Yes, this is a candidate diary. Or maybe it isn't. You be the judge.
But it seems to me that if this is the "theory of change" primary, we ought to do a little thinking about just what this system is that we're trying to change. And more specifically, we ought to do a little thinking about conservatives, and just what it is that makes them conservative.
You've probably all had this experience. You're engaged in a conversation with a co-worker, or a friend-of-a-friend, or your hairdresser, or the girl in your yoga class, or the stranger you just met on the bus. And things are going pleasantly enough until ... they drop some hint that lets you know that they're a conservative. Maybe the mention something about a ballot initiative, or some piece of news. Maybe they tell you something about some blog they visited, or some newspaper they read, or some organization they belong to. Maybe they tell you who they're voting for in some upcoming election.
The thing about these moments is that this person you are talking to -- they are not trying to confront you. On the contrary, they are trying to be agreeable. Most people will not bring up politics in conversation with an acquaintance unless they're fairly certain that you agree with them; that they've broached a "safe" topic of conversation. So this person, who you're getting along with reasonably well, has sized you up and decided that ... hey, you must be a conservative too. The waters are safe with you.
What is your reaction when this happens? I would guess that most of you, as pugnacious as you can be on the blogs, are usually empathetic and pleasant. I'm almost always that way when this happens (although I can think of a couple of exceptions that involved truly obnoxious people, or too much beer). But deep down, you feel a little betrayed. Why? Because you had probably been sizing up this person too, and you had decided, being a nice enough human being and all, that they were probably just like you ... a progressive.
* * *
Let me pull back for a moment. As far as I can tell, there are three basic sets of explanations for the question I pose in the title of the diary: what makes a conservative conservative? And these fall under the three broad headings of the moral, the economic, and the psychological.
- The moral explanation. This is the idea that a person is conservative because they are simply less ... evolved than you. They are less ethical or more selfish than you. Or they are more gullible than you. Or they aren't as intelligent as you. I know, I know, this one sounds a little bit impolite when we frame it in this fashion. But don't tell me these sorts of thoughts haven't crossed your mind when you've been engaged in a discussion with a conservative who happens to be a little disagreeable. At its basest, the explanation becomes this: progressives are Good and conservatives are Evil.
- The economic explanation. This is the classic explanation from political economy. People are relatively rational, so this goes, and they formulate their political beliefs on the basis of a relatively narrowly defined self-interest. Rich people are conservative because conservatives support lower taxes on the rich. Gay people are liberal because liberals support gay rights. And so forth. At its extreme, this explanation can boil down into a class conflict hypothesis.
- The psychological explanation. This explanation treats political affiliation as a form of identity. The person is a conservative because their parents were conservative. Or their peer group is conservative. Or because they belong to some other sort of subgroup of people -- evangelical Christians, for instance -- who are generally associated with conservatives. Or because there was some sort of formative experience in their life that they associate favorably with conservatism. Perhaps they came of age when Ronald Reagan was very popular. Perhaps they served in the military under a Republican president. I wish I could come up with better examples, but hopefully you see that there are a myriad of possibilities. Conservatism, in this sense, is somewhat analogous to picking a favorite sports team.
* * *
At this point, I'm going to pull even further back and ask you a series of questions. Why are progressives progressive? And specifically, why are you progressive? I would caution against this line of thinking: "progressives are right on Iraq, and the environment, and a woman's right to choose, and so-forth and so-forth, and so I am a progressive". That is getting somewhat ahead of the question. Instead, I am asking you to think about how you became progressive. Were your parents progressive? Are your friends progressive? What made you decide that progressives are right on, for example, a woman's right to choose? Did you always think this, or did you come to this conclusion later in life? Which came first: that you identified yourself as progressive, or that you decided that progressives were correct on this issue, a woman's right to choose? Are there any issues that you disagree with the progressive mainstream about?
