I'm prompted to write this because a diary yesterday suggested that teabaggers were responding to future shock: So much has changed in recent years that they're responding, well, oddly.
I don't buy it. While we've had a lot of changes in the past half-century, it strikes me as having been a slower pace of change than, say, the period of 1810-1850. Not only did that period have the industrial revolution, but it brought about railroads, cheap letter post, and the telegraph. Those had a huge impact on how and where people lived, and on communications. In the middle of that tumultuous epoch, the US went from being largely secular to having a strong religious revival: "Fundamentalism" as we know it is largely a 19th-century reaction to that era.
But that begs the question. What is conservatism and what feeds it? A 2008 article by University of Virginia anthropologist Jonathan Haidt has a sensible answer. He titled his article, "What Makes People Vote Republican?"
I do advise everyone to read his article:
http://www.edge.org/...
He identifies emotional reactions such as disgust and shows how they translate to social norms. Then he gets down to summarizing the difference between what we might call liberal and conservative world views.
The liberal view roughly corresponds to John Stuart Mill's view of a society that exists to prevent harm, and for people to band together for the common good. A Millian view has two key tenets, which he labels "harm/care" (don't harm people and care for those who need it) and "fairness/reciprocity" (treat people fairly). Liberals and traditional conservatives both tend to support these; they're common values. As such, I note that Glenn Beck was hugely out of line when he said that "social justice" was not something that a church should support. It is certainly part of most denominations' views, and he was rightly called out on it by evangelical Christian and Mormon authorities.
But conservatives have other values too. We liberals don't share them, but they evolved in tribal society and do have some rationale, at least historically. Haidt identifies three extra value-sets that distinguish conservatives. Ingroup/loyalty concerns tribal and national identity. Authority/respect concerns one's place in the tribe or society. Purity/sanctity concerns disgust and ritual. All of these translate to current political behavior. Ingroup/loyalty can be useful in modest doses (national unity) but can become toxic in excess. Authority/respect is about social order; again, it can lead to peaceful coexistence in small doses or it can justify oppression. Purity/sanctity is the favorite of the Christian Right, who easily take offense, but Haidt notes that it can also support environmentalism.
This explains why "uppity" (one who doesn't know his place) is an insult to conservatives, but to a liberal just makes the speaker sound odd, a failed insult. And (I've seen other articles about this) you can see how Appalachian culture, the most anti-Obama region of the country, descends directly from the Celtic tribes who shared these values. We see poor white folks harming their own economic interests. They see clan loyalty, someone claiming authority who doesn't look the role, and liberal support of behavior which they find impure, such as homosexuality. Same with the teabaggers.
My quick summary doesn't do Haidt justice, but I suggest that it fits modern political reality better than Toffler. From a political perspective, we should recognize these sets of values. We can't make them go away, so we should work with them. We can position our messages to minimize how they upset conservative values, and instead should emphasize our common ground.