OK, do we need any more evidence that conservatives kick liberal ass when it comes to getting their message across to the public? Progressives have been scratching their heads about this for years, wondering how the public could be so misguided as to embrace policies that, in many cases, go directly against their own interests. What, indeed, is the matter with Kansas?
Theories abound, and many of them center on the issue of values. Conservatives speak to them, liberals (for the most part) don't. Jonathan Haidt, a University of Virginia psychologist (who just announced a move to NYU), puts it this way: liberals approach politics like shopping ("Buy our policy because it's better than the other side's"), while conservatives treat it like religion ("Support us because we're moral and the other side is immoral"). There's no longer much question as to which argument resonates with most voters.
To a large extent, then, it comes down to: How do you define what is moral? And that's what Haidt has been studying, with very interesting results...
About 4 years ago, Haidt published a much-discussed (and recommended) article entitled What Makes People Vote Republican?, available here. In the first paragraph, he says
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.
and a few lines later
one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats.
According to Haidt, we are all born with a moral sense: a set of intuitions about how people should behave. It wasn't written on stone tablets on a mountaintop, it was developed and honed by millions of years of evolution, and its adaptive purpose is to help us navigate through, and succeed in, the very complex social network that is human society. To a large degree, it's concerned with (a) making other people like us and want to be our allies, and (b) protecting and enhancing our all-important reputations.
Haidt's recent book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, expands on these ideas. I haven't read it yet, but Haidt discussed it with Bill Moyers recently, and it's well worth watching.
Haidt's research has identified six key concerns in our inherited moral sense: Care, Liberty, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. He says that conservatives value all these about equally, whereas liberals score highest on Care, somewhat less on Liberty, a bit less on Fairness, and hardly at all on the last three. So when conservatives make appeals to Loyalty ("America is No. 1"), Authority ("Homeland Security needs to know everything about you"), and Sanctity ("Don't desecrate the flag"), liberals have no effective response. As Haidt notes, liberals badly need to come up with a coherent narrative about why their view of the world makes sense (which is exactly what Drew Westen and George Lakoff have been saying ad nauseam). Haidt, who started out as a full-on liberal, now describes himself as a centrist and says he thinks that conservative intellectuals have a more realistic view of human nature than liberals do.
So what's the solution to the current deadlock of polarization? I don't know, and neither does Haidt. In the Moyers segment, he offers a few rather tepid recommendations like stop demonizing the other side: you can disagree with someone without calling them evil (I suspect you're now thinking the same thing I am: "But they are evil!" Maybe there's a distinction to be made between the evil leaders and the rank and file, who are merely manipulated.)
Haidt notes that even our supposedly dependable ally, "reason", deserts us because people use reason to argue a position, not to search for truth. We're all subject to confirmation bias, meaning that we seek out and pay attention to things that support our point of view, and ignore or suppress things that don't—which only makes polarization worse. (The Internet, says Haidt, hasn't helped in this regard: no matter what wacky premise you want to espouse—Space aliens among us? Obama born in Keyna?—a few seconds with the Google will give you thousands of references "confirming" your theory.)
The only real way of breaking the logjam, says Haidt, is to bring together people on both sides who have some level of trust in each other. That used to exist, he notes, in the U.S. Congress, but it doesn't any more.
To which I can't resist adding: "Now whose fault is that?"