being victims.

Do you at all realize how stupid that sounds?

>>> Ironic that the right sees NOTHING intrusive in the Patriot Act, wire taps without warrants or a criminal justice system that puts people with mental handicaps to DEATH... AND...IF you were a libertarian conservative you'd have some credibility...BUT, judging by your quotes, you fail that challenge...

"Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the Republican party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them."
Barry Goldwater (R) – Late Senator & Father of the Conservative movement

 

[CueUp]

From Justin Quinn, the Guide to Conservative Politcs, the most important conservative issues.

1) Traditional family values and the sancticty of marriage.

2) A small, non-invasive government.

3) A strong national defense focused on protection and the fight against terrorism.

4) A commitment to faith and religion.

5) The right to life for every human being.

How do you have 3 without infringing on 2? That's wholly contradictory. That's where these newer so called conservatives were led astray. The only thing matters is to protect the government from infringing on rights of people and to follow the Constitution word for word.

Spoken like a Ron Paul Libertarian.

Indeed. However, many Libertarians (I hazard to guess) don't agree with Ron Paul on this issue. I would also suggest that there are certain legitimate functions of government supported by the Constitution (and which, therefore, *should* be supported by Libertarians) and among those legitimate functions are national defense and national security.

 

[CueUp]

In a study that ponders the similarities between former President Ronald Reagan, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Rush Limbaugh, four American university researchers say they now have a better understanding of what makes political conservatives tick.

Underlying psychological motivations that mark conservatives are "fear and aggression, dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity; uncertainty avoidance; need for cognitive closure; and terror management," the researchers wrote in an article, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," recently published in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin.

I just had to comment on this one. See the highlighted portion above. Doesn't that sort of...well...tend to throw the objectivity of the whole thing into the crapper? It would be rather like finding a "study" that starts out with the premise that goes something like this: "In a study that ponders the similarities between former President Bill Clinton, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung and Al Franken, four Heritage Foundation researchers say they now have a better understanding of what makes political liberals tick".