The Specific Positions that U.S. Political Parties Take on Contentious Issues Lack Ideological Coherence

Many years ago, I read Moral Politics (1996), in which George Lakoff tried to make sense to the two baskets of positions taken by the two political parties. He was intrigued by the idea that Republicans strongly cling to positions that didn't seem to have any coherent underlying value. What does a strong Second Amendment position have to do with being anti-abortion? What does willingness to through one's weight around in the world using the military have to do with Prayer in Schools, cutting welfare assistance or attempting to limit jury awards on tort cases? Then Lakoff realized that he, a self-proclaimed liberal, took the opposite position on all of those issues. In short, he had his own basket of seemingly unconnected issues. But, he thought, there must be an underlying basis for these two opposing collections of issue-positions. When I read his book, I wondered the same thing.

Lakoff concluded that there, indeed, were separate foundations for the Liberal and Conservative mindsets. He called these the "Strict Father Model" and the "Nurturant Parent Model." See pp 33-35. Lakoff claims that at the center of the conservative worldview is the Strict Father Model.

This model posits a traditional nuclear family, with the father having primary responsibility for supporting and protecting the family as well as the authority to set overall policy, to set strict rules for the behavior of children, and to enforce the rules. The mother has the day-to-day responsibility for the care of the house, raising the children, and upholding the father’s authority. Children must respect and obey their parents; by doing so they build character, that is, self-discipline and self-reliance. Love and nurturance are, of course, a vital part of family life but can never outweigh parental authority, which is itself an expression of love and nurturance—tough love. Self-discipline, self-reliance, and respect for legitimate authority are the crucial things that children must learn.

Once children are mature, they are on their own and must depend on their acquired self-discipline to survive. Their self-reliance gives them authority over their own destinies, and parents are not to meddle in their lives.

According to Lakoff, the liberal worldview centers on a very different ideal of family life, what he calls the Nurturant Parent model:

Love, empathy, and nurturance are primary, and children become responsible, self-disciplined and self-reliant through being cared for, respected, and caring for others, both in their family and in their community. Support and protection are part of nurturance, and they require strength and courage on the part of parents. The obedience of children comes out of their love and respect for their parents and their community, not out of the fear of punishment. Good communication is crucial. If their authority is to be legitimate, parents must explain why their decisions serve the cause of protection and nurturance. Questioning by children is seen as positive, since children need to learn why their parents do what they do and since children often have good ideas that should be taken seriously. Ultimately, of course, responsible parents have to make the decisions, and that must be clear.

The principal goal of nurturance is for children to be fulfilled and happy in their lives. A fulfilling life is assumed to be, in significant part, a nurturant life; one committed to family and community responsibility. What children need to learn most is empathy for others, the capacity for nurturance, and the maintenance of social ties, which cannot be done without the strength, respect, self-discipline, and self-reliance that comes through being cared for. Raising a child to be fulfilled also requires helping that child develop his or her potential for achievement and enjoyment. Th it requires respecting the child’s own values and allowing the child to explore the range of ideas and options that the world offers.

Lakoff contrasted these two models in a way that would intuitively sound correct to many people who traditionally vote for Democrats:

Strict Father morality assigns highest priorities to such things as moral strength (the self-control and self-discipline to stand up to external and internal evils), respect for and obedience to authority, the setting and following of strict guidelines and behavioral norms, and so on. Moral self-interest says that if everyone is free to pursue their self-interest, the overall self-interests of all will be maximized. In conservatism, the pursuit of self-interest is seen as a way of using self-discipline to achieve self-reliance.

Nurturant Parent morality has a different set of priorities. Moral nurturance requires empathy for others and the helping of those who need help. To help others, one must take care of oneself and nurture social ties. And one must be happy and fulfilled in oneself, or one will have little empathy for others. The moral pursuit of self-interest only makes sense within these priorities.

There's a big problem with Lakoff's analysis. From 1996 to the present, those who identify as "liberals" have dramatically flipped their positions on censorship, warmongering, race consciousness, trust in the U.S. security state. Did these issues become more "nurturing?" It's impossible to account for these 180 degree turns using a Strict Parent/Nurturant Parent analysis. Over time, conservatives have also turned themselves into pretzels, as discussed in a new book, The Myth of Left and Right, by brothers Hyrum and Verlan Lewis (2023). When they voted for Trump in large numbers, Republicans decided that the type of morality they had strongly touted for decades was no longer important.

