The article feels a little to self congratulatory, to the point of a straw man. It’s like they’re saying “look how enlightened I am for understanding that liberals can be bad guys too”. Everybody gets that. The only issue seems to have been the measurement scale, for which I wish they went into more detail.
Other researchers have concluded that the number of strident conservatives in the U.S. far exceeds the number of strident progressives and that American conservatives express more authoritarian attitudes than their counterparts in Britain, Australia, or Canada.
At least in the context of the U.S., progressivism is small enough and has little enough political power that it can be overlooked, so any subsets of this group are easily overlooked as well. On the flip side, conservative authoritarians have reached the highest political offices, so that is not only hard to overlook but also quite easy to notice.
> in the context of the U.S., progressivism is small enough and has little enough political power that it can be overlooked
On the other hand, Coca-Cola had training urging workers to be less white [1], the US Army lectured soldiers on white privilege [2], the most allegedly xenophobic US president didn't put a dent in legal immigration numbers [3], academia is not only overwhelmingly liberal, but also openly hostile to conservatives [4], and the University of California required (or still requires?) specific plans to advance diversity from job applicants [5].
You are correct that if you measure progressivism by e.g. worker's rights, universal healthcare, or stopping the military-industrial complex, it has been an utter failure. And if your imagined conservative is someone that is opposed to these things, they will appear very powerful. But if you pick a different test by which you measure, you get very different results.
From your friendly shills at the American Enterprise Institute. You know they’re scared if they feel the need to ignore clear and present dangers to write this distraction.
And then you remember the big boogeyman of left actually had word socialist proudly in their names... And somehow that didn't or does not count. I say they are the same as current left.
Serious question: how is this a novel idea given the historical context of people like Stalin and Mao? I feel like I am missing something here. Are Stalin and Mao not considered authoritarians or are they not considered "leftists"?
That's why most political compasses are 2 dimensional.
Most left v. right discussions are essentially a projection of some opinionated vector across the 2d landscape into a 1d line which they can then use to slander either end of the vector as authoritarian or communist or whatever. But these actual definitions lose a lot of information in that projection.
The 2d map has left (socialism) v right (capitalism) and up (authoritarianism) v down (anarchism). Its probably even more complicated than that, you could at least add a 3rd dimension of time but projecting everything into a 1d line is nearly meaningless at this point.
I've never really liked the standard 2D political compass, and I think the issue is that the two axes aren't actually independent.
Right v. Left basically boils down to one's opinion on hierarchies. If one views hierarchies as good, they're on the right, if they see them as evil, they're on the left, and there's a whole spectrum of "necessary evil", "acceptable", etc, in between.
Then you've got the Authoritarian v. Libertarian axis, which essentially boils down to "how much power should higher-ups in the hierarchy have over those who are lower?". With Monarchies and Dictatorships being "guy on top controls everything" to Anarchism saying "no one should control anyone".
The problem is that, defined that way, certain areas in the space become absurd. What does it mean to completely reject hierarchies as evil, but think that people on top of the hierarchies ought have absolute power? What does it mean to think that hierarchies are good and just, but that there should be no power vested in them?
This manifests outside the philosophical, in the real world as well. As you look at increasingly authoritarian ideologies, the differences between left-leaning and right-leaning ideologies shrink. Comparing the conditions of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR reveals far less difference than you see even amongst the spread of Liberal states today.
Likewise, the number of hierarchies you hear objections to shrinks as you move right amongst Libertarians, until you basically only hear complaints about the government.
Side-topic: I often wonder how much political affiliation drives personal ideology (and not the other way around).
Particularly in the US with its crazy 2-party system, there does not really seem to be the option of choosing a party that actually aligns with your personal ideals. Instead, most people seem to end up compromising at some point and joining the party they perceive is "closest" to them. However, I wonder how much of this decision is driven by ideology and how much is driven by social pressure ("all my family/friends" belong to this one..."). Then, once you have aligned to a party, does the Stockholm Syndrome set in? How much of that party's platform do you start to rationalize and acclimate to when previously you would never have agreed with some of the ideas?
