Conservatives and Liberals experience the world differently

When someone reacts to something conservatives say by asking what universe they exist in, the question may make sense beyond just being snark. Science is beginning to determine that liberals and conservatives really do live in different universes. This is a quick report from Wired.

Research has already shown that, compared to liberals, conservatives display heightened responses to threatening images. Michael Dodd of the University of Nebraska wanted to explore this in finer detail: He showed 46 left- or right-leaning Nebraskans a series of images alternately disgusting (spiders on faces, open wounds) and appealing (smiling children, cute rabbits.) Dodd's team found that conservatives reacted most strongly to negative images, and liberals most strongly to positive photographs.

Then he showed them pictures of well-known politicians. The same patterns held: Conservatives displayed more distaste than liberals for politicians they disliked, while liberals felt more positive than conservatives about politicians they liked. Given these and other findings, wrote Dodd's team, "those on the political right and those on the political left may simply experience the world differently."

That sounds pessimistic, but it doesn't have to be. It can be a healthy reminder that people with whom we disagree aren't stupid or irrational; they just have different perspectives.

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Image: Each graph depicts the arousal response of conservatives (triangle dots) and liberals (square dots) to images that are disgusting or appealing (left set) and pictures of opposing politicians (right set). (Dodd et al./Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B)

Citation: "The political left rolls with the good and the political right confronts the bad: connecting physiology and cognition to preferences." By Michael D. Dodd, Amanda Balzer, Carly M. Jacobs, Michael W. Gruszczynski, Kevin B. Smith and John R. Hibbing. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Vol. 367 No. 1589, March 5, 2012.

Where is the national Democratic Party when it is needed to battle national Republican overreach?

Those of us who feel that the national Democratic Party seems unled and unmanaged in the face of the massive Republican attacks on the government and on unions probably have good reason to feel that way. We may have felt that with a Democratic President there should be some Democratic (if not progressive) push-back to the current Republican overreach at a national level. The New York Time has a good article today on the new management process in the White House since Rham Emmanuel and David Alexrod have been replaced by William M. Daley and Jay Carney. There's a lot interesting in the article about the different type of management style the White House feels in currently required, but the following provides a reason for me to feel the national Democratic Party is unled.

Frustrated Democratic lawmakers and interest groups have been railing to White House aides that Mr. Obama is forfeiting opportunities to draw the public’s attention to what the Republicans’ cuts would mean for programs popular with most voters, including the coveted independents. The aides respond that the time will come for Mr. Obama to join the attack, should Republicans press their agenda and refuse to compromise.

“One of the lessons of the last two years is that if the president weighs in all the time, it’s less impactful,” said Dan Pfeiffer, who remains as the communications director. “But if he weighs in at a moment of his choosing when the public is paying attention, it will be more influential.”

Similarly, the White House mostly has sought to stay out of the fray in Madison, Wis., and other state capitals where Republican governors are battling public employee unions and Democratic lawmakers over collective bargaining rights. When West Wing officials discovered that the Democratic National Committee had mobilized Mr. Obama’s national network to support the protests, they angrily reined in the staff at the party headquarters.

It is clear that the Obama White House sees its job as reelecting Obama in 2012, not leading the national democratic party -- and definitely not leading a progressive counterrevolution against the massive Republican overreach that is currently going on. The may be right to believe that.

The problem is that the White House squashed efforts by the DNC to join the fray. The White House sees the DNC as an institution that belongs to them to be used for Obama's reelection. The problem is, this leaves the Democratic Party with NO institutions that have the job of coordinating the national party in the clearly needed national response to the present current attacks on America and its workers.

This is a big problem. The Republicans seem to have national party coordinating institutions, the Democrats do not. An organized and led organization will almost always defeat a larger but unled force. I see no immediate solution to it.

The Political Power of Narrative Trumps that of Fact

I've been looking at the social power of narratives for a while, and you seen to get the idea over quite well. Here is a Scientific American Mind article which supports the power of storytelling: The Secrets of Storytelling: Why we Love a Good Yarn.

Politically a good narrative trumps a lot of powerful facts because that is the way the human mind works. That's true even when the story being told is blatantly fiction.

Since one of the major focuses of a liberal education is to overcome the desire for a good story when the facts demonstrate that it is false, we liberals are trained to downgrade the importance of narrative. But the major religions are all transmitted through narratives. So is the American conservative movement - certainly it has been since Reagan started telling the Welfare Queen story.

