I've recently become fascinated by the concept that one's political affiliation tends to sync up with one's dominant survival strategy. If you rely most on communities and relationships, you tend to be liberal; if you rely most on authority and hierarchies, you tend to be conservative; if you rely most on your own skills, you tend to be libertarian.
An interesting article, but a little politically charged. The repeated emotionally loaded descriptions of liberals and conservatives cannot have been accidental.
Firstly, he doesn't actually define r/K selection theory and then map it onto politics by showing an actual mapping. He simply defines r-selection according to his disfavored strawman of "liberalism" and K-selection according to his favored strawman of "conservatism".
"The theory was popular in the 1970s and 1980s when it was used as a heuristic device, but lost importance in the early 1990s as it was criticized by several empirical studies."[1] Emphasis mine. Furthermore: if we actually try to make a mapping, we find exactly the reverse of what your blogger describes: it's the highly-educated, urban-dwelling, blue-state "liberals" (as alluded to in the Atlantic article) who are actually observed to have fewer children and invest more in each child, while the less-educated, rural-dwelling, red-state "conservatives" produce more children with less investment in each.
It's really, really amazing just how wrong your blogger has managed to get his ecology, how completely backwards. For one thing, if we look at Wikipedia, we find that human beings simply are not considered an r-strategist species at all, at least not modern humans.
But hey, let's go ahead and extend the analogy, because I'm feeling particularly evil today and thus see no reason not to map between evolutionary/ecological behaviorism and actual moral philosophy for real people as if such a thing isn't outright blasphemous to the very concept of human dignity. An r-strategist population is held in check from becoming K-selected by... what? Well, some form of external population culling, something that kills off the less-fit in large numbers and thus ensures the population as a whole has no need to evolve more complex behaviors or lifestyles.
What, in conservative politics, is the culling agent? Well, capitalism. It's an r-strategist economic system: produce lots of low-human-capital proletarians and then just work them until they either drop dead or manage to reproduce.
What, in left-wing politics, follows K-selection strategies? Well, the entire emphasis on social investment in individual lives, actually.
And yet half the population feigns moral offense at the notion that human beings, a K-selected species in the first place, should shift further in the direction of K-strategizing by going from capitalism to socialism! And in the face of a slow-motion planetary-level ecological collapse driven by human overpopulation in the most conservative, r-strategist societies, nonetheless!
How much of the above is at all accurate or precise? Well, probably not very much, but more than that godawful "Anonymous Conservative" blog entry, most likely. Do I care? Not entirely, the point was more to rant and to show that you can easily argue either "side" of the so-called political "spectrum" (which is actually far more complex than "liberal versus conservative", a dichotomy produced entirely by the idiocy of First Past the Post voting systems) based on any given ecological/evolutionary theory, because real scientific theories are not moral or ethical arguments!
Well I don't know. The possible analogies are interesting: a social system is a reproductive strategy, it's a way of breeding and educating your population to serve some defined purpose (the objective of the system). Being able to characterize those systems broadly would be helpful.
I think you are flipping conservatives and liberals. Liberals tend to rely on authority and hierarchies (the state, and similar authority figures), whereas conservatives tend to rely on communities and relationships (church, family, secular community orgs). Or am I misinterpreting something here?
Subject to debate, and everyone's gonna want to think that their "side" is the most enlightened... (end disclaimer)
I think a lot of liberals see conservatives as authoritarian in that they support the police/military parts of government. Even your tea party libertarians tend to see the police/military as 'our people', culturally speaking and as a necessary part of the state philosophically speaking. Liberals tend to distrust police/military a lot more.
So while your libertarian is a lot less friendly to 'The State' and 'Big G Government', typically they're thinking about zoning boards, the FDA, FCC and welfare when they're against those things -- not particularly hierarchical organizations compared to military/police.
(as a liberal, I find it ridiculous when I hear conservatives talk about the tyranny of big govt while pushing for an increase in defense spending and more militarization of police)
As a conservative I find it ridiculous when liberals talk of fascist police while pushing to limit civilian gun rights. We can make straw men all day.
Regardless of arguing against caricatures of the 'other' side. I think a majority of Americans could agree on a majority of issues. The problem is the gamesmanship of politics.
"pushing to limit civilian gun rights" is sort of willfully deceptive, as it implies gun-grabbing where most liberals just want registration along the same level as a driver's license. At least you acknowledged that it's a straw man.
