Mick Hartley

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Red States

Why does anyone vote Republican? Don't they realise that Democrats are really much nicer, and have the interests of American working people at heart? Can't they see that Bush is a complete moron? I mean, what's wrong with these people?

At last the psychologists get to work to bring some scientific rigour to this perennial puzzle:

What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death.

So, you define a belief in "liberalism, diversity, and progress" as normal and healthy. Then anything else must be some kind of a pathology, right? And at last they've nailed it: conservatism is "a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death".

Excellent. Now, to isolate those genes…

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10 responses to “Red States”

  1. Dom Avatar
    Dom

    The guy who wrote this is not himself working class. He is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, so he is paid with tax dollars.
    When politicians of either party take money out of someone’s pocket, they always put some of it back into someone else’s pocket. The first person votes against these politicians, the second person votes for them. This guy is the second.

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  2. GMan Avatar
    GMan

    It’s not such a terrible piece though. It makes a lot of good points about how people who consider themselves progressive fail to understand what drives and unifies those they consider their opponents. Maybe I’m hearing it in the wrong voice but I don’t take it as particularly condescending. Take the conclusion: Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation… Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so.

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  3. Mick H Avatar
    Mick H

    Yes, it makes some good points along the way, I’ll admit. I just found the premise objectionable: that there’s a problem which needs to be explained, and that a liberal progressive (ie Democrat) psychologist is just the man to tell us what’s wrong with Republicans.

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  4. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    The Republicans were the party of abolition. The Dems, and the associated labor unions, were the party of slavery, segregation of the negroes, racist laws against the Chinese and Japanese in California, et bloody cetera. And until the advent of that lamentable leftie W, the Dems were the war party.

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  5. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    Ah well, its being 9/11, let’s think well of the USA.

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  6. GMan Avatar
    GMan

    Yes but what those parties were once and what they are now are very different things. Evangelical Christians and those who know how best to manipulate them are in control of the Republican Party, which can hardly claim to be an instrument of small government, fiscal conservatism and individual liberty these days. When did support for torture become a conservative value? And the Dems, well I’m not sure who the hell is running that show and I don’t think they know themselves. But if they don’t rein in the hard Left attack dogs on this Palin caper, they can kiss goodbye to any chance of electing Obama, because that sneering elitism and undignified muckraking and name calling are just the things to get middle America behind a “hockey mom” from smallville USA who lives close enough to Russia to have a firm grip on foreign policy…

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  7. MD Avatar
    MD

    Well, the very first paragraphs are basically a reiteration of Thomas Frank’s ‘What’s the Matter with Kansas?’. The point of that book, which I haven’t read, is supposed to be that working class types in Kansas vote against their economic interest because of cultural issues. So, the writer to this piece simply assumes that they are working against their own best interests. But, what if they themselves (the troublesome Kansans) don’t think they are voting against their own best interests? What if the poor dears (in the formulation of certain know-it-alls) don’t agree with the premise that voting for pro-business Republicans is against their own best interests?
    Odd.

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  8. MD Avatar
    MD

    “Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? ” This is the line in the article to which I am referring, above. Some on the left never seem to re-think this; they simply assume, you know?

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  9. Brian Micklethwait Avatar
    Brian Micklethwait

    I think this posting is a quite bad error. You don’t seem to have grasped – or didn’t grasp when you wrote the posting – that the man who wrote these words is almost as critical of the attitudes they embody as you are. Maybe the absence of actual quotation marks fooled you. He agrees with some of it, basically the economic assumptions, and that’s worth criticising him for, although this is only incidental to what he is actually saying. But the bit about “diagnosis” is promptly attacked in paragraph two, “diagnosis” actually being the next word in the article. This first paragraph is the starting point which he then sets about criticising.
    Still, at least you provided the link to the whole thing, so that we can all see for ourselves what you failed to see.
    I should add that I am a regular reader here, and generally I agree with almost everything you say, and share most of your tastes in things said by others that you quote approvingly, i.e. without further comment. This is my first comment here for ages, because this is my first serious complaint.

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  10. Mick H Avatar
    Mick H

    Well, I’ll admit that the actual article is better than my excerpt and commentary would suggest. A mistake, though? I don’t know…

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