Anecdata, but in my experience most normal people (i.e. not extremely politically engaged) understand they're usually choosing between imperfect (often even less-bad) options. I don't get the sense that there's a ton of cognitive dissonance required until you get into the Very Online subset of people for whom politics is their life.
I think where the phenomenon you describe is extremely visible is in elected officials, especially at the federal level. You see an example now with Liz Cheney, who is in the process of transforming from a fairly generic Republican into a fairly generic Democrat as her political incentives change. The same can be observed going the other way with JD Vance moving from generic institutional Republican into post-liberal Trumpist (though perhaps the signs were there for those with eyes to see). The question then is whether the convictions were real or merely convenient.
I think this is not an uncommon phenomenon, but I still think the more common (and charitable) situation is simply that people don't feel a strong need to explicitly agree with everything the representatives, talking heads, and/or majority voters of "their" political party believe. To be sure, there is a lot of dishonest/self-deceiving side-taking, but a big part of the image of that ridiculous situation is actually just that: An image, conjured by the extrapolation of those observations onto the whole. In general, people understand that a political party is 10s of millions of people, and see no hypocrisy in voting for party A or B without agreeing with all of that party's apparently popular opinions.
I think the media drives personal ideology more than social pressure. Talk to some people about this. You'll find a lot of times, people frame things exactly as they are presented on Fox News, MSNBC, the Jordan Peterson podcast, whatever. From there, and to a lesser extent, I don't know if Stockholm Syndrome is the right term, but I do think after a while, people can put too much of their self into their politics, which makes it hard for them to change that part of themselves. It also doesn't help if the messaging they receive equates changing your mind to being weak (remember when John Kerry was reflexively mocked as a "flip flopper"?)
Also, if someone is a one issue voter (2A, pro-life, etc.), the rest of their party's platform really doesn't matter.
Talking to people in real life (rather than forming opinions based on posts on any online platform) quickly reveals that the vast majority straddle the political divide. The vast majority of people, anywhere in the world, are fiscally conservative and socially liberal.
Simply stated: One could not live well in most societies were this not true.
You have to be careful about how you use the money you earn. If you run a business, this lesson is front-and-center every day of your life. You can't throw money around carelessly and survive. This applies to both a business and individuals.
With regards to social behavior. A society could not achieve a high overall level of wellness, productivity and quality of life without individuals having various degrees of tolerance and consideration for others as well as caring for the well-being of various groups around you. Anyone who has experienced bad neighbors knows full-well how ugly it can be to live without caring for others around you.
The problem with political systems such as that of the US is that we don't get to vote on individual issues. We have to choose "kings" and "queens". And so, as an example, if you do not agree with abortion --and this is important to you-- you have no choice but to vote republican and blindly accept everything else they stand for. The same is true of a list of issues favored by democrats. As a further hypothetical case, an individual has no way to vote in favor of the second amendment (firearms) and, at the same time, support climate change action. These two issues are trapped on opposite sides of a political divide. Despite what some might think, people are almost never 100% aligned with a political party. Those who claim to be, upon closer inspection, will typically reveal that their perception of their alignment as compared to how they live their lives do not verify the claim.
In my opinion, the truth of the matter is that, if we could vote on individual issues rather for people, you would see a different distribution of votes. And, I would argue, we might just deliver better outcomes overall.
This is the proverbial "throwing out the baby with the bath water" American saying. We have dumbed things down to the point where your choices are: Republican, Democrat or don't vote. Independents can't achieve scale anywhere I know of, and election mechanism truly rob votes away from them (example, presidential elections in CA are winner-take-all, which means that all independent votes are pretty much always converted to democrat votes...talk about voter suppression).
Changing a complex multivariate system is not easy and should not be done impulsively. I think we desperately need to isolate the issues from party affiliation. In other words, a more direct form of democracy of some sort where we do not vote for kings and queens who will despotically wield party strength at every level in government, but rather make decisions on issues of interest. If such a thing could be implemented, our politicians would be reduced to administrators of our decisions rather than powerful partisan actors.