Most conservatives do actually support more spending on military/security and less spending on everything else -- that's not a straw man position really, I was just describing a slant on it.
I'm not a member of either side - I'm solidly in the camp of the radical individualist libertarians, both politically and in terms of survival strategy.
I'm curious where you get the idea that liberals distrust the police/military. I certainly haven't observed this trend. Liberals tend to favor disarming everyone except the police/military, for example, while conservatives want to retain the ability of their community/family to defend itself. Not just ability - liberals tend to be against self defense, neighborhood watch programs and similar things they perceive as "vigilantism", both politically and culturally.
As for the military, the last mainstream politician to eschew militarism was George "Humble Foreign Policy" Bush. (That lasted all of 9 months.)
I could agree with your characterization if you were talking about hippies in the 60's, and I'm well aware that many people still take that view of the world. But that's the world of 50 years ago.
The liberal base seems to like "clean" wars, in the style of Clinton and Obama: occasional military actions where very few Americans die. While there is a sizable anti-war segment of the Democratic party, they are in the minority, and have nowhere else to go. Patton and Carlin had it right: Americans like war (which is easy to do for those who've never been in one). They just disagree over details.
Domestically, mainstream Democrats are also a little schizophrenic: they want to leave defense to the police, but they usually support restraints on police regarding profiling, due process, etc. (Those who join the police skew conservative, as authority and violence are intertwined; liberals know this instinctually, therefore feeling conflicted about depending on them.)
lukifer is expressed a common view. I think "liberal" and "conservative" aren't quite the best terms to use here, with Republican and Democrat being better (party/cultural affiliations vs. more purely political preferences).
I'm not buying the whole thing, but recent studies about one's affiliation correlating with various ways of viewing the world bear out some of Lakoff's thoughts.
Probably. Church's and families are "authority" and have a "hierarchy". Respect the church, respect your elders. The organizations generally have rules and procedures. You might need to pay to be apart, or there might be other restrictions.
Liberals don't see the state as an authority, but rather, the community. After all, the people you are working with are literally neighbors, locals, friends. This also works with my own experience in dealing with getting state services for my children. The people we deal with come to the house, work with us, and are our equals. They form a community of people.
As far as I'm aware, most modern American protestants don't believe in doing whatever your parents or pastor tell you. They view the church as voluntary organizations people can join to help them be better people and get closer to god. Similarly, I don't think most people view family as authority, at least once the kids get a job and move out.
Admittedly, I'm culturally an extreme NY liberal, so I have little contact with this side of America. I've never been part of such a community, and could be totally wrong. If so, please tell me - I don't purport to have much first hand knowledge of such communities.
I would also debate that many people calling themselves Protestant who go to mainline churches aren't really christian except in a cultural way. Unlike their Evangelical brothers, they have a tendency to not show up at church
Conservative churches (let's be honest most churches tend to be conservative) and the traditional family tend to be hierarchical, which lends itself to an authoritarian mindset.
It's funny you describe liberals as relying on authority and hierarchies - I'm reminded of a quote from Will Rogers "I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat." Ask liberals about this, and you'll get a bunch of laughs and nods… they even pride themselves on not exactly have the same point of view as each other, much less "leadership".
Well, conservatives are less attracted to a strong federal government while liberals favor more power in that federal government. Conservatives favor decentralization while liberals favor the reverse.
Conservatives tend to claim their ideology comes from an invisible, all-powerful deity. They claim that they are the true representatives of THE authority.
Conservationism has historically been associated with a strong central government, under the belief that a selected group of suitable people are better at governing than the general population. The definition of "suitable" has changed throughout the years: typical examples are "King chosen by divine right" or "general with enough troops to seize the capital".
Liberals have emphasized the idea that the general population should have a loud voice in their own future. In an ideal liberal society, people lead their own lives according to their own desires, with decisions affecting the entire group made by group consensus. Authority figures would be temporarily elected by consensus to lead the group during times of danger, and would step down once things are back to normal.
Both extremes have been tried during various times in history, and there's a lot of evidence that we don't yet know how to make either one work. Purely conservative societies tend to degrade into dictatorships when the wrong leader comes to power, while purely liberal societies fall apart when they grow past the size of a small town.
Major modern nations are a compromise between both conditions. A liberal nation might have a leader with weaker powers elected by direct vote from every adult. A conservative nation might have a leader with strong powers, elected by successful businessmen or the aristocracy. Smaller societies tend to be more extreme than large ones, with successful examples of both totalitarianism and communism existing in small towns throughout the world.
