Remember the good old days of a permanent Republican majority? The economy was booming, terrorists were kept at bay and the gays could be cured, Terri Schiavo must be saved, masturbation was wrong, and Jesus was for everyone.
That got me thinking of how in good times people have more time to fret about more trivial things; trivial things like how other people are living their private lives. Like the Hygiene Hypothesis (see Wikipedia) which describes of how our bodies might over-react to pollen if we've never been exposed to a grassy meadow. Thus, the comparison of conservatives.
According to Wikipedia the Hygiene Hypothesis is gaining more and more clout since I first started reading about it years ago. The basic idea of the hypothesis is that the reason for allergies and other immunological conditions in more developed countries is because of less exposure to environmental challenges at a young age. Exposure to various germs in the environment prime the developing immune system to act appropriately to various stimuli. Without the exposure at a young age, the ill-prepared immune system over reacts to harmless stimuli later in life.
As a metaphor consider a society where all the people's needs are met. They have shelter, food, love, disposable income and no worries about losing any of those. This gives the people lots of free time to concern themselves with the details of the lives of others. Just like an immune system that has never known exposure to various germs might overreact to encountering something harmless (For a similar metaphor see http://www.wired.com/... Modern life may be too easy for our minds and bodies to deal with (I think the Unibomber said this).
People need to struggle lest they get bored, lose personal direction and, I propose, experience a free-floating hopelessness for which the target of their hope is not known to them. Seeking out ways to fill this void they seek a struggle in which to embark upon. Unfortunately this often means adopting causes that are divisive or that amount to meddling into the private lives of others.
This leads us to conservatives. Now that times are bad and their future on shaky ground, they are more worried about their own well being than ideology. I remember the meddling into private lives the conservatives did while times were good. Conservative politicians and their life-comfortable supporters objected to many private issues that were really none of their business. Now I'm not really speaker here of the politicians since many are just opportunistic exploiters. My comparison to the immune system is to their supporters. Issues which had no impact on their lives (such as gay marriage, other women's bodies, condoms in schools) became such dire concerns that they voted in these directions without regard to the other policy positions they heedlessly voted for. These "other" policy positions that I'm referring to are, arguably, more important: such as health care, social safety net, regulation, war, etc. In effect, the exaggerated response to the little things, in the end, lead to the conservative voter's own detriment. At a higher level as well it also led to the demise of the politicians running on the smaller issues.
And that is what I recently thought about while shaving.