Self-identified conservatives and liberals have also recently switched places on the importance of personal morality in public officials. During the Clinton years, conservatives were nearly unanimous in believing that the personal char acter of a politician was crucial to his or her performance in office - it was one of their central justifications for impeaching President Clinton- but as soon as Trump assumed leadership of the right, conservatives reversed course. Before Trump, only 36% of Republicans believed that "public officials can behave ethically in their professional roles even if they acted immorally in their personal life," but after Trump's nomination, that number shot up to 70%.54 More recently, Gallup found that: [More . . . ]

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Ryan Long’s Dilemma

Excellent video by Ryan Long. The answer is to start with this premise: There are real-life human beings on all sides of this horrific situation. Start from this position. Martin Buber's I-Thou. Then think slowly, not impulsively, with the assumption that the past doesn't strictly determine the future.

One more meme . . . Be a problem solver. Don't pick sides.

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About Intellectual Humility

Tribal affiliation is the biggest threat to intellectual humility. It is insidious--we join tribes emotionally and organically--there is not official signup form, so we don't even know that we joined. Once we join, the confirmation bias takes over, making us hubristic and even willing to fight for things we didn't choose to believe.

The solution is to disengage, to step out of one's tribe. That is extremely difficult once we get used to the comfy confines, the smiles and encouragement of our comrades, the non-stop warmth of that feeling that of belonging, the feeling that one is always at home. Once we are comfy, we turn off any thoughts that maybe we don't belong. We are completely credulous regarding tribal dogma. Stockholm Syndrome takes over. We become our own prisoners, setting up electrified fences to cordon off any improper or impure thoughts. The only hope for most people is that external tragedy resulting from the dogma comes crashing in, resulting in depression, nihilism and scales falling from our eyes. This might offer us a more-or-less blank slate on which to rebuild, a chance to build one's own belief system based on intellectual humility: curiosity, skepticism and evidence. More likely, it merely sends one on a shopping trip to join the next most attractive tribe.

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New Study Regarding Tribalism in Politics

New study by Bernstein, Zambrotta, Martin, & Micalizzi on political tribalism. Disturbing and not surprising to anyone who has eyes and ears. Title is: "Tribalism in American Politics: Are Partisans Guilty of Double-Standards?"

Here is the discussion section:

Across experiments, we found strong evidence for the existence of political tribalism and the application of double-standards. In Study 1, we found that tribalism occurs for the perceived legitimacy of hypothetical election outcomes. When asked whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden would be the legitimate president under three different scenarios, Republicans viewed Trump as more legitimate than Biden while Democrats viewed Biden as more legitimate than Trump. Similarly, in Study 2 Part 1, Republicans supported identical presidential policies and actions more under Donald Trump than Barack Obama while Democrats supported identical policies and actions more under Barack Obama than Donald Trump.

A noteworthy element this study is that each item was, in fact, true under both Presidents, which highlights the study’s real-world importance and is an important contribution over prior experiments. In Study 2 Part 2, we showed that Republicans viewed identical statements attributed to Bill Clinton as more bigoted than those attributed to Donald Trump while Democrats viewed the statements as more bigoted when attributed to Trump instead of Clinton. Further, Republicans viewed a statement advocating colorblindness to be generally not racist when attributed to either Dr. Martin Luther King (MLK) or Donald Trump (though racism scores were slightly higher in the latter condition); Democrats also viewed the statement as low in racism when attributed to MLK, but the racism score increased drastically when attributed to Trump. Taken together, these studies suggest that tribalism permeates many aspects of political life and discourse. Policy agreement differs according to the person enacting the policy. Perceptions of racism and xenophobia depend on the person who utters the statement. Alarmingly, even the perceived legitimacy of elections is dependent upon the winner; that is, people assign different standards for election legitimacy depending upon whether their preferred candidate wins or loses. Moreover, some of these effects are rarely seen in the social or cognitive sciences (e.g., Fs>250 when sample size <150), which suggests that tribalism plays a large role, at least in certain contexts.

