rolling explaining conservatism

"If you’re a conservative who lives in a major metropolitan area or who simply reads the New York Times, you get used to being outnumbered by liberals. Liberals, by contrast, get used to being surrounded by other liberals, both in person and in culture and the media."

this is a terrible take. "major metropolitan areas" skew liberal, but are often much more purple than conservative strongholds where conservative bleeds redder than raw meat. and i dont need to rehash the whole "everyone is in their own media bubble". a lot of conservatives summarily dismiss "MSM" and stick with fox news and talk radio etc.

nah mordy they're just cheapskates bullshitting why they want their taxes lowered. there's no genuine idealism there. the dream of galt gult is to make enough 'fuck you' money never to have to work again

I'm just offering a counter to "i suspect i know and speak to more conservatives irl than almost anyone on ilx fwiw." Not only are my family mostly Republicans, they're also mostly born-again Christians. (My dad's side is a different story.) And I live in a mostly Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, so most of my neighbors are conservative, too!

But in terms of modeling and the "getting something for nothing" mindset, these people all play the lottery with a nearly religious fervor. Any time they have the slightest fender bender, or trip and fall in a store, they look for a lawsuit angle. They all are fiercely protective of their own Medicare/Medicaid benefits while wanting to cut them for "those people." etc etc.

I agree with Mordy that:

It can be a good thing for liberals to read bizarro descriptions by conservatives of "what liberals / "the left" believe / want," reflect on just how difficult it is to build accurate mental models of other people, and calibrate epistemic humility accordingly

I disagree with Mordy that:

"i think that getting something for nothing is humiliating and unenjoyable and that everyone wants to work to earn their way. no one wants to be on government aid bc it's a mostly shameful thing for most ppl."

On the contrary, I think people love getting something for nothing. Very few people find it "humiliating" to send their kids to kindergarten and that's not because there's some intrinsic difference between getting free schooling and getting free healthcare, it's because no one has chosen to humiliate them for sending their kids to school.

i think generally speaking ppl want to work and feel like they're contributing something and earning their way

yeah this isn't actually true i find. I've met a ton of conservative people who while happily take public resources - living in public housing; working in easy, stable, relatively well-paying civil service jobs; receiving disability assistance; receiving tax credits for being low income etc. - who resent the hell of everyone else who they feel benefits from government largesse

― -_- (jim in vancouver), Friday, 23 June 2017 14:02 (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Jim, I thought this, from the last Ontario provincial election, was an incredibly naked piece by Tasha Kheiriddin, a self-described "life-long small-c conservative" who has always taken a hard-right position on public funding for social services. tl;dr: Despite spending her career clamouring for cuts to big government, she couldn't vote for the Tories because they were finally proposing cuts that would actually affect her own family. (Her daughter has Asperger's and she was concerned about the effects of larger class sizes in public schools.)

mordy i'm not sure what your take is tbh
the people you're described - and i relate/know many of these as a NY suburbanite, believe me - are just all the more despicable and awful. maybe even more so because i expect them to "know better"

i think that getting something for nothing is humiliating and unenjoyable and that everyone wants to work to earn their way.

Sounds like Socialism to me. Maybe Corbyn can reintroduce the commitment to full employment into the next Labour manifesto.

my take is that conservatives have beliefs that are underlined by real principles + sincerely held priors and that explanations of their behavior that seek to attribute their political beliefs to purely vulgar self-interest and hate are failures to build an accurate model. xp

due to fixed-point theorems there's gotta be at least one person out there who's benefiting from society exactly proportional to how much they're contributing to society. i say we find that person and beat them up.

my take is that they're like people who swear that WARRANT is the best heavy metal band of all time and won't hear any opinions to the contrary. i'm not really that curious about the rest of their musical taste except for sheer amusement

xp to Mordy: You could maybe build a consistent conservative worldview with that belief in it (that govt. assistant recipients mostly feel humiliated by it), but I'm not convinced it's widely held. I would be interested to see conservative politicians reflect it in public statements: no one really wants social security, medicare, public school, etc. I wonder why they don't do that, if it's what their constituents really think.

