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To beat Trump, we need to know why Americans keep voting for him. Psychologists may have the answer
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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politics
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I think this study is more at the root of the issue:
"One explanation for this might be that conservatives see "loyalty" as an innate moral principle and liberals don't. There was a study that asked people to explain how they judged scenarios as right or wrong. It came to this conclusion:
Liberals have three principles by which they judge morality: care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression
Conservatives have six principles by which they judge morality: care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation.
This explains why it's hard for conservatives and liberals to have a debate about morality. Say the topic is flag burning. The conservative would say that burning a flag violates sanctity but a law against it violates liberty, so the principle of sanctity must be balanced against the principle of liberty. The liberal doesn't see sanctity as a moral principle so only sees the violation of liberty. The liberal can see no reason to ban flag burning and can't understand the conservative's reasoning. However, both can agree that murder is wrong because it harms people, and that rich and poor must obey the same traffic laws because of fairness.
These are two extreme examples, but if I understand the theory correctly moral reasoning exists on a spectrum. A question for those who believe they don't see sanctity as a moral principle at all: if your beloved dog died of natural causes, would you be comfortable serving its body as a meal? If you hesitated at all, you're at least slightly morally conservative.
Dead link now: https://www-bcf.usc.edu/~jessegra/papers/GrahamHaidtNosek.2009.Moral%20foundations%20of%20liberals%20and%20conservatives.JPSP.pdf
Possible alt: https://daverupert.com/2017/08/jonathan-haidt-the-moral-roots-of-liberals-and-conservatives/
More differences:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/22/both-republicans-and-democrats-prioritize-family-but-they-differ-over-other-sources-of-meaning-in-life/
Agreed, but it seems that Trump's rise has coincided with a change to those 6 conservative values. Sanctity in particular seems to be drastically less important than it used to be, as vulgarity has been embraced by the right to an unprecedented degree. Gone are the days when Ned Flanders and David Brooks personified the typical conservative. Vulgarity, foul language, lack of church attendance, sexual impropriety, substance and gambling use, etc are all drastically more acceptable today than at any point in America's post-WWII history
Having said that, there still are elements of Sanctity that these conservatives care about - kneeling during the NFL's national anthem being one of them. But these occurrences seem to be increasingly uncommon