Edge: WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN? By Jonathan Haidt — This is an excellent research piece that also links to an interesting test to see if you are naturally inclined to be liberal or conservative. While slanted toward academic thinking there are some simple take-aways here.

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?

People vote Republican because Republicans offer “moral clarity”—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

Most interesting comment within the post:

MICHAEL SHERMER
Publisher of Skeptic magazine, monthly columnist for Scientific American; Author, Why Darwin Matters; and How We Believe

The Conscious of the Conservative

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.”

Take the morality test here.




  1. T Classen says:

    Since everything is so black and white and so uncomplicated in the Republican mind it is no wonder that they have failed so miserably with their Kleptocracy and had to bail themselves out in the eleventh hour. No person has ever been able to name one thing that they have done to raise the level of the middle class in the past eight years. I too work my butt off only to have my future mortgaged to the tune of five possibly many more trillions of dollars for no infrastructural improvements of any note beyond the acquisition of more weapons for a useless, unjust and fraudulent war in Iraq.


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