At the end of the day what makes our lives better is when we all do better. No political party has the monopoly on this. In fact, one could argue political parties have devolved into existing for the sake of their own power structure rather than to benefit society. Taking that power away from them might be more helpful in charting a path that benefits all. Not sure, just what I've been thinking over the years as I watch just how pointless the shit-show we've had in front of us for decades has become. We can't get anything done, and whatever we do get done is a mess.
This is what I love about HN. Just when I start to feel like the only sane person left on Earth, someone comes on here and takes the time to post something both rational and thought-provoking. Thank you for reminding me to have more hope in "the vast majority of people" (even if the vast majority of elected officials (and their talking-head counterparts) seem utterly brainless).
I think it is very important to get out and touch reality as frequently as possible. Even places like HN have extreme ideological end-points and edges. Social media is a complete shit-show that has very little to do with what you encounter when you sit down for a cup of coffee with someone, even a complete stranger. Reality isn't that bad. Politicians are merchants of fabricated fear and doubt because that's the easiest currency for them to convert into votes. I often think of them as an entirely different species, one devoid of humanity.
> The vast majority of people, anywhere in the world, are fiscally conservative and socially liberal.
The majority of the world's population is probably fiscally liberal and socially conservative by Western standards.
Pick a random person in Africa, Asia or the Middle East. They likely have views on many social issues which are very much at the conservative end of those debates by Western standards, even though their positions would be moderate by the standards of their own society.
On the other hand, they are unlikely to share the free market / small government / etc orthodoxy which defines so much of Western economic/fiscal conservatism.
Talking to people is a very skewed sample, because anyone you personally talk to from country X is unlikely to be representative of the general population country X. They are more likely to be an emigrant, more likely to be English-speaking, likely to be better educated – all influences which can lead to them having different views than the majority of the population of their country of origin.
> Talking to people is a very skewed sample, because anyone you personally talk to from country X is unlikely to be representative of the general population country X.
The argument you present does not match reality. Having traveled to about twenty countries and lived in two continents I can tell you, with nearly 100% certainly that the vast majority of people are fiscally conservative. There are degrees when it comes to social issues, some having to do with the differences in cultures around the world.
If I can claim the hypothesis, I’ll say that fiscal conservatism and social liberalism (or tolerance) are a necessary average normal from an evolutionary perspective.
> Having traveled to about twenty countries and lived in two continents I can tell you, with nearly 100% certainly that the vast majority of people are fiscally conservative
That's not a representative sample. Whether you are travelling for business or pleasure, the people you meet as a foreign visitor are unlikely to be representative of the country as a whole. You probably spent most of your time in big cities, or tourism sites–how many rural villagers did you meet? The people to whom you spoke were more likely to be bilingual/multilingual, more likely to associate with (and hence be influenced by) foreigners, quite possibly even of above-average socioeconomic status. And the 20 countries you visited are probably not a representative sample of the world's population either.
Are there surveys on the percentage of people identifying as "fiscal conservatives", or supporting fiscally conservative policies, across different countries? I think survey data would be far more convincing than anyone's personal anecdotes.
> There are degrees when it comes to social issues, some having to do with the differences in cultures around the world.
You claimed the "The vast majority of people, anywhere in the world, are... socially liberal". As the term "socially liberal" is normally defined in Western societies, that clearly isn't true. Here is a recent survey on acceptability of homosexuality worldwide – https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/06/25/global-divide-... – they asked people "should homosexuality be accepted by society?" Unfortunately, they only surveyed four African countries – 7% of Nigerians said "yes", 9% of Tunisians, 14% of Kenyans, 54% of South Africans. If they had surveyed more, I am sure most African countries would have produced results much closer to Nigeria/Tunisia/Kenyan than to South Africa. Similarly, they only surveyed three Middle Eastern countries – Lebanon (13%), Turkey (25%), Israel (47%). Even in Israel, social acceptance of homosexuality is a minority view, and the average Middle Eastern country is going to be closer to Lebanon or Turkey than to Israel. Obviously on LGBT issues, the average African or Middle Eastern person is not socially liberal – and if we looked at other social issues, such as abortion rights or gender issues or criminal justice reform, I doubt the average African or Middle Eastern person would be socially liberal on those issues either.
Unless you are trying to argue that the average African, while not socially liberal by Western standards, is socially liberal by African standards. If that's your argument, how do you know what constitutes social liberalism by African standards?
