Predisposed

Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences

John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith, John R. Alford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136281211
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Conservatorismo e liberalismo

• A major paradigm shift in the study of politics

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• Highly controversial topic

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• Lively and clear writing on complicated material

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• Applicable to all aspects of political life

Chapter 1
Living with the Enemy

Democrats: Sweaty, disorderly, offhand, imaginative, tolerant, skillful at give-and-take.

Republicans: Respectable, sober, purposeful, self-righteous, cut-and-dried, boring.

Clinton Rossiter, Parties and Politics in America

Politics is a blood sport where fights among spectators can be just as ferocious as the blows traded by combatants. Political exchange tends toward the emotional and primal rather than the reasoned and analytical, which is why it must have seemed like a good idea to ABC News in 1968 to televise a series of debates between William F. Buckley, Jr., and Gore Vidal. Both were ideologues— Buckley for the right, Vidal for the left—but ideologues in an educated, patrician, and articulate men-of-letters sort of way. Perhaps they could demonstrate to a mass audience that it was possible for debates between political opponents to employ words that were honest, intellectual, and constructive rather than pejorative, dismissive, and rancorous.

That sort of example was desperately needed in the United States in 1968, a time when people who disagreed with the political ideas of other people had picked up an alarming habit of shooting them or beating them senseless. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated; race riots raged in dozens of cities; and during the Democratic National Convention, anti-Vietnam War protestors fought the Chicago police for control of the city’s streets in an epic eight-day running battle. Buckley and Vidal, then, must have seemed like just the ticket. They were smart and hyper-articulate, and their plummy, East Coast establishment tones made them seem so, well, civilized. Perhaps they could demonstrate a more mature way to deal with political differences. Or not.

In their most famous exchange, on August 27, 1968, Buckley asserted that Vidal was unqualified to say anything at all about politics, calling him “nothing more than a literary producer of perverted Hollywood-minded prose.” Vidal retorted that Buckley “was always to the right, and always in the wrong,” and accused him of imposing his “rather bloodthirsty neuroses on a political campaign.”

After that the gloves came off.

“Shut up a minute,” said Vidal. Buckley did not shut up. Vidal called him a “proto- or crypto-Nazi.” Buckley was not happy with that. “Now listen you queer,” he said. “Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddam face.”¹ Buckley went home in a huff and sued Vidal for libel. Vidal went home in a huff and, perhaps miffed that he didn’t think of it first, counter-sued Buckley for libel.

So much for a civilized exchange of views.

At this point we could cluck our tongues and make highbrow academic noises about the degeneration of political exchange. We could point back to the early days of the American experiment and hold up the dignified Founders as better examples of civil and edifying political debate. We won’t, though, because they, too, stuck in the shiv when it suited them. Like Buckley and Vidal, Alexander Hamilton and John Adams could be insufferable know-it-alls, intolerant of viewpoints other than their own. President Adams signed into law the Alien and Sedition Acts, making it a crime to say nasty things about the government—a good deal if you are head of that government—and Hamilton engaged in a personal feud with Vice President Aaron Burr so vitriolic it ended with Burr putting a musket ball through him. As an example of politics putting people on the boil, it is difficult to top the sitting vice president of the United States shooting and killing one of the prime movers and signatories of the Constitution. Other Founders weren’t much better. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, held up in the United States as semi-divine political angels descended from Mount Independence, chucked mud with the best of them. Jefferson, for example, slandered his opponents on the sly. He bankrolled James Callender, a professional “scandal monger,” to attack Adams. Callender obliged, describing Adams in scorching prose as “a repulsive pedant, a gross hypocrite and unprincipled oppressor.”² Callender was tossed in jail for violating the Alien and Sedition Act (score one for Adams) and Jefferson got a nasty bit of blowback—he fell out with his journalistic attack dog, who promptly turned to writing titillating tales about Jefferson’s affairs with an attractive slave named Sally Hemmings. Jefferson indignantly and, if you believe DNA testing on Hemmings’ descendants, wholly misleadingly said he did not have sexual relations with that woman.