Another example is Ayn Rand's book "The Fountainhead" which is the narrative soul of Libertarianism in America today. Fact? Not a bit, but any facts that are presented to demonstrate its falsity literally bounce off of the narrative power of that book. Try arguing with a committed libertarian and you will see that there is no rationality in their position.

Tribalism is passed on through narrative, not through any form of science or reliable truth. For a modern example of such tribalism Michael Wolraich points out (in his TPM Cafe essay How a Story Seduced the Right Wing) that the conservative movement is a tribal group held together through a series of narratives.

When I started trying to understand the nature of narrative I was referred to an essay "Notes on the Origins and Life of Narrative" in Reynolds Price's excellent book "A Palpable God." It is the best discussion of narrative I have ever found. The rest of the book is Price's translations of various books of the Old Testament which he presented as outstanding example of narratives. The desert religions are based on the tribalism carried in those stories. I found the same narrative power in an excellent book called "The Teachings of Buddha" by Paul Carus. Again the stories were told and refined by storytellers (because of their narrative power) for centuries before ever being written down.

These days many of the best narratives in America are crafted by advertisers and PR people. The conservatives have adopted narratives as ways of communicating and attracting others to join their tribe. Rush Limbaugh crafts narratives and tries them out on his audience, then modifies them to improve the power to get people to do what he wants.

It's going to be difficult for liberals to fight the political battle based on mere facts and science. The human mind prefers narratives to determine how to behave - or to vote.

[I haven't read it yet, but Michale Wolraich recently published a book on this subject entitled Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies about the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior into a Raging Homosexual.]

Right-wing "outgunned" on the Internet

This is a rather illuminating comment

Erick Erickson from RedState said that on the right, the focus has been “on punditry as opposed to activism.” “It has been focused on bloggers trying to be the next Rush Limbaugh or the next columnist, not on urging readers to call members of Congress or go to tea parties,” he added.
[Source: Think Progress]

Do you think the distinction could be the different mindset between individualists out to make it on their own against people who belong to a community and contribute to making it better?

If that's the case then the right-wingers simply cannot operate successfully using the Internet as a way of linking their community without changing the individual mindset of their members. Until they make that change, the Internet will remain an advantage for the left. But if they do make that change, they will become left-wingers themselves.

That leaves the right-wingers with only one way to fight the advantage the Internet gives the left-wingers - somehow deny the left-wingers the use of the Internet. Legal, sabotage, whatever. But it will not be the kind of highly effective asset for the right-wing that the left-wing already has found it to be.

Are our political leaders trapped in the past?

Sen. Ben Nelson is threatening that the "centrists" may kill the health care reform initiative rather than let it go forward.



Nelson is aware that the Democratic "centrists" killed Clinton's effort at health care reform in 1993. He thinks that history is predictive. He'd better be wrong.

If Nelson and the centrists can kill health care reform, then the Democratic Party is as doomed as the conservative Republicans have already proven themselves to be. That means that both major parties will go into the November 2010 election after being completely out of touch with the voters and quite discredited. With both current major parties self-discredited by the 2010 election then what comes out of November 2010 is simply unknowable. But the public is going to latch onto something. This is the kind of event that revolutions are made of. In the extreme such a political event led to the 1917 takeover of what became the Soviet Union, and the 1933 Nazi takeover of Germany. But it is also what Franklin Delano Roosevelt headed off quite effectively during the 1930's.

It might be time right now to start building a true Progressive party outside the two major parties. The media won't figure this out for at least two election cycles. The conservatives, with their backwards view of politics as being a move to what was good in the past, cannot take advantage of such a situation. Progressives, however, are more capable of dealing with such s changing political and social situation.

This is, of course, pure "Blue Sky" thinking, but the problem seems to be that both parties are mired in the experience of the Congressional Leadership with the past, but facing a society and economy that is moving rapidly into the (currently undescribed) future.

Why the right can't win in the blogosphere

I've been reading several places where the guys over at RedState think that the Liberals have the effective on-line infrastructure and for some reason the Conservatives don't. Atrios reported it again today. So I thought I'd offer my explanation.

