Why Liberals Don’t Understand Conservatives

[SkyBubble]

https://agoodreason.net/2018/04/why-liberals-dont-understand-conservatives/

Many liberals, though, have trouble comprehending conservatives. In his studies of liberals and conservatives reported in The Righteous Mind, NYU-Stern Business School professor Jonathan Haidt found that liberals – particularly the “very” liberal – were consistently worse than conservatives at predicting how the other side would respond to various moral questions. “When faced with questions such as ‘One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal’ or “Justice is the most important requirement for a society,’ liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree.”

This failure to “get” conservatives may be due to the liberal suspicion that selfishness and bigotry are the real motivations behind conservatism. That unsympathetic perception creates a communication blockage. If the liberal is hearing nothing more than an attempt to justify selfishness and bigotry, why continue listening? What more is there to “get”? As the New York Times book review of The Righteous Mind explained:​

The hardest part, Haidt finds, is getting liberals to open their minds. Anecdotally, he reports that when he talks about authority, loyalty and sanctity, many people in the audience spurn these ideas as the seeds of racism, sexism and homophobia . . . . Liberals don’t understand conservative values. And they can’t recognize this failing, because they’re so convinced of their rationality, open-mindedness and enlightenment.​

This hostility to conservatism is apparent in almost any liberal attempt to explain it. “Conservatism is a type of motivated social cognition,” explains Salon magazine, “that by its very nature is hostile to members of groups on the lower rungs of the social hierarchy.” A PolicusUSA headline declared in 2013 (ie, pre-Trump) “Today’s Republicans are Yesterday’s Fascists.”

Writer George Lakoff, in an article entitled “Why the Conservative Worldview Exalts Selfishness,” explains that conservatives believe being rich is a reflection of moral superiority, while poverty is a sign of morally inferiority; in other words, that the poor deserve their poverty. Which is an argument I’ve heard before, but never from an actual conservative.

Maybe he didn’t intend to be taken literally, but prominent New York theater critic Michael Feingold (formerly of the Village Voice) has this to say about Republicans:​

Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet . . . . Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.​

These angry liberals think they do “get” conservatives: Conservatives are selfish bigots. This perception not only stands in the way of comprehending conservatives, it leads almost inevitably to the current nationwide “shut down conservatives” movement. It is why libertarian writer Charles Murray was shouted down and roughed up at Middlebury College in 2017, and why colleges continually “disinvite” such speakers as columnist George Will, writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, and anyone else who deviates from the liberal narrative.

In fact, most libertarians and conservatives care about the poor, about minorities, about the environment, about education. There are non-selfish, non-bigoted, non-stupid reasons for holding conservative views. Most conservatives are decent people with whom liberals are simply in disagreement. It would help if at least that much was understood.​

 

[Bn2f]

https://agoodreason.net/2018/04/why-liberals-dont-understand-conservatives/

Many liberals, though, have trouble comprehending conservatives. In his studies of liberals and conservatives reported in The Righteous Mind, NYU-Stern Business School professor Jonathan Haidt found that liberals – particularly the “very” liberal – were consistently worse than conservatives at predicting how the other side would respond to various moral questions. “When faced with questions such as ‘One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal’ or “Justice is the most important requirement for a society,’ liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree.”

This failure to “get” conservatives may be due to the liberal suspicion that selfishness and bigotry are the real motivations behind conservatism. That unsympathetic perception creates a communication blockage. If the liberal is hearing nothing more than an attempt to justify selfishness and bigotry, why continue listening? What more is there to “get”? As the New York Times book review of The Righteous Mind explained:​

This hostility to conservatism is apparent in almost any liberal attempt to explain it. “Conservatism is a type of motivated social cognition,” explains Salon magazine, “that by its very nature is hostile to members of groups on the lower rungs of the social hierarchy.” A PolicusUSA headline declared in 2013 (ie, pre-Trump) “Today’s Republicans are Yesterday’s Fascists.”

Writer George Lakoff, in an article entitled “Why the Conservative Worldview Exalts Selfishness,” explains that conservatives believe being rich is a reflection of moral superiority, while poverty is a sign of morally inferiority; in other words, that the poor deserve their poverty. Which is an argument I’ve heard before, but never from an actual conservative.

Maybe he didn’t intend to be taken literally, but prominent New York theater critic Michael Feingold (formerly of the Village Voice) has this to say about Republicans:​

These angry liberals think they do “get” conservatives: Conservatives are selfish bigots. This perception not only stands in the way of comprehending conservatives, it leads almost inevitably to the current nationwide “shut down conservatives” movement. It is why libertarian writer Charles Murray was shouted down and roughed up at Middlebury College in 2017, and why colleges continually “disinvite” such speakers as columnist George Will, writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, and anyone else who deviates from the liberal narrative.