Note the Atlantic article's sub-title - "Many psychologists wrongly assumed that coercive attitudes exist only among conservatives".
The key word is "psychologists". At best, that field's WEIRD problem (
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/non-weird-science/20... ) leaves them poorly qualified on this issue. At worst...why the h*ll would anyone think that psychologists qualify as "The Experts"?
I'm writing a book advocating for the integration of socialism and capitalism, because socialism works best with markets and vice versa. I call it "Social Capitalism". The point of the book is that this is already the dominant system, despite the fact that no party actually advocates for it directly. It emerged out of compromise not philosophy. And that's A OK.
> The Trump era likely deepened psychology’s conventional wisdom that authoritarians are almost always conservatives; the insurrection at the Capitol earlier this year showed the urgency of understanding the phenomenon.
I suggest people to watch the recently released footage from inside the Capitol. You could call them idiots, fools, etc, but I don't think you can call them insurrectionists. They just bumbled in and took selfies for the most part. The FBI have been investigating these people for months, and the best they found for some form of plot was a Lego model. It's exactly this kind of inflammatory talk about your fellow Countrymen that is causing greater division.
> In the U.S., though, Costello hypothesizes that right-wing authoritarians outnumber left-wing ones by roughly three to one.
In the US, the left-wing (Democrat voters) clearly dominate the cities and Universities, and thereby have a much higher probability of being more educated. I would suggest people to consider that on average, the right-wing is less able to elegantly express themselves.
For example, when you hear "immigrants are bad", when you nail them down, what they actually mean is "current immigration is unsustainable and affects my local community". There is currently this really dangerous assumption of assuming the political opposition are fundamentally evil, rather than people who want to see the betterment of their Country, but through different means.
P.S. If you're going to downvote, at least do me the courtesy to explain why.
35 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadI’m wondering if the reason it was overlooked before is because it was a very small phenomena before the rise of social media.
At least in the context of the U.S., progressivism is small enough and has little enough political power that it can be overlooked, so any subsets of this group are easily overlooked as well. On the flip side, conservative authoritarians have reached the highest political offices, so that is not only hard to overlook but also quite easy to notice.
On the other hand, Coca-Cola had training urging workers to be less white [1], the US Army lectured soldiers on white privilege [2], the most allegedly xenophobic US president didn't put a dent in legal immigration numbers [3], academia is not only overwhelmingly liberal, but also openly hostile to conservatives [4], and the University of California required (or still requires?) specific plans to advance diversity from job applicants [5].
You are correct that if you measure progressivism by e.g. worker's rights, universal healthcare, or stopping the military-industrial complex, it has been an utter failure. And if your imagined conservative is someone that is opposed to these things, they will appear very powerful. But if you pick a different test by which you measure, you get very different results.
[1] https://nypost.com/2021/02/23/coca-cola-diversity-training-u...
[2] https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-releases/judicial-watch-...
[3] https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2019/tab...
[4] https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/02/study_liberalto...
[5] https://reason.com/2020/02/03/university-of-california-diver...
From a brief on-line search for lists of the world's most-authoritarian regimes, this seems to be false. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism#Current
Stalin by all means run almost theocratic totalitarian regime.
Communism was used as a slogan and means of rallying his followers. Same with Mao.
Most left v. right discussions are essentially a projection of some opinionated vector across the 2d landscape into a 1d line which they can then use to slander either end of the vector as authoritarian or communist or whatever. But these actual definitions lose a lot of information in that projection.
The 2d map has left (socialism) v right (capitalism) and up (authoritarianism) v down (anarchism). Its probably even more complicated than that, you could at least add a 3rd dimension of time but projecting everything into a 1d line is nearly meaningless at this point.
Right v. Left basically boils down to one's opinion on hierarchies. If one views hierarchies as good, they're on the right, if they see them as evil, they're on the left, and there's a whole spectrum of "necessary evil", "acceptable", etc, in between.
Then you've got the Authoritarian v. Libertarian axis, which essentially boils down to "how much power should higher-ups in the hierarchy have over those who are lower?". With Monarchies and Dictatorships being "guy on top controls everything" to Anarchism saying "no one should control anyone".