(xp mordy) what about explanations of their behavior that attribute their political beliefs to neither hate, self-interest, or principles, but rather to tribal affiliation, and which furthermore denies that they are even really beliefs at all but mostly affiliative assertions, and which says the same thing about liberals, are those cool?

there should be a term like 'dunning-kruger effect' for people who are so hypocritical they don't even realize how hypocritical they are

besides "conservative" that is

it's fine i'm just suspicious of all models where we're logical, compassionate and honest and the outgroup is incoherent, selfish and cruel. like this is the story of every in-group interpretation of the out-group in history. no one has ever been like "well sure we're selfish and illogical and our opponents are compassionate and wise."

xxp

give me a break

https://www.kitkat.com/images/kitkat-snap.png

i think generally speaking ppl want to work and feel like they're contributing something and earning their way

obviously not everyone does think this so you end up with a false consciousness position, denying ppl for their own good

i think generally speaking ppl want to work and feel like they're contributing something and earning their way

I remember we had a thread about work ethic - most of us on here IIRC said they didn't value work in itself but liked the idea of helping other people, being part of a group endeavour etc

People are often bad at empathy, particularly when it comes to those who see the world through radically different eyes, but it seems like the general project of liberalism (ideally, mind) is taking into account the varied needs and desires of different people and trying to figure out how to structure things such that it maximizes the common good. Conservatism, contrarywise, seems to be about constricting everything as much as possible to one streamlined POV which practically necessitates othering anyone who doesn't share that POV. Not to mention the extensive historical precedent of explicit subjugation and disenfranchisement and exploitation and othering upon which conservatism is built.

it's fine i'm just suspicious of all models where we're logical, compassionate and honest and the outgroup is incoherent, selfish and cruel. like this is the story of every in-group interpretation of the out-group in history. no one has ever been like "well sure we're selfish and illogical and our opponents are compassionate and wise."

Good point this ^

The subjugation and disenfranchisement of unborn babies, for example, hmm? What do you have to say about that, Mr. Compassionate Liberal? xp

(See, this modelling thing is easy. It's not like anyone is suffering from underexposure to conservative views.)

I mean, I can only speak for myself but I try as much as possible to separate out the beliefs from the people espousing them. At least to the extent that they aren't, for instance, proudly proclaiming their racism.

xps Although there's nothing too crazy I would think about the idea that, within the bloc of people who don't like social security and vote against it, some of them will be idealistic about work, some of them will be calculating and thinking they'll become richer in that situation, and most of them will be some mixture of the two, right?

rand is beloved in large part because that is as close as the right has come to a coherent representation of the left as immoral

none of it is sincere. it's always starting with the prejudice and rationalizing backwards.

If an American conservative were willing to acknowledge the extent to which social inequality in our country is due to centuries of bad shit perpetuated by white people and from which white people have largely reaped the benefits, I feel like I'd be open to hearing more about any aspects of conservative ideology that don't rest on the premise that that's an awesome state of affairs which should be perpetuated ad infinitum.

sincere "conservatives" aren't intelligent enough to understand that position, otherwise they wouldn't be "conservatives" in the first place

Yeah, and that's kind of the problem. Any ideology rooted in something that heinous is morally indefensible. I'm open to hearing how that isn't the case but I feel like it would involve an awful lot of rhetorical gymnastics.

citizens united needs to go, and the fairness doctrine reinstated

first amendment solutions

this thread is ridiculous & i'm wary of generalisations, but they are fun, so: i think conservatives aspire to collectively cultivate a certain dignity & elevated spirit through purity & abnegation

Prolly worth noting that these are generalizations drawn about a voluntary self-identification. We're not talking about, like, the French or people with brown eyes.

i think conservatives aspire to collectively cultivate a certain dignity & elevated spirit through purity & abnegation

I ... don't get this?

xp it's more like a generalisation about a religious group

Unless it was a joke? Like, I've known some people for whom this might be true, usually but not always deeply religious people, but conservative political views do not seem to be the determining factor there. And Gandhi, e.g., was far from a conservative. xp

i would say gandhi was very conservative, but obviously the word is loose and vague to the point of being nearly useless

I generally agree with Lunch in terms of effects. But in keeping with the project of showing Mordy we actually can try to see things from the perspective of sincere conservatives, this -

I'd be open to hearing more about any aspects of conservative ideology that don't rest on the premise that that's an awesome state of affairs which should be perpetuated ad infinitum

- is ascribing words to them they wouldn't say. The premise is not necessarily "that's an awesome state of affairs which should be perpetuated ad infinitum." That's lefty ventriloquism, not a way a sincere conservative would formulate it.

Try something more like "historical skepticism," which might be expressed as: traditions became traditions over time, through organic processes. SOMETIMES they need changing - slavery is an example - but they should do so gradually and through the same organic means. It should happen through an open and transparent process where the whole of the culture comes to understand that the change needs to take place. We should not toss aside long-held cultural traditions willy-nilly, or frivolously, or due to fashion. And we should DEFINITELY not have cultural changes thrust down our throats against our wills through aggressive Federal action. Bottom-up, not top-down.

On this view, the idea that people can just choose to be the gender that they "feel like," perhaps "feel like on a given day," and that men can go into women's bathrooms and compete in women's sports, is not just wrong but wrongly adjudicated and wrongly promulgated. It is the Government moving ahead of public opinion, and seeking to impose a change in values, rather than responding to an organic change.

