On Third Culture, Jonathan Haidt poses the question, “What makes people vote Republican?” He then goes on and tries to answer it. This is not intended to be a pro-Republican essay, in fact, he seems to conclude that voting Republican is some kind of aberration, exposing people with some kind of dysfunctional rationale. Haidt is a professor at the University of Virginia, where he researches morality and culture.

I wasn’t as impressed with his essay as I was the replies by the likes of Sam Harris and Michael Shermer. I think Shermer makes excellent points and I’ve reprinted much of this below. He points out some key distinctions in this discussion, namely points I have expressed that we have biases that we often don’t recognize that diminishes the legitimacy of our arguments and that we tend too often to categorize others and presume to know what they are thinking based on stereotypes. This leads to personal attacks that encourage divisiveness and unfair/inaccurate characterizations. I guess maybe liberals really don’t understand what makes conservatives tick – maybe they just don’t get it after all. And, Republicans, as hard as they try, can’t think like a liberal, so each side thinks the other is crazy. (Does this mean Republicans are from Mars, and Democrats are from Venus??)

The Conscious of the Conservative
Michael Shermer

Two cheers for Jonathan Haidt’s essay. At long last a liberal academic social scientist has recognized (and had the courage to put into print) the inherent bias built into the study of political behavior—that because Democrats are so indisputably right and Republicans so unquestionably wrong, conservatism must be a mental disease, a flaw in the brain, a personality disorder that leads to cognitive malfunctioning. Thus, Haidt is mostly right when he asks us to move beyond such “diagnoses” and remember “the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats ‘just don’t get it,’ this is the ‘it’ to which they refer.”

I allocate two (instead of three) cheers for Haidt’s commentary because I think he does not go far enough. The liberal bias in academia is so entrenched that it becomes the political water through which the liberal fish swim they don’t even notice it. Even the question “What makes people vote Republican?” hints at something amiss in the mind of the conservative, along the lines of “Why do people believe weird things?” As Haidt notes, the standard liberal line is that people vote Republican because they are “cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death.” A typical example of this characterization can be found in a famous 2003 paper published in the prestigious journal Psychological Bulletin by the New York University social psychologist John Jost and his colleagues, entitled “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” in which they argue that conservatives suffer from “uncertainty avoidance,” “need for order, structure, closure,” and “dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity,” all of which leads to “resistance to change” and “endorsement of inequality.”

It is not the data of these scientists that I am challenging so much as it is the characterizations on which the data were collected. We could just as easily characterize Democrats and liberals as suffering from a host of equally malevolent mental states: a lack of moral compass that leads to an inability to make clear ethical choices, an inordinate lack of certainty about social issues, a pathological fear of clarity that leads to indecisiveness, a naive belief that all people are equally talented, and a blind adherence in the teeth of contradictory evidence that culture and environment determine one’s lot in society and therefore it is up to the government to remedy all social injustices. As all conservatives know, liberals are a bunch of sandle-wearing, tree-hugging, whale-saving, hybrid-driving, trash-recycling, peaceniks, flip-floppers and bed-wetters.

This is a crass, unfair, and inaccurate characterization, of course, and that’s my point. Once you set up the adjectives in the form of operationally defined personality traits and cognitive styles, it’s easy to collect the data to support them. The flaw is in the characterization process itself. Two recent examples can be found in the 2008 book The Political Mind by Berkeley cognitive scientist George Lakoff and the 2007 book The Political Brain by Emory University psychologist Drew Westen. The tropes are familiar: liberals are generous to a fault (“bleeding hearts”), rational, intelligent, optimistic, and appeal to voters’ reason through cogent arguments; conservatives are stingy (“heartless”), dour, and dim-witted authoritarians who appeal to voters’ emotions through threat and fear-mongering. But conservatives win most elections because of their Machiavellian manipulation of voters’ emotional brains.

None of this is true. Although Republicans defeated Democrats 25 to 20 in the 45 Presidential elections from 1828 to 2004, in the Senate Democrats outscored Republicans 3395 to 3323 in contesting 6832 seats from 1855 to 2006, and in the House Democrats trounced Republicans 15,363 to 12,994 in the 27,906 seats contested from 1855-2006.

Further, according to the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Surveys, 1972-2004, 44 percent of people who reported being “conservative” or “very conservative” said they were “very happy” versus only 25 percent of people who reported being “liberal” or “very liberal.” A 2007 Gallup poll found that 58 percent of Republicans versus only 38 percent of Democrats said that their mental heath is “excellent.” One reason may be that conservatives are so much more generous than liberals, giving 30 percent more money (even when controlled for income), donating more blood, and logging more volunteer hours. And it isn’t because conservatives have more expendable income. The working poor give a substantially higher percentage of their incomes to charity than any other income group, and three times more than those on public assistance of comparable income poverty is not a barrier to charity, but welfare is. One explanation for these findings is that conservatives believe charity should be private (through religion) whereas liberals believe charity should be public (through government).

Why are academic social scientists so wrong about conservatives? It is, I believe, because almost all of them are liberals! A 2005 study by the George Mason University economist Daniel Klein, using voter registrations, found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans among the faculty by a staggering ratio of 10 to 1 at the University of California, Berkeley and by 7.6 to 1 at Stanford University. In the humanities and social sciences the ratio was 16 to 1 at both campuses (30 to 1 among assistant and associate professors). In some departments, such as anthropology and journalism, there wasn’t a single Republican to be found. The ratio for all departments in all colleges and universities throughout the U.S., says Klein, is 8 to 1 Democrats over Republicans. Smith College political scientist Stanley Rothman and his colleagues found a similar bias in a 2005 national study: only 15 percent professors describe themselves as conservative, compared to 72 percent who said they were liberal (80 percent in humanities and social sciences).

Why do people vote Republican? Because they believe their lives and the lives of all Americans will be better for it. And as often as not they are right.

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