Why Conservatives Are… Conservative

Ten years ago, it was wildly controversial to talk about psychological differences between liberals and conservatives. Today, it's becoming hard not to.

You could be forgiven for not having browsed yet through the latest issue of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. If you care about politics, though, you'll find a punchline therein that is pretty extraordinary.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences employs a rather unique practice called "Open Peer Commentary": An article of major significance is published, a large number of fellow scholars comment on it, and then the original author responds to all of them. The approach has many virtues, one of which being that it lets you see where a community of scholars and thinkers stand with respect to a controversial or provocative scientific idea. And in the latest issue of the journal, this process reveals the following conclusion: A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics.

That's a big deal. It challenges everything that we thought we knew about politics—upending the idea that we get our beliefs solely from our upbringing, from our friends and families, from our personal economic interests, and calling into question the notion that in politics, we can really change (most of us, anyway).

In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets—centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns—would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology.

The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. "One possibility," they write, "is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene," when it would have been super-helpful in preventing you from getting killed. (The Pleistocene epoch lasted from roughly 2.5 million years ago until 12,000 years ago.)

There is by now evidence from a variety of laboratories around the world using a variety of methodological techniques leading to the virtually inescapable conclusion that the cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite different. This research consistently finds that conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemic concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety.

All of this matters, of course, because we still operate in politics and in media as if minds can be changed by the best honed arguments, the most compelling facts. And yet if our political opponents are simply perceiving the world differently, that idea starts to crumble. Out of the rubble just might arise a better way of acting in politics that leads to less dysfunction and less gridlock…thanks to science.

Recent Republican and Conservative Convocations

Recent Republican and Conservative convocations have showed one general thing. Those who pass for thinkers and leaders of these intertwined movements think they can keep doing the same things but attain improved outcome. With the prominent except of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, most Republicans, after sifting through the debris of November 6, think they need new spokespeople and better packaging. 

The lone thing standing between Republicans and the great Reagan landslides of 1980 and 1984 is them. This is a sad commentary on once noble movements. Republican and Conservative “leaders” believe 21st Century Americans are coming up to embrace 10th Century stands on social matters and science, and blustery vague pronouncements on government spending. Does any rational person think today’s Republicans and conservatives stand the slightest resemblance to those who rallied around Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan? Those two icons would not have ended in the top ten in the 2012 Iowa Caucus or South Carolina primary.

What made the success of late 20th Century Republicanism and conservatism was not just charismatic and eloquent candidates. After World War II, the Foundation for Economic Education and its publication The Freeman (1946), the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (1953), and National Review (1955) formed a triad of scholarly forums where the great thinkers of 20th Century conservatism talked about issues. Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, Frank Meyer, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Heyak, Milton Friedman, James Burnham, and countless other great minds, applied the principles of the Enlightenment (1650-1789) and 19th Century liberalism to modern challenges. This three hundred year provenance of reason, critical thinking, scientific inquiry, and the nature of man and his relationship to the state formed a solid foundation for philosophical exploration. It is tough to go wrong using John Locke, Isaac Newton, Denis Diderot, Charles-Louis Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and America’s Founding Fathers, as touch stones for civil discourse on the function of government in society.

Sadly, today’s conservative touch stones are Karl Rove, Dick Morris, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity. The forums are soundbites on Fox News and Talk Radio. Today’s activists came of age under George W. Bush’s NeoCon global adventurism, theocratic government activism, and opportunistic federal spending. They view the libertarian/conservative fusionism of Goldwater/Reagan through this clouded lens. The Republican and conservative movements have become what Russell Kirk once stated he despised a party of “millenarian ideas of pseudo-religious character.” 

Where are the REAL Conservatives? Who in the present day mentions Enlightenment ideas, or bases their policies on this noble philosophical heritage? What the Right has now is a handful of pundits, and a disdain for those who owns any scholarly credential. The demise of the conservatives is not a matter of “messaging” as many on their side has claimed. It is an end of intellect. The great sages of conservatism, from Edmund Burke to John Adams and contemporary figures like Buckley, used up their time reading not blogs, but books. Further, they spent time writing dissertations on them; not like today’s “leaders” who dress in their ignorance as badges of honor and electability.

Has conventional philosophy been lost? In the words of Kirk, citing T.S. Eliot, has “wisdom” been lost to a vapid neoconservative philosophy of “information”?

The swap over of ideas -- the cornerstone of philosophy and democracy -- depends upon differing sides exchanging thoughts. It cannot consist of one side saying, for instance, diplomacy means blowing up the United Nations building in New York, and the other wanting to cede America’s sovereign authority to an unaccountable and dysfunctional international body.

This explains how the extremes have grown so far from the roots of Western political and philosophical thought. Yet there are few of us who still think these matters deserve consideration aside from partisan politics, electioneering, and fundraising.

We are in a different place now. Conservatism has been drawn into the blogosphere, the talk radio universe, and the cable news echo chambers in which each fulfils their own micro-targeted audience. Even “live” forums like CPAC and the National Review Institute Summit are more forums for media soundbites than critical discourse. Conservatives, but also all Americans, need civil forums for the point of good governance and debate, deeply rooted in conservative principles and tempered by liberal ones, supporting openness, and nurturing common sense and common ground. 

We write in that mood and in the hope that both sides in our democracy regain their roots. Conservatives, especially, must reconsider their evolution over the several centuries, and return to key philosophical values, if they desire to stay pertinent. Our view here is that a sturdy democracy only thrives when both sides match each other. Today there is no balance, and we are confident that will vary.