The problem is that, defined that way, certain areas in the space become absurd. What does it mean to completely reject hierarchies as evil, but think that people on top of the hierarchies ought have absolute power? What does it mean to think that hierarchies are good and just, but that there should be no power vested in them?
This manifests outside the philosophical, in the real world as well. As you look at increasingly authoritarian ideologies, the differences between left-leaning and right-leaning ideologies shrink. Comparing the conditions of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR reveals far less difference than you see even amongst the spread of Liberal states today.
Likewise, the number of hierarchies you hear objections to shrinks as you move right amongst Libertarians, until you basically only hear complaints about the government.
Particularly in the US with its crazy 2-party system, there does not really seem to be the option of choosing a party that actually aligns with your personal ideals. Instead, most people seem to end up compromising at some point and joining the party they perceive is "closest" to them. However, I wonder how much of this decision is driven by ideology and how much is driven by social pressure ("all my family/friends" belong to this one..."). Then, once you have aligned to a party, does the Stockholm Syndrome set in? How much of that party's platform do you start to rationalize and acclimate to when previously you would never have agreed with some of the ideas?
I think where the phenomenon you describe is extremely visible is in elected officials, especially at the federal level. You see an example now with Liz Cheney, who is in the process of transforming from a fairly generic Republican into a fairly generic Democrat as her political incentives change. The same can be observed going the other way with JD Vance moving from generic institutional Republican into post-liberal Trumpist (though perhaps the signs were there for those with eyes to see). The question then is whether the convictions were real or merely convenient.
Also, if someone is a one issue voter (2A, pro-life, etc.), the rest of their party's platform really doesn't matter.
Simply stated: One could not live well in most societies were this not true.
You have to be careful about how you use the money you earn. If you run a business, this lesson is front-and-center every day of your life. You can't throw money around carelessly and survive. This applies to both a business and individuals.
With regards to social behavior. A society could not achieve a high overall level of wellness, productivity and quality of life without individuals having various degrees of tolerance and consideration for others as well as caring for the well-being of various groups around you. Anyone who has experienced bad neighbors knows full-well how ugly it can be to live without caring for others around you.
The problem with political systems such as that of the US is that we don't get to vote on individual issues. We have to choose "kings" and "queens". And so, as an example, if you do not agree with abortion --and this is important to you-- you have no choice but to vote republican and blindly accept everything else they stand for. The same is true of a list of issues favored by democrats. As a further hypothetical case, an individual has no way to vote in favor of the second amendment (firearms) and, at the same time, support climate change action. These two issues are trapped on opposite sides of a political divide. Despite what some might think, people are almost never 100% aligned with a political party. Those who claim to be, upon closer inspection, will typically reveal that their perception of their alignment as compared to how they live their lives do not verify the claim.
In my opinion, the truth of the matter is that, if we could vote on individual issues rather for people, you would see a different distribution of votes. And, I would argue, we might just deliver better outcomes overall.
This is the proverbial "throwing out the baby with the bath water" American saying. We have dumbed things down to the point where your choices are: Republican, Democrat or don't vote. Independents can't achieve scale anywhere I know of, and election mechanism truly rob votes away from them (example, presidential elections in CA are winner-take-all, which means that all independent votes are pretty much always converted to democrat votes...talk about voter suppression).
Changing a complex multivariate system is not easy and should not be done impulsively. I think we desperately need to isolate the issues from party affiliation. In other words, a more direct form of democracy of some sort where we do not vote for kings and queens who will despotically wield party strength at every level in government, but rather make decisions on issues of interest. If such a thing could be implemented, our politicians would be reduced to administrators of our decisions rather than powerful partisan actors.
At the end of the day what makes our lives better is when we all do better. No political party has the monopoly on this. In fact, one could argue political parties have devolved into existing for the sake of their own power structure rather than to benefit society. Taking that power away from them might be more helpful in charting a path that benefits all. Not sure, just what I've been thinking over the years as I watch just how pointless the shit-show we've had in front of us for decades has become. We can't get anything done, and whatever we do get done is a mess.
The majority of the world's population is probably fiscally liberal and socially conservative by Western standards.