Using government resources (like the military or Federal funding or highways or whatever) to perform "social engineering" is not just bad because conservatives disagree with the values being espoused. It's bad because the government should not be the mechanism whereby we change attitudes - whether it's on gay marriage, trans rights, or when the police should be allowed to shoot black people.

It sure is if it can be used to describe a pacifist anti-imperialist anarchist. xp

Lunch, is that ^ too much gymnastics for you?

It seems like a plausible Buckleyan position. Of course it's both (a) wrong on facts and (b) horrible in practice, but it's plausible.

traditions became traditions over time, through organic processes. SOMETIMES they need changing - kowtowing to russians is an example

you can be a pacifist anti-imperialist anarchist and still think desperately impoverished ppl need to hand spin for their edification. the obsession with an inward-looking moral order is still there, it just (claims) not to require a state to enforce it

bad brackets

Just getting super reductive.

Amodio et al, 2007. Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism. Nature neuroscience, 10(10), pp.1246-1247.

> our results are consistent with the view that political orientation, in part, reflects individual differences in the functioning of a general mechanism related to cognitive control and self-regulation. Stronger conservatism (versus liberalism) was associated with less neurocognitive sensitivity to response conflicts. At the behavioral level, conservatives were also more likely to make errors of commission. Although a liberal orientation was associated with better performance on the response-inhibition task examined here, conservatives would presumably perform better on tasks in which a more fixed response style is optimal.

Carraro et al, 2011. The automatic conservative: Ideology-based attentional asymmetries in the processing of valenced information. PLoS One, 6(11), p.e26456.

> In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that negative (vs. positive) information impaired the performance of conservatives, more than liberals, in an Emotional Stroop Task. This finding was confirmed in Experiment 2 and in Experiment 3 employing a Dot-Probe Task, demonstrating that threatening stimuli were more likely to attract the attention of conservatives. Overall, results support the conclusion that people embracing conservative views of the world display an automatic selective attention for negative stimuli.

Hatemi et al, 2011. A genome-wide analysis of liberal and conservative political attitudes. The Journal of Politics, 73(1), pp.271-285.

> The results point toward NMDA and glutamate related receptors as being worthy of further examination. Indeed, in every significant or suggestive chromosomal region these receptors were implicated. Of particular interest to political ideology is the relationship between NMDA and performance on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). The WCST is a neuropsychological test of the ability to display flexibility in the face of changing schedules of reinforcement. By definition Conservatism and Liberalism have much to do with flexibility of opinion in the face of a changing world

Kanai et al, 2011. Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults. Current biology, 21(8), pp.677-680.

> We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala.

Schreiber et al, 2013. Red brain, blue brain: Evaluative processes differ in Democrats and Republicans. PLoS One, 8(2), p.e52970.

> Although the risk-taking behavior of Democrats (liberals) and Republicans (conservatives) did not differ, their brain activity did. Democrats showed significantly greater activity in the left insula, while Republicans showed significantly greater activity in the right amygdala. In fact, a two parameter model of partisanship based on amygdala and insula activations yields a better fitting model of partisanship than a well-established model based on parental socialization.

Ahn et al, 2014. Nonpolitical images evoke neural predictors of political ideology. Current Biology, 24(22), pp.2693-2699.

> Disgusting images, especially those related to animal-reminder disgust (e.g., mutilated body), generate neural responses that are highly predictive of political orientation even though these neural predictors do not agree with participants’ conscious rating of the stimuli. Images from other affective categories do not support such predictions. Remarkably, brain responses to a single disgusting stimulus were sufficient to make accurate predictions about an individual subject’s political ideology.

Old Lunch makes a lot of good points itt.

I've really struggled with making sense of my good buddies conservatism. He's sympathetic to Trump, flat earthers and many other things that frankly confuse me. What I've noticed is he seems to think these con. groups are counter to the majority and it's almost like he's engaging in a form of rebellion by choosing these beliefs. No matter how much I try to get him to admit there's an agenda in what his side believes, he seems to see their side as "facts" and that they're exposing lies. I love the guy and celebrate our differences but I also find it impossible to get through to him so I give up.

Ogmor, I think you're working with a definition of "conservatism" that is fairly removed from any that I'm usually familiar with. I do hope to see Republicans and Tories champion radical pacifism and decentralized participatory economics in my lifetime, though.

I think social & moral conservatism can (will?) manifest in pretty much any sort of society. I guess I'm saying it's that defensive tendency, that prizing of decorum & dignity & harmony, it's the concern with threats to the social/moral order & hegemony

if not, what is it that conservatism aims to conserve?

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