Don’t be smug if you are not from the United States; we’re willing to bet your political icons are not much different from the feet-of-clay rhetorical flame-throwers blistering each other under the Stars and Stripes. Show us a paragon of politics from any time and place and chances are we won’t have to scratch the surface too hard before finding something like the Buckley-Vidal kerfuffle, in other words someone saying the other guy’s political views are so wrongheaded they merit a fast-moving fist to the schnoz.

People take politics seriously. They love validation of their own opinions and vilification of their opponents’ opinions. This is why conservatives make Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and Mark Levin best-selling authors, Rush Limbaugh a wealthy talk-radio titan, and Fox News the most watched outlet on cable television. These sources can be counted on to tell their audiences that conservatives are noble defenders of the good and the just while liberals are stubbornly mugger-headed and oppositional. Driven by a desire to receive precisely the opposite message, liberals flock to the books of Al Franken, Michael Moore, and Molly Ivins, and the satire of television comedy like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report has created a massively successful career around the persona of a shallow, jingoistic, uniformed conservative buffoon. Diatribes against liberals or conservatives enjoy a guaranteed audience of partisans all subscribing to the maxim, “why be informed when you can be affirmed.”³

If we were of an avaricious bent, we could write another broadside against stupid, inbred, uninformed, malodorous, bloodsucking conservatives. If we really wanted the big bucks, we could pen a blistering condemnation of duplicitous, malevolent, degenerate, cretinous liberals. Such works sell very well among certain demographics and, having read a fair sampling of what’s on offer, we see little evidence that it takes much effort or talent to get on a good rant. Authors of these popular political screeds rarely seem to invoke—let alone conduct—systematic research. Ginning up a truckload of demeaning adjectives to unload on one group or another? Sounds like it might be fun as well as profitable. Unfortunately, we are academics, so neither profit nor fun is what interests us most.

Besides that, the world does not need another book assuring readers that their political views are laudably correct while those of their political opponents are pathetically, dangerously, and rashly incorrect. Such books only pander to the worst instincts of those who care deeply about politics, encouraging extremity and discouraging dialogue. Ad hominem attacks on the political “other side” may be comfortingly confirmatory to readers and financially fulfilling to authors, but they are shallow, derivative, and polarizing.

In this book we aim to explain why people experience and interpret the political world so very differently. We want to provide liberals with a better appreciation for the conservative mindset; conservatives with a better appreciation for the liberal mindset; and moderates with a better appreciation for why those closer to the extremes make such a big fuss. We make no pretense that conservatives and liberals can be led to agree on everything, or even anything. Getting the Buckleys and the Vidals of the world to hold hands and sing “Kumbaya” around a campfire is just not going to happen. Pretending that some middle-ground nirvana can be reached if only we listen to the other side is counterproductive and a source of endless frustration. We are after smaller but important and much more realistic game. We want liberals and conservatives to understand why they are different from each other and why those differences frequently seem so unbridgeable.

We recognize what we are up against. Liberals and conservatives are rarely in the mood to understand the other side. This resistance to accepting the other side is something we have encountered in our own professional lives. A few years ago, we published a study showing that liberals and conservatives experience the world differently and suggested that it might be unproductive and slightly inaccurate to view either side as irredeemably malevolent—or unremittingly beneficent. Media coverage of this study led to us to receive numerous emails. Some of these were decidedly caustic, but the most memorable was more plaintive than judgmental. Its key line was “don’t do this to me: I NEED to hate conservatives.” Clearly, for some it is deeply rewarding to denounce political adversaries, preferably at high volume.

Facing Your Monsters

“If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention,” goes the old saying. We disagree. Outrage does not solve challenging issues of governance and it is possible for people to pay close attention to politics without losing emotional control. A more productive, if less viscerally satisfying, response to political difference is to try to understand the source of the views of those who disagree with us so fundamentally. Doing so does not mean your resolve is weakening or that your fellow travelers should begin to worry about you; making an honest effort to understand the other side is not selling out.