In fact, most libertarians and conservatives care about the poor, about minorities, about the environment, about education. There are non-selfish, non-bigoted, non-stupid reasons for holding conservative views. Most conservatives are decent people with whom liberals are simply in disagreement. It would help if at least that much was understood.​

Conservatism is dead.
Republicans are now fascist authoritarians.
Also, you’re a liar and I can prove it.

 

[SkyBubble]

Wrong on all counts.

 

[SkyBubble]

https://www.aei.org/articles/liberals-or-conservatives-whos-really-close-minded/

To be “close-minded” is, according to the dictionary, to be “intolerant of the beliefs and opinions of others; stubbornly unreceptive to new ideas.” To be conservative and close-minded, according to popular portrayal, is a redundancy—a package deal that liberals can and do take for granted.

But University of Virginia Professor Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Righteous Mind doesn’t simply suggest that conservatives may not be as close-minded as they are portrayed. It proves that the opposite is the case, that conservatives understand their ideological opposite numbers far better than do liberals.

Haidt’s research asks individuals to answer questionnaires regarding their core moral beliefs—what sorts of values they consider sacred, which they would compromise on, and how much it would take to get them to make those compromises. By themselves, these exercises are interesting. (Try them online and see where you come out.)

Liberals don’t know what they don’t know; they don’t understand how limited their knowledge of conservative values is.

But Haidt’s research went one step further, asking self-indentified conservatives to answer those questionnaires as if they were liberals and for liberals to do the opposite. What Haidt found is that conservatives understand liberals’ moral values better than liberals understand where conservatives are coming from. Worse yet, liberals don’t know what they don’t know; they don’t understand how limited their knowledge of conservative values is. If anyone is close-minded here it’s not conservatives.

Haidt has a theory regarding why this is the case, based on the idea that conservatives speak a broader and more encompassing language of six moral values while liberals embrace three of the six in a narrow set of core values. I see nothing wrong with this explanation.

But let me present a complementary, more practical explanation: 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. As a result, liberals speak their minds freely, often in ways that are harshly condemnatory of conservatives and their stands on issues. As a conservative, you can defend your values against friends and acquaintances who essentially just called you stupid and evil or you can keep quiet.

As a conservative, you can defend your values against friends and acquaintances who essentially just called you stupid and evil or you can keep quiet.

Most conservatives, most of the time, choose the latter. That is, they stay in the closet to avoid being accused of hating the poor, gays, or polar bears. As a result, liberals aren’t gaining any commensurate information. In fact, the silence of their conservative friends helps reinforce their views. Much of the time, liberals’ views of conservative positions and values are simply a caricature that bear little resemblance to what conservatives actually think and, more importantly, why they think it.

But during that time when conservatives’ mouths are shut, their ears are open. They’re listening and understanding what liberals think—and what liberals think of them. Conservatives understand their own world—whether it’s of religious organizations, talk radio, Fox News, or whatever—along with the New York Times, network news world of liberals.

That helps explain why a conservative’s reaction to a liberal critique often isn’t “you’re wrong.” It’s “you don’t even know what I’m trying to say.” Haidt’s research seems to show that this reaction is warranted.

 

[Bn2f]

Wrong on all counts.

Haha. Let’s prove it then.

 

[BrightShinyGirl]

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

 

[YDB95]

Conservatism is dead.

Exactly. What people like SkyBubble call "conservative" is really right-wing. There used to be a difference between the two, but the far right has long since co-opted the former as a euphemism for the latter. When comparing liberal and conservative, it's important to be clear as to whether you're comparing center-left to center-right, or to far-right. These days it's almost always the latter.

 

[Bn2f]

No one is reading your dumb shit.

 

[SkyBubble]

https://bakadesuyo.com/2012/05/whos-better-at-pretending-to-be-the-other-sid/
Conservatives and moderates understand liberals better than liberals understand them.

Those who identified as “very liberal” performed notably worse than anyone else.

Via The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion:

In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right. Who was best able to pretend to be the other?

The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.”

You can hear author Jonathan Haidt (who is liberal himself) discuss the study here.

 

[SkyBubble]

Exactly. What people like SkyBubble call "conservative" is really right-wing. There used to be a difference between the two, but the far right has long since co-opted the former as a euphemism for the latter. When comparing liberal and conservative, it's important to be clear as to whether you're comparing center-left to center-right, or to far-right. These days it's almost always the latter.

You have literally no idea what you're talking about.

 

[SkyBubble]

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

Completely false.

 

[SkyBubble]

Haha. Let’s prove it then.

Go ahead. Try. We're waiting.

 

[SkyBubble]

Somewhat academic, but quite good.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0050092

 

[Bn2f]

Go ahead. Try. We're waiting.