The right wing is inherently authoritarian. Their media exists to get the message out to the faithful That what their kind of political ideology is. So they tell the readers what to believe and provide vignettes to support those beliefs. It's clearly a top down model. (In fact it is very much like a significant part of organized religion.) If someone questions the message, then their questions are to be suppressed as dissident and rebellious. It really doesn't matter if others see facts that don't match the pronouncements from the authority. Both TV and talk radio are well suited to this model. You can say whatever you want, and if someone questions it, then they are either screened out before getting on the are or they are easily cut off before going very far, after which they are ridiculed by the host. The ridicule enforces the appropriate socially expected behavior of people who want to belong to that group. This is especially effective in groups that also portray their members as an embattled minority constantly under attack. Such individuals do not have another group to join other than the oppressors, who they expect will reject them.

The left wing consists of people who want to know "Why?" But then they go beyond that and search for exceptions, generally to poke holes in what is being said. The intent is to improve the explanation given.

In short, the conservatives have a model in which "The Answers" are broadcast and in which questioning is repressed. The liberals have a model in which an identified situation or problem is identified and tentative solutions are thrown out for discussion. Then if the original message is not adequate, it is expected to be improved on - assuming it was not just wrong in the first place. The conservatives see all the various questions and objections as being dissident, rebellious and disrespectful of the authority.

When conservatives attempt to question a message or idea on a liberal blog, they resort to the ideology which they know to be true. If it runs counter to well-discussed liberal ideas which have been proven in both discussion and in tests against reality to be true, then the conservatives catch a lot of flack for what they present. They generally view this as being rejected. If someone attempts to offer explanations of why the conservative dogma does not work, if the individual will analyze the explanation and respond to it in a analytical manner and identify where the flaws are in their own ideas as well as those presented, then they can fit in on liberal blogs and such. But if as is most usual, they simply respond by repeating conservative dogma with no effort compare and contrast realistically, then they actually will be rejected. The term for that is usually "troll."

The liberal blogosphere is set up to encourage debate and to reject time-wasters who are there simply to sell their dogma. For people who are looking for workable solutions to novel problems, the ideas and debate are necessary. The trolls are time wasters.

My previous post about the reaction to the 2005 presentation by Economist Raghuram Rajan is a case in point. He was rather roundly rejected for not being sufficiently deferential to the economic genius to whom the meeting at the Kansas City Fed’s Jackson Hole symposium was dedicated - Alan Greenspan. The economy was chugging along and growing reasonably well and Wall Street was making a mint because of the brilliant leadership of the free market guru Allan Greenspan. There was no room for dissent to the prevailing wisdom.

Yeah, right. And here were are now in the Recession that officially started in December 2007, and Alan Greenspan has admitted that his views on the self-correcting nature of the unrestricted and unregulated financial markets were wrong.

So what brought the economic party to a screeching halt? And more important, what do we do about it now? It's clear from the chaotic decisions made by Henry Paulson, Sec. of Treasury, and the less chaotic but no better informed decisions of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, no one really knows right now. One thing is clear, though. The answers to those questions will not be first filtered through the free market fundamentalist ideology and work. Those ideologically pure "answers" are largely what caused the current mess.

What I haven't seen on the right wing is any effort to actually dig into the problem and to propose solutions that might work. At best they offer prepackaged ideologically approved "solutions" with no convincing reasoning behind them. The liberal blogosphere doesn't have the answer yet, either, but they are getting to explanations of what caused the problem. From that workable (not perfect) solutions will ultimately be developed.

This is just one example. The top down authoritarian Internet media will give canned ideological responses and attack anyone who does not conform to the ideology. The liberal groups are searching for explanations and solutions and are open to things that are new because the current economic situation is quite unusually and according to the orthodox and free market fundamentalist ideas simply could not happen.

Is it any wonder that the left wing blogosphere is a lot more lively and active than the propaganda strewn right wing blogosphere? It offers puzzles with the possibility of real solutions that can be applied in real situations, not just frequently repeated canned and unquestioned conservative dogma, attacks on liberals and whining about how victimized conservatives are.

Will a win by Obama result in both parties moving to the right?

Kevin Drum suggests that an Obama win Tuesday is going to push both the Republican Party and the Democratic party more to the right. The political losses for the Republicans will be among the more moderate Republicans, leaving the extremist right survivors in safe seats, while the Democratic wins in previously Republican districts are going to bring in more
Blue Dog” or conservative right-wing Democrats.