* * *
All three of the explanations I advanced above are valid, and all three of them are probably necessary in some dosage to explain something as complicated as political behavior. But as you may have gathered, I think that the third explanation -- political affiliation as identity -- tends to have the most resonance.
The first explanation, that political affiliation is a matter of deeply-held personal attributes like intelligence or capacity for empathy, is probably the most difficult to test. The relationship between conservatism and intelligence as measured on standardized tests, for example, tends to be rather ambiguous. There is some evidence that progressives have increasingly become more intelligent than liberals, even if they were not before, but this is a relatively new phenomenon, and the correlations are quite weak. And how one would test the proposition that progressives have more character than conservatives, I simply have no idea.
However, the experience that I recalled at the outset of this diary -- that of having a conversation with an acquittance who "outs" themselves as conservative -- was meant in part as a refutation of this hypothesis. When you find out that someone is a conservative, does your opinion of their intelligence go down? Your opinion of their character? Your overall respect for them? If you don't know that person very well, then it very probably might. But the better you've gotten to know that person, my personal experience it won't greatly affect your perception about these things. Most of us, after all, not only have conservative acquaintances, but also conservative friends, or relatives, or even spouses. The explanation that conservatives are somehow less ethical than liberals seems at the very least insufficient, and quite possibly unnecessary, to explain political orientation....
* * *
The second explanation is more robust, but almost certainly not entirely satisfactory. One problem is semantic: defining what is in one's self-interest depends on how we define self-interest. But leaving that aside, it is clear that many people do not vote according to their self-interest as most people would usually define it. One of the hypothesis behind What's the Matter with Kansas?, for instance, is that Republican electoral margins circa 1980-2004 were based in large part on people voting against their self-interest. Namely speaking, a lot of rural, working-class people tended to align themselves with the Republicans, particuarly in Presidential elections, even though the people they voted for would tend not to promote the interests of the working class. This Republican coalition may be on the verge of disintegrating now -- but, ironically, it has been replaced by a similarly vexing problem, which is that Democrats are becoming the party of the wealthy. Now, certainly, you can come up with some pretty good explanations that are still rooted in a narrowly-defined concept of self-interest for why this might be the case -- for example, it is in almost everyone's self-interest to ensure that the environment does not go to Hell. But at the very least, the traditional conception of the Democrats as the party of the working class and the Republicans as the party of the economic elite is something that has come into question.
Another set of problems revolving around this explanation is the relationship between issue positions and political identity. One of the questions I asked you to consider before is which came first -- your progressive positions or your progressive identity? My guess is that for most of you, the explanation is something like this: there are one or two issues that you thought about deeply, and that you tended to take the progressive position on. At some point, those issues became especially important to you, and pushed you past some sort of a tipping point where you began to identify as progressive. At that point, the other positions tended to fall into place.
Consider, for example, the following propositions:
- The United States should immediately begin a phased withdraw of all combat troops from Iraq.
- A woman's right to choose deserves the full protection of the law, and trumps any presumptive rights of the unborn fetus.
- Tax cuts on the richest Americans should be repealed.
I would guess that upward of 95% of you reading this diary agree with the first two propositions, and that upward of 85% agree with the third. But what do these positions really have to do with one another? What common point of philosophy tends to underlie the three of them? Is it possible, for example, to agree with #1 and #3, but to have a either a scientific or a religiously-based definition of life that would preclude one from agreeing with #2? Yes, it is quite possible; there is nothing inherently contradictory about that set of positions. And yet, the solid majority of people -- certainly not all -- tend to answer "yes" to all three of these questions, or "no" to all three of them.
* * *
That leads us into the third explanation, which is political orientation as self-identity. This is not to suggest that one's political identity is entirely arbitrary; there is some set of reasons why you prefer progressivism to conservatism, just as there is some set of reasons why your favorite band is your favorite band, or you prefer the Red Sox to the Yankees. But at the very least, this notion of identity tends to normalize and amplify one's position on the political spectrum. And in some cases, the identity will come to entirely proceed the positions: rather than being a progressive because you take these positions on the issues, you take these positions on the issues because you are a progressive.