Among liberals, one of the popular ideas is that everyone should have some basic quality of life. This can be accomplished either through government (e.g. taxing according to earnings and then distributing according to need) or non-government (e.g. church or charities) mechanisms. Strong liberals prefer the first because it can be more fair and efficient, whereas more moderate liberals prefer the latter because it gives the donor more choice over who receives help.
Personally, I lean more towards the liberal side because I feel there is significant evidence that when a program needs to cover a large majority (say 90+%) of the population, letting it be run by the government will make it more effective and less costly than letting it be run by a corporation.
Clearly if lukifer is using the terms "liberal" and "conservative" as you've defined them (rather than their meanings in conventional American politics), he is correct. My mistake.
Be careful with meanings in "conventional American politics", because they shift from day to day. A position that's quite conservative one year (e.g. "force everyone to pay for health insurance") might become liberal the next.
Wiretapping and spying has been a "liberal" position (by the conventional definition, not necessarily lukifers) at least since the Clinton era. Republicans got on board with this only in the Bush era.
Joe Biden's reaction to the Patriot Act was simply to protest that Ashcroft just copied his 1996 bill.
In any international discussion, "liberal" used bare is going to be tremendously confusing - there is no "conventional definition", there are 10 different definitions each of which is mainstream in a different place.
Wiretapping and spying was a Democratic position under Clinton, and the virtuous Republicans opposed it. Wiretapping and spying was a Republican position under Bush and the virtuous Democrats opposed it. Do you honestly expect, though, that there wasn't spying under Bush Sr., who had been head of the CIA? And obviously wiretapping and spying was J. Edgar Hoover's position under a host of administrations of both parties.
Really, in recent times wiretapping and spying support/opposition in politicians seems to better track the power held by the politician than anything else.
Separately, politicians speak to multiple ideologies and represent multiple constituencies, and pointing to the actions of a politician as clearly establishing the views of a particular ideology (unless that ideology is defined in reference to the politician - "Maoism" or whatnot) is likely to steer you wrong.
I'm not sure where you live, but American conservatives favor power in the states (i.e. decentralization). American liberals favor power in the federal government (i.e. centralization).
Historically, the American federal government has been much more circumspect in its use of power against citizens than the state- and local-level governments. The NSA might be sniffing your packets, but the highway patrol is confiscating your cash and the local police department is shooting up your car.
> I'm not sure where you live, but American conservatives favor power in the states
American conservatives say that in the context of debates over federal engagement in certain types of government programs as a reason for opposing them there (which, incidentally, the same conservatives also oppose at the State level), but not about the kind of programs they support, like, say, national defense.
The areas that American conservatives make the biggest stinks about state power are identical to the ones where they make the biggest stink about the function not being a proper role of government at all.
> American liberals favor power in the federal government (i.e. centralization).
Er, no, American liberals don't. American liberals are often characterized as supporting centralization by American conservatives when they support the federal government doing things that American conservatives don't think government should do at all. (They are, surprisingly enough, not accused by American conservatives of "opposing centralization" when they oppose the federal government doing things American conservatives think it should do, e.g., spending more money than the rest of the world combined on national defense.)
Both American conservatives and American liberals tend to conduct multipronged efforts to get the same general policy preferences adopted at both state and federal levels (and tend to push all levers of power available, executive, legislative, and judicial -- and, at the state level, direct citizen initiative) at both levels.
In addition, American conservatives tend to accuse American liberals of centralization whenever they push a policy conservatives don't approve of at the federal level (particularly through legislative action), of seeking to "overturn the will of the people" whenever they seek to overturn a policy conservatives approve of through judicial action, of dictatorship whenever they seek to implement policy conservatives oppose executive action, and of infringing on the authority of the executive when they seek to implement a policy conservatives disapprove of through legislative action, at least, when the executive is in hands viewed as friendlier to conservatives.
This definition of "liberal" is frequently termed "classical liberal" for clarity. Both party-line Democrats and party-line Republicans draw on some of the ideas there when politically convenient. Libertarians probably have the best claim in the American political spectrum on a strict adherence to classical-liberal principles (arguably to the exclusion of other valuable principles, and arguably with an overly narrow focus in application - "policy debates should not appear one-sided", to borrow a phrase).
The terms have become muddy and overlapping in popular usage.
Liberals do fuel a larger central government, but the narrative comes in the form of "we". Government is seen a vessel for popular will: "taking care of the homeless/planet/etc is our responsibility".