For a baseline, let’s start easy.
What’s 2 + 2?

 

[SkyBubble]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1205947323555176448

It has been shown that conservatives understand liberals better than liberals understand conservatives, on average.

This could be a primary reason for this large gap...

@JonHaidt has some fantastic work on this. Definitely helped me to understand the world better.

 

[SkyBubble]

https://conservativehome.com/2012/04/13/why-liberals-dont-understand-conservatives/
It is, for many conservatives, a familiar feeling – the sense that our counterparts on the liberal left not only disagree with us, but don’t even understand us.

Well, it seems there is hard evidence to support our suspicions. It comes from an unlikely source – the American psychologist (and political liberal) Jonathan Haidt. The basis of his research is a framework of five moral ‘foundations’: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sacredness/degradation. Gathering masses of survey data (to which you can contribute here), Haidt and his colleagues have built-up a detailed picture of the degree to which these various foundations underpin the liberal and conservative worldviews.

In a book review for Prospect, David Goodhart provides an excellent summary of Haidt’s findings:

• “His main insight is simple but powerful: liberals understand only two main moral dimensions, whereas conservatives understand all five.
• Liberals care about harm and suffering (appealing to our capacities for sympathy and nurturing) and fairness and injustice. All human cultures care about these two things but they also care about three other things: loyalty to the in-group, authority and the sacred.
• As Haidt puts it: ‘It’s as though conservatives can hear five octaves of music, but liberals respond to just two, within which they have become particularly discerning.’”

Haidt’s recommendation to his fellow liberals is to make a greater effort to understand conservative concerns:

• “For example, if you want to improve integration and racial justice in a mixed area, you do not just preach the importance of tolerance but you promote a common in-group identity. As Haidt puts it: ‘You can make people care less about race by drowning race differences in a sea of similarities, shared goals and mutual interdependencies.’”

For David Goodhart – a prominent liberal opponent of multiculturalism – the Haidt approach is the “last chance for the left.” However, one might also argue that if you start acting upon conservative moral insights you might as well become a conservative.

 

[Bn2f]

[QUOTE="
It has been shown that conservatives understand liberals better than liberals understand conservatives, on average.

@JonHaidt has some fantastic work on this. Definitely helped me to understand the world better.
[/QUOTE]

Conservatives understand liberals better???
Yet you had to read up from someone to teach you that???
Seems to me you and Jon Haidt both don’t know shit.

 

[Bn2f]

I’m calling you out as a fraud and a liar because my claim is and has been that I DO KNOW YOU.

You can’t even answer what’s 2 + 2. Already proving me right before you’re out the starting gate.
You POS.

 

[latecomer91364]

'Liberals' don't understand conservatives because they don't even try. They live in their own little self-righteous bubble of how they think things should be. Because of that, voters are leaving the Democrat party in droves.

As far back as The Art of War, Sun Tzu said "Know your enemy and know yourself, and in a hundred battles, you will never be in peril."

This is why the Dem party is in the dire peril of dissolving into nothing. Meh... it won't happen, but don't look for them to win anything but small, local elections for the foreseeable future.

 

[SkyBubble]

[QUOTE="
It has been shown that conservatives understand liberals better than liberals understand conservatives, on average.

@JonHaidt has some fantastic work on this. Definitely helped me to understand the world better.

Conservatives understand liberals better???

Yes, conservatives understand liberals much better than liberals understand conservatives. Haidt's research proves it.

 

[SkyBubble]

I’m calling you out as a fraud and a liar because my claim is and has been that I DO KNOW YOU.

You can’t even answer what’s 2 + 2. Already proving me right before you’re out the starting gate.
You POS.

1. You do not.
2. You're unable to understand that.
3. Why don't you address the subject at hand instead of coming up with stupid, insulting questions.
4. This is exactly what Haidt was talking about.

 

[SkyBubble]

'Liberals' don't understand conservatives because they don't even try. They live in their own little self-righteous bubble of how they think things should be. Because of that, voters are leaving the Democrat party in droves.

This is 100% on target. Completely true.

Case in point: their responses in this very thread.

 

[SkyBubble]

This article is from 2016, but still quite relevant.

https://www.glennbeck.com/contribut...-to-rural-alaska-the-week-before-the-election

 

[YDB95]

You have literally no idea what you're talking about.

Feel free to show us how.

Yes, conservatives understand liberals much better than liberals understand conservatives. Haidt's research proves it.

Every time you describe what you think liberals believe, you prove otherwise.

 

[RoryN]

Why Liberals Don’t Understand Conservatives

We do now.

It went like this:

2016: They really want a restart, and to "drain the swamp".

2020: Wait...

2024: Their primary goal is to have their bigotry not only justified, but celebrated.