In urging each side in the political debate to work harder at accepting the other side, we are not implying that the two poles of the ideological spectrum are mirror images of each other and equally culpable on all matters. The media often engages in “false equivalency,” leaving the impression that if a problem exists, both sides must have contributed equally to its creation. For example, if one side of the political debate is not compromising then the other side must not be compromising either. This is not our position at all. Our pitch is that liberals and conservatives and everyone in between have different orientations to information search and problem solving and therefore contribute to political difficulties and solutions in very different ways. Indeed, one manifestation of this is that the two ideological poles have quite different attitudes toward compromise.

To illustrate the value of entering the mindset of the other side, consider the following. One of our children was given to horrible nightmares. He would cry and shout as monsters circled in his sleep. Words from the awake world (“there is no monster under your bed”) could not disabuse him of the fears that were so real to him. Weeks into this unpleasant pattern, due more to desperation than inspiration, his parents’ strategy changed. Instead of telling him how silly and outrageous he was being, they entered his dream world. “Yes, there is a monster. Oh, he’s an ugly one—mean, too—and he’s coming this way. But wait, he just spotted some monster friends of his and he’s moving off in another direction— way off.” By imagining the world he was in and by letting him know that others understood the nature of that world, it became possible to work through the attending issues. Blissful sleep—for parents and child alike—soon descended where monsters had lurked only moments before.

Dismissing the nightmare world of political adversaries is a wholly ineffective approach to solving political problems. What is lost by making a real effort to enter their world, not with the intention of joining them but to understand the reasons they have come to such different political conclusions? You are free to believe that the world of your political adversaries is as detached from reality as a scared little boy’s nightmare world—but realize it is as real to them as the monsters were to him. Also realize that to your political adversaries, your world is as detached from reality as a child’s green, scaly monster. Maybe if we understand their world we can figure out how to live with people who annoyingly, irritatingly, and persistently come to political viewpoints so very different from our own. Puzzlement is better than hate.

In this book we make the case that political variations are part of an incredible range of differences in the way people respond to the world. Just to give you a brief teaser, it turns out that liberals and conservatives have different tastes not just in politics, but in art, humor, food, life accoutrements, and leisure pursuits; they differ in how they collect information, how they think, and how they view other people and events; they have different neural architecture and display distinct brain waves in certain circumstances; they have different personalities and psychological tendencies; they differ in what their autonomic nervous systems are attuned to; they are aroused by and pay attention to different stimuli; and they might even be different genetically. At least at the far ends of the ideological spectrum, liberals and conservatives are emotionally, preferentially, psychologically, and biologically distinct. This account is not just based on casual observation or armchair analysis. Science—both social and biological—is our co-pilot.

Liberals and conservatives often are reluctant to accept that their differences are rooted in psychology, let alone biology. Their own political beliefs seem so sensible, rational, and correct that they have difficulty believing that other people, if given full information and protected from nefarious and artificial influences, would arrive at different beliefs. Liberals are convinced the existence of conservatives can be written off to Karl Rove’s treachery, the Koch brothers’ fortune, the bromides of Fox News, and a puzzling proclivity to think simplistically. Conservatives are equally convinced the existence of liberals is attributable to the “lamestream” media, indoctrination by socialist university professors, the sway of Hollywood, and a maddening tendency to disengage from the real world. Yet political differences are grounded not in a duplicitous conspiracy or an irrational disregard of logic and truth but rather in variations in our core beings. Conservatives are not duped liberals and liberals are not lazily uninformed conservatives.

You would not come to this conclusion by looking at much of today’s popular political commentary. Egged on by ideologically biased authors and personalities, efforts to understand political opponents often go no further than the assertion that they are ignorant, obdurate, and uninformed—those on the right are “big fat idiots” and those on the left are “pinheads.”⁴ Accepting that political differences are due not merely to incorrect information, elite machinations, or an unwillingness to think through situations is an important step toward living more comfortably. A better understanding of the biological and psychological realities of our political opponents makes it possibl...