Which "right" will the Republicans move towards? There are at least two major directions the Republican right are moving, and they don't get along with each other well.

One direction is the small government - no regulation right, and the other is the religious right. It was the alliance of these two groups into the Reagan coalition that has given the conservatives political dominance since the Reagan era. At that time the Goldwater conservatives joined with the Christian Coalition to dominate national politics.

But what we saw in the 2007 - 2008 Republican presidential primaries was that those two groups no longer support the same candidates. Romney couldn't get the support of the religious right, Huckabee couldn't get anyone but the religious right, and the Ron Paul libertarians (a consistent 10%) couldn't accept either group.

In the meantime the traditional good-government pro-civil-rights Republicans no longer have political representation through the Republican Party. They disappeared with Lincoln Chaffee; Olympia Snowe and Chris Dodd linger on. Their descendants make up the Northeastern Democratic Party now.

The shorthand "moving to the Right" has become quite meaningless ideologically as the conservative Republican Party has fractionated into different groups of extremists. About the only thing the various groups making up the Republican Party have in common now is an extremist willingness to use authoritarian powers of government to get their own way and the willingness to spend government money corruptly to gain and maintain power.

Kevin’s analysis is a logical conclusion based on the older model of a left - right linear continuum which does not, in fact, exist. It was an artifact of the Cold War, and as a model explained the differences between American democracy and Socialists authoritarianism to some extent. But today the left – right model is as imaginary as the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It no longer explains significant political and economic realities because the Cold War is over and the institutions based on that bipolar world are gone. That means that Kevin’s analysis doesn’t work.

The older stability will be replaced by a new one when new institutions are created that reflect the new political and economic realities. Obama’s anticipated win is clearly being driven to a great extent by his ground game and his broad-based fundraising. His fundraising has permitted the development of a nationwide political organization, one which represents the moderate views of average people. This contrasts with the conservative think tanks which represent wealthy extremists and gives average people a way to effectively block those extremists.

After the election Obama’s organization is going to shrink, but it is not going away. Too many people have been trained, mobilized and motivated, and winning causes people to do the same thing that led to winning. Since the organization is funded primarily by a broad group of small donors it will be a moderate organization which will contrast to the narrow extremist organizations that make up the rightwing think tanks have been created since the Reagan era by wealthy donors. The Obama organization is the framework for a new institutional basis for American politics.

The Republicans and Democrats are not likely to both move “to the right” nationally as a result of this election. What is much more likely is that both parties are going to reorganize themselves. The Democrats are going to establish new institutions that allow them to effectively represent the majority of moderate voters, while the Republicans are going to continue to break up into competing extremist and generally authoritarian groups which will decline in political importance. After about two elections there will be Democrats who disagree with the dominant Democratic positions and who will break away to form new competing parties. Some will move over to the surviving Republican organizations which will become more moderate after the continued losses they are going to experience.

At least that’s what I think is most likely to happen. That’s on a national basis. Locally, of course, remnants of the older party structures will remain for at least a decade, probably longer. The development of a new political stability is going to take a while, and the Recession is going to last a number of years to scramble that development.

Found this questionnaire at Hullabaloo

My Liberal Identity:

You are a New Left Hipster, also known as a MoveOn.org liberal, a Netroots activist, or a Daily Show fanatic. You believe that if we really want to defend American values, conservatives must be exposed, mocked, and assailed for every fanatical, puritanical, warmongering, Constitution-shredding ideal for which they stand.

Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com

This is a really neat form of marketing a book to people on the Internet.

Of course, I find the term "hipster" in the title of category that I fit into a bit insulting, but someone younger then me might not. The answer selections for each question are forced choice, so even if you feel that two might apply, you are required to choose only one. With the very few questions asked, changing a single answer probably changes your category.

Just for fun I went back and chose my second choice on some of the questions. Here is the result:

My Liberal Identity:

You are a Social Justice Crusader, also known as a rights activist. You believe in equality, fairness, and preventing neo-Confederate conservative troglodytes from rolling back fifty years of civil rights gains.

Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com

I'd say both are accurate.

Roger Cohen - Your ideas don't matter to society.

Ezra Klein has read NY Times OpEd columnist Roger Cohen's complaint that he gets no credit with Liberals for being merely a liberal hawk. Instead he is lumped in with and accused of being that most despicable of American political labels now, a "NeoCon."

