Understanding Conservatism

Awesome, awesome article by Tom Jacobs @ Miller-McCune today on Alternet:

"Morality is not just about how we treat each other, as most liberals think," he argues. "It is also about binding groups together and supporting essential institutions."

"With all that in mind, Haidt identified five foundational moral impulses. As succinctly defined by Northwestern University's McAdams, they are:

• Harm/care. It is wrong to hurt people; it is good to relieve suffering.
• Fairness/reciprocity. Justice and fairness are good; people have certain rights that need to be upheld in social interactions.
• In-group loyalty. People should be true to their group and be wary of threats from the outside. Allegiance, loyalty and patriotism are virtues; betrayal is bad.
• Authority/respect. People should respect social hierarchy; social order is necessary for human life.
• Purity/sanctity. The body and certain aspects of life are sacred. Cleanliness and health, as well as their derivatives of chastity and piety, are all good. Pollution, contamination and the associated character traits of lust and greed are all bad.

Haidt's research reveals that liberals feel strongly about the first two dimensions -- preventing harm and ensuring fairness -- but often feel little, or even feel negatively, about the other three. Conservatives, on the other hand, are drawn to loyalty, authority and purity, which liberals tend to think of as backward or outdated. People on the right acknowledge the importance of harm prevention and fairness but not with quite the same energy or passion as those on the left."

Crazy, huh?! Best of all, it reveals how people with different moral prorities can come together on issues -- i.e.

"Haidt notes that the environmental movement was started by liberals, who were presumably driven by the harm/care impulse. But conservative Evangelical Christians are increasingly taking up the cause, propelled by the urge to respect authority. "They're driven by the idea that God gave man dominion over the Earth, and keeping the planet healthy is our sacred responsibility," he notes. "If we simply rape, pillage, destroy and consume, we're abusing the power given to us by God."

Brilliant.

TAM

HOPE FLOATS

Since The Original Average Man (TOAM) recently made reference to Naomi Klein's funny and insightful article in which she assigns hope-based terms to disappointed Obamaniacs, I was inspired to make a couple comments of my own ...

Like many Obama fans, it seems that TOAM woke up this morning with a nasty Hopover; defined as:

Like a hangover, a hopeover comes from having overindulged in something that felt good at the time but wasn't really all that healthy, leading to feelings of remorse, even shame. It's the political equivalent of the crash after a sugar high. Sample sentence: "When I listened to Obama's economic speech my heart soared. But then, when I tried to tell a friend about his plans for the millions of layoffs and foreclosures, I found myself saying nothing at all. I've got a serious hopeover."

Okay, maybe I'm still a little drunk on the Obama Kool-Aid, but I'm not quite there yet. Although, I do admit to being on a little bit of a Hoper coaster lately. At any rate, just to show that I'm not completely in the tank for Barack, I am jumping on Naomi's quest to banish Larry Summers from public life. I have to admit that I didn't know much about the guy before this election, but the more I learn, the more queasy I get. In fact, I'm currently in the middle of Ms. Klien's awesome book The Shock Doctrine, and it seems that Larry's embracing of "disaster capitalism" goes quite a ways back. And here's part what Naomi Klien says about him in this recent column:

... that's the problem with Larry. For all his appeals to absolute truths, he has been spectacularly wrong again and again. He was wrong about not regulating derivatives. Wrong when he helped kill Depression-era banking laws, turning banks into too-big-to-fail welfare monsters. And as he helps devise ever more complex tricks and spends ever more taxpayer dollars to keep the financial casino running, he remains wrong today.

So, yes, I'm still in love with the idea of hopey. But let's call a duck and duck: Summers smells fowl, and I hope he gets kicked off the island.

Having said that, though, my other great hope is that my lefty friends aren't running their feelings through the InstaHope-A-Matic and won't soon develop Hopelash.

Peace Out.

TL

OBAMA RESPONDS TO THE LEFT

If you didn't see Obama's speech on the economy today, you really should. If interested, you can see it here. Anyway, I thought it worth mentioning the defense of his economic plan from some on the Left like Paul Krugman. Here's part of it ...

On the other hand, there have been some who don't dispute that we need to shore up the banking system, but suggest that we have been too timid in how we go about it. They say that the federal government should have already preemptively stepped in and taken over major financial institutions the way that the FDIC currently intervenes in smaller banks, and that our failure to do so is yet another example of Washington coddling Wall Street. So let me be clear - the reason we have not taken this step has nothing to do with any ideological or political judgment we've made about government involvement in banks, and it's certainly not because of any concern we have for the management and shareholders whose actions have helped cause this mess.

Rather, it is because we believe that preemptive government takeovers are likely to end up costing taxpayers even more in the end, and because it is more likely to undermine than to create confidence. Governments should practice the same principle as doctors: first do no harm. So rest assured - we will do whatever is necessary to get credit flowing again, but we will do so in ways that minimize risks to taxpayers and to the broader economy. To that end, in addition to the program to provide capital to the banks, we have launched a plan that will pair government resources with private investment in order to clear away the old loans and securities - the so-called toxic assets - that are also preventing our banks from lending money.

So, I don't know if Obama is right or not about this stuff, but he sure sounds like he knows what he's talking about when you listen to the speech. He's a very impressive man.

NIXON DEBUNKERED

With back-to-back trips to Sacramento and Las Vegas recently, I haven't really had much time to blog. Plus, I was tired of talking about the crappiness that is Tim Geithner anyway.

So, on a completely different note, my passions for politics and television merged recently with this little gem from a March 24 Studio Briefing entry ...

The liberal online news magazine Truthdig has uncovered a recording among the infamous White House tapes of former President Richard Nixon in which he denounces a 1970s' episode of Norman Lear's All in the Family that dealt with gay issues. Speaking to presidential assistant John Ehrlichman, Nixon remarks that he became so enraged by the episode that "I turned the goddamned thing off. I couldn't listen any more." But it is clear that he must have seen the entire show since he mentions some of its final scenes. In the recording, which includes an unexplained 14-second bleep, Nixon remarks, "The point that I make is that goddamnit, I do not think that you glorify on public television homosexuality. The reason you don't glorify it, John, anymore than you glorify whores. ... We all have weaknesses and so forth and so on, but goddamnit, what do you think that does to kids ... when they see that?" Later, Nixon says that he was angered by the show not on moral grounds. "Why it outrages me because I don't want to see this country go that way. ... You know what happened to the Greeks. Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure Aristotle was a homo, we all know that. So was Socrates, but he never had the influence that television had."

And here you thought you already had enough reasons to dislike Nixon.