Another take on this philosophy is that we tend to vote on the basis of the positions favorable to the person we aspire to be, rather than the person we actually are. This has been used to explain, for example, how the estate tax ("Death Tax") became a populist issue for Republicans, even though most of the people supporting their position were unlikely ever to have to pay the estate tax, or to inherit money from someone who did. But many people aspire to be wealthy and to leave their children with a large inheritance, and they want to protect the rights of that aspirational identity.
In a somewhat related note, there is considerable evidence that people consider the personal qualities of a leader at least as much as his issue positions in determining who to vote for; the choice of candidate may himself be a surrogate for one's identity and aspirations.
Finally, I would point out that this explanation permits the most possibility for the influence of the media and mass culture, which tend to be very effective at formulating and reinforcing personal identity.
* * *
Whether or not I have persuaded you on this long, epistemological tangent, there is something else at work here too, which is that each theory of political identity produces its own corresponding theory of change. In addition, each of the theories seems to be associated with one of the three major Democratic candidates for Preisdent.
The first explanation -- that political affiliation is mainly a matter of moral character -- is associated with Hillary Clinton. The Hillary worldview tends to break the country down into partisan forces of Good and Evil -- and little wonder, considering what that woman and her husband have been through. To some extent, this may also be reflected in the behavior of her supporters, who in my experience, tend to have particuarly strong objections when arguments are raised by supporters of other candidates that are sourced from moderate or conservative political commentators.
The problem with this worldview is that it provides very little opportunity for change. And the reason is simple: it is hard to change someone's position when you believe that it is the result of some ethical or mental defect. As a result, it tends to assume primarily a defensive posture.
Although John Edwards seems just as inclined to inflect his narrative with concepts of Good and Evil, the foundation of his political philosophy is something much closer to the second view. Politics is largely a matter of class conflict, with those classes in turn motivated by their economic self-interest. Although I believe that this philosophy hits closer to the mark than that of Hillary Clinton's, it too is problematic from the standpoint of producing change. This is because the class conflict narrative suggests that political positions are relatively entrenched, and are therefore unlikely to be malleable.
In contrast, we have the position of Barack Obama, who seems to believe that political orientation is largely a matter of identity. This presents a considerably more optimistic picture from the standpoint of producing change for a couple of reasons:
- Identity tends to be more fluid, and therefore more malleable, than either one's character or one's economic self-interest.
- This philosophy espouses that political identity tends to form separately from, and perhaps prior to, one's position on the issues. Therefore, even if we cannot change someone's political identity, we can perhaps hope to change what positions are associated with that identity.
In other words, the idea is not so much to get conservatives to stop identifying themselves as conservative, but rather to adopt progressive positions as part of their conservative worldview. Energy independence is a great example of this, since it can be framed in a number of ways (like national security) that can be quite consistent with classical conservative values. Likewise, universal health insurance can be framed as something that removes an inefficient burden from employers, or corrects adverse selection problems in the insurance market. In some ways, this is analogous to shifting the Overton Window, but with a bit more intellectual weight behind it.
But the real advantage of the Obama philosophy is this:
- It permits empathy with the positions of those whom we disagree with, and empathy is almost always a precondition to successful negotiation.
Perhaps the key thing to understand about Barack Obama's political philosophy is that it is not a gameplan to get us to agree with conservatives, but a gameplan to get conservatives to agree with us. It is an opportunity to redefine progressive positions and conservative positions in a way that is favorable to us. If partisan politics are conceived of as a matter of good and evil, or immutable concepts like class conflict, we may win some battles, but we are unlikely to win any wars. If, on the other hand, we can understand the origins of conservative identity and understand its fluidity, we stand some chance of being able to reshape it in our image.