Our main interest was in documenting if bias exists among each side of the political aisle. However, the study does invite us to ask which side exhibits greater tribal bias . . . To the degree that our results can help weigh in on this question, there was some indication that bias is higher among Democrats, which we call “left-leaning asymmetry”

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The Perfect Storm Inflicted Upon Girls by Transgender Ideology

During this conversation with Helen Joyce, Jordan Peterson explained by girls as so much more at risk of harm at the hands of those who peddle transgender ideology. I transcribed the following excerpt:

There's no difference between being self-conscious and being miserable, technically, but here's something else. Self-consciousness among females is much more associated with body dysmorphia. Now there's a bunch of reasons for that. We don't know all of them. But here's a couple. First of all, at puberty, women start to experience more negative emotion on average than men. And that is not true of boys and girls, but it does seem to kick in at puberty. And that's likely because you get size dimorphism developing. And so it's reasonable for women to be a little bit more timid about the physical environment than men. But also women are sexually vulnerable. And also, they have to care for infants. So being threat-sensitive, makes sense, okay? And in any case, those are three possible reasons, but it definitely kicks in at puberty.

Now, it also is the case that anxiety among women tends to take the form of bodily self-consciousness. And I think the reason for that is likely--this is a speculation, although the others are merely observable facts--it's likely because girls and women are judged more comprehensively on their physical appearance than men. So it makes sense that if they're going to be self-conscious, it's going to be more broadly focused. And that's particularly rough. Then the third contributing factor is girls hit puberty earlier than boys. So now what you have is a perfect storm there.

So now you have a girl. And she's feeling a lot more anxious and confused than she did before, because she hit puberty. Plus, her body is doing 50 weird things. Plus, she's getting all sorts of strange attention from adults that she never got before. Plus, she doesn't know how to fit in on the social front. And she's trying to make that transition from childhood to adulthood. And then you have people additionally torturing them about the fact that any deviation from the norm on the stereotypical front is actually an indication that she doesn't exist in the correct body while she doesn't really feel like she's in the correct body to begin with. So it's a perfect storm for young girls.

When Canada came out with its compelled pronoun law 2016, I talked to the Canadian Senate, I said, you idiots, in your legislation, you think you're going to free up kids? You're going to produce a psychogenic epidemic among young women, because they're preferentially susceptible to psychogenic epidemics, which is why we had a bulimia epidemic and an anorexia epidemic, all of which were spread by social media--and a cutting epidemic. And then there's a history of such epidemics going back 300 years: Freudian hysteria, which was very widespread in the Victorian times, although disappeared afterwards, or mutated, was also a psychogenic epidemic that preferentially affected young women.

So I just wanted to lay out some of the reasons why that's the case, higher levels of negative emotion, and more broadly focused self-consciousness. And so then you add to that a kind of unpopularity, because maybe a given girl isn't that sophisticated at manifesting--what would you call it? Socially acceptable feminine traits. It takes a fair bit of sophistication to be a well put-together woman and you're going to be pretty damned awkward at that if you're kind of a clunky tomboy when you're 12.

So now you're providing them with, first of all, a uni-dimensional reason why they're miserable. It's pretty damned convenient. And no wonder an adolescent wants that. It's like, do I have 50 problems? Or do I have one? And then you also entice them with the additional social status that they're going to receive by announcing that they're special, and having every bloody teacher in the entire world--plus the world at large--focus on that narcissistic grandiosity that goes along with the insistence of a special identity. And the only price you have to pay is enforced sterilization and surgical mutilation. Fine deal for our teenagers!

I think there are another couple of things about teenage girls that we don't pay as much attention to but the very fact of physical development in teenage girls means your body is sort of ballooning. You know, breasts here, hips here, bottom there. And you lose that sort of gender-neutral body that gives you so much freedom in childhood. And so what girls experience in puberty is moving from being a free kind of person into being an object because to some, her body is public property. And as you say, it's commented on. Everyone has a right to comment on it. She may, you know, she'll get comments in the street. She'll look all around her and become aware of the objectification of women throughout society.

Now, I think this is happening to boys much more that over the past decade in kind of, certainly objectification of the male body, and in some cases, kind of sexual objectification of men. And this generation are used to seeing those really exaggerated images of femininity so the feminine female heroes have huge breasts and tiny waist and-Kim Kardashian. And the male heroes have a ripped six pack . . . it's all about how you look. So it's happening more for men, and interestingly, boys experiences of things like anorexia have increased, but not as much as girls….

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