Pick a random person in Africa, Asia or the Middle East. They likely have views on many social issues which are very much at the conservative end of those debates by Western standards, even though their positions would be moderate by the standards of their own society.
On the other hand, they are unlikely to share the free market / small government / etc orthodoxy which defines so much of Western economic/fiscal conservatism.
Talking to people is a very skewed sample, because anyone you personally talk to from country X is unlikely to be representative of the general population country X. They are more likely to be an emigrant, more likely to be English-speaking, likely to be better educated – all influences which can lead to them having different views than the majority of the population of their country of origin.
The argument you present does not match reality. Having traveled to about twenty countries and lived in two continents I can tell you, with nearly 100% certainly that the vast majority of people are fiscally conservative. There are degrees when it comes to social issues, some having to do with the differences in cultures around the world.
If I can claim the hypothesis, I’ll say that fiscal conservatism and social liberalism (or tolerance) are a necessary average normal from an evolutionary perspective.
That's not a representative sample. Whether you are travelling for business or pleasure, the people you meet as a foreign visitor are unlikely to be representative of the country as a whole. You probably spent most of your time in big cities, or tourism sites–how many rural villagers did you meet? The people to whom you spoke were more likely to be bilingual/multilingual, more likely to associate with (and hence be influenced by) foreigners, quite possibly even of above-average socioeconomic status. And the 20 countries you visited are probably not a representative sample of the world's population either.
Are there surveys on the percentage of people identifying as "fiscal conservatives", or supporting fiscally conservative policies, across different countries? I think survey data would be far more convincing than anyone's personal anecdotes.
> There are degrees when it comes to social issues, some having to do with the differences in cultures around the world.
You claimed the "The vast majority of people, anywhere in the world, are... socially liberal". As the term "socially liberal" is normally defined in Western societies, that clearly isn't true. Here is a recent survey on acceptability of homosexuality worldwide – https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/06/25/global-divide-... – they asked people "should homosexuality be accepted by society?" Unfortunately, they only surveyed four African countries – 7% of Nigerians said "yes", 9% of Tunisians, 14% of Kenyans, 54% of South Africans. If they had surveyed more, I am sure most African countries would have produced results much closer to Nigeria/Tunisia/Kenyan than to South Africa. Similarly, they only surveyed three Middle Eastern countries – Lebanon (13%), Turkey (25%), Israel (47%). Even in Israel, social acceptance of homosexuality is a minority view, and the average Middle Eastern country is going to be closer to Lebanon or Turkey than to Israel. Obviously on LGBT issues, the average African or Middle Eastern person is not socially liberal – and if we looked at other social issues, such as abortion rights or gender issues or criminal justice reform, I doubt the average African or Middle Eastern person would be socially liberal on those issues either.
Unless you are trying to argue that the average African, while not socially liberal by Western standards, is socially liberal by African standards. If that's your argument, how do you know what constitutes social liberalism by African standards?
The key word is "psychologists". At best, that field's WEIRD problem ( https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/non-weird-science/20... ) leaves them poorly qualified on this issue. At worst...why the h*ll would anyone think that psychologists qualify as "The Experts"?
I suggest people to watch the recently released footage from inside the Capitol. You could call them idiots, fools, etc, but I don't think you can call them insurrectionists. They just bumbled in and took selfies for the most part. The FBI have been investigating these people for months, and the best they found for some form of plot was a Lego model. It's exactly this kind of inflammatory talk about your fellow Countrymen that is causing greater division.
> In the U.S., though, Costello hypothesizes that right-wing authoritarians outnumber left-wing ones by roughly three to one.
In the US, the left-wing (Democrat voters) clearly dominate the cities and Universities, and thereby have a much higher probability of being more educated. I would suggest people to consider that on average, the right-wing is less able to elegantly express themselves.
For example, when you hear "immigrants are bad", when you nail them down, what they actually mean is "current immigration is unsustainable and affects my local community". There is currently this really dangerous assumption of assuming the political opposition are fundamentally evil, rather than people who want to see the betterment of their Country, but through different means.
P.S. If you're going to downvote, at least do me the courtesy to explain why.