His complaint? Anyone today who supports American military intervention is derided as a NeoCon. He claims that he is not. His is a nuanced pro-military intervention position in which he merely supports intervention in Serbia, but does not go along with the NeoCons.

Ezra takes that whine apart beautifully.

...the liberal hawks should pay attention to a scolding Tom Wilkinson (in the movie The Last Kiss) gives to the solipsistic Zach Braff. "What you feel only matters to you," he spits. "It's what you do, to the people around you, that matters. That's all that matters." [Snip]

American politics isn't about you. It's not about your ideas, or your personal vision of the world, or your purity. Contemporary politics is not a landscape awaiting your morality plays and exhibitions of ethical decisiveness. It is not yours.

It is the impact of your ideas, and your commentary, that matters. That's all that matters. Yet years after their sustained dance of personal regard and self involvement helped blind the liberal hawks to the reality of George W. Bush's war, one of them, Roger Cohen, is retreading the same ground, wondering why his continued advocacy for war, (or at least continual attacks on its opponents) is folded into the critiques of the neocons.

Here's why: Roger Cohen is not president. George W. Bush is. And until Roger Cohen's foreign policy vision integrates itself with an understanding of American power, and how ideas interact with the current administration, he is, effectively, a neoconservative, or, worse, an enabler of the neoconservatives who's able to advocate for their policy agenda without needing to answer for their failures.

Cohen may not, personally, think like Bill Kristol. But he certainly writes like him. "Neocon, for many, has become shorthand for neocon-Zionist conspiracy," he says, naming no names, and instead offering a simple, generalized accusation of anti-semitism against all those who question the neoconservatives. "Baghdad is closer to Sarajevo than the left has allowed," he writes, obliterating the difference between a bombing campaign undertaken to end an ongoing genocide and a ground invasion undertaken to unearth weapons that didn't exist, overturn a regime we couldn't replace, and forcibly impose a system of governance that lacked foundations. "MoveOn.org is the Petraeus-insulting face of never-set-foot-in-a-war-zone liberalism," he scoffs, having never, himself, fought in a war, but nevertheless adopting the authority of those who have.

These are not arguments. They are smears. [Snip]

Cohen would no doubt respond that he is not a neoconservative, but a liberal interventionist. "Distinction matters," he protests. "The neocon taste for American empire is not the liberal hawk’s belief in the bond between American power and freedom’s progress." But this war, and any that occur until January 2009, will not be conducted by Roger Cohen. They will be conducted by neoconservatives animated by a taste for American empire. And so the distinction does not matter, because any hawkish actions will be undertaken and overseen by those on the wrong side of it. Roger Cohen may feel like he is a liberal hawk, and thus distinct. But what Roger Cohen feels does not matter, because Roger Cohen does not control any branch of the American military. Who he empowers, and which actors in American politics find their ideas legitimized by his columns, is all that matters. And in that, he is worse than a neoconservative. He's a liberal hawk who knows better, but whose interest in writing about his own virtue overwhelms his judgments concerning the actual actions of those who wield power. He is not a neoconservative. He is a narcissist.

In short - the NeoCons and Bushies have thoroughly screwed up America and the world with their militaristic nationalist fantasies. They clearly have not learned how they screwed up. Instead, they are trying to find out who prevented their success and want to kill whoever that is, not accepting the clear reality that they are themselves their own worst enemy and the source of their defeats.

It is not the liberals, the anti-war Democrats, the al Qaeda members or the Sunni Wahabbi terrorists who are causing their grand plans to collapse into dust. It is their own blindness, ignorance and stupidity that is defeating the Bush people. And as long as the Republicans retain control of the White House, this situation will continue.

There is no "nuanced liberal war hawk position" that can get around the fact that the NeoCons and incompetent Bushies control any possible military action at this time and that will remain the case until February 2009. Any "liberal war hawk" who suggests using military options to the current incompetent crew is one of them.

No amount of whining from Cohen that he didn't mean to support the incompetence of the current leaders will detract from the fact that support of Cheney/Bush/NeoCons means their failures are those of their supporters also.

Thanks, Ezra. Extremely clear and most accurate. "What you feel only matters to you," ... "It's what you do, to the people around you, that matters. That's all that matters."