Conservatives are community-oriented, but tend to support authority as a valid context for community creation, from God and pastor in a church, to a security state to keep community safe, to the value of elders and traditions.
Libertarians, meanwhile, have a characteristically hard time unifying, being either out on the fringe, or split between the parties: the anti-war libertarians hold their nose and lean blue, and the anti-nanny-state libertarians hold their nose and lean red.
Very few people unilaterally reject any of the three survival strategies. It comes down to which is most prominent in the story you tell yourself about what a perfect world would be, and your role within it.
You tend to be libertarian if you think you rely on your own skills and you think what you do as an individual has no effect on the individuals around you.
There is the joke "A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged"
One could add: "A liberal is a conservative who just lost their health insurance"
or "A liberal is a libertarian whose neighbor just blocked their waterfront view"
I've observed something kind of similar, although in my view, the axis is, if you rely on abstracted rules and disembodied systems and institutions, you tend to be liberal, whereas if you rely on much more on tightly shared unstated norms and cultural expectations, you tend to be conservative.
If you live in a dense, cosmopolitan city, you need local government to make sure that all those diverse transient strangers around you are coordinating their lives properly through the shared explicit protocol of secular government.
If you live in a distant suburb, on the other hand, it's not the cops that make you feel safe, its the fact that most people around you look and dress like you do, water their lawns, go to church, and generally display themselves publicly exhibiting the norms of your community. But of course, you better be exhibiting those norms too.
I wonder if in the years to come as population density increases, will more and more people vote Democrat, or will the magic number of 800 people per sq. mile. simply increase?
The density number will almost certainly increase. Both of the major US political parties are very pragmatic -- they're willing to shift their platforms as much as necessary to capture a bare majority (if they weren't, they wouldn't remain major parties for long). So while it's possible that ideals currently endorsed by the Democratic platform will become more widespread that only means that the Republicans will shift their stand to match the majority opinions.
What I always enjoy reading, from an intellectual sense and not a "ha ha" sense, is "awakening" stories when people are raised super conservative and follow that path - until they have a personal experience that enlightens them that it's not ideal.
Watching self-discovery instead of being hit over the head with it is always fascinating.
I enjoy reading that every generation thought that in 50 years there will be no more conservatives.
Every 20 something thinks with absolute certainty that their political views wont change with age. And that it's only a matter of time until the rest of the world catches up to their 'correct' views.
The problem with just saying "conservative" is there are fiscal conservatives and then there are social conservatives.
You think 50 years ago they ever thought there would be gay conservatives? Conservatives that would support gay marriage? So they aren't socially conservative, at least not completely.
On the other side, I am not sure how to explain this properly but I find I am less liberal with age but even more progressive.
Basically, cultural/lifestyle issues, military issues, and economic issues are intertwined, but largely separate. You can be a "fiscal conservative, social liberal" proprietarian, and you can also be a "economic social-democrat, social conservative" (like most of the working-class population in most countries, by the way). Or you can go "full partisan retard", pick one "side" of the "spectrum", and take that "side" on every separate spectrum, thus resulting in the traditional strawmen of "liberals" or "conservatives".
Personally, I've actually become more culturally liberal the further I get out of university. College liberals are awful and horrendously stupid to boot, but seeing people who've left their parents' support and still manage to hold liberal positions drives me towards that position.
Kind of like how conservatives tend to oppose gay marriage right up until meeting the average actual gay couple, and realizing that, hold on, those "godless liberals" are just like us "normal, decent folk"!
I enjoy reading that every generation thought that in 50 years there will be no more conservatives.
And in their defense, conservatives have been getting steadily more "liberal" every generation. Even my grandmother doesn't hate other races and ethnicities from us the way her grandmother did. Grandma even crossed one of her our people's real lines by accepting my Christian girlfriend.
I'd like to know if more fine-grained data on population density is available. Congressional districts have a very broad array of population densities within them. I'd love to have access to density information at the voting precinct level and see if that correlation still holds.
I realized this a decade or so ago when digging thru election precinct maps and noticed how bright the "red/blue division" line was around urban areas.
The huge amount of scatter around the line of best fit in the scatterplot shown in the article demonstrates that there is a HUGE degree of uncertainty in this model. I know plenty of counterexamples to this in my high-density townhouse neighborhood.
Except in the military, which is high density but pretty conservative.
Anyway, the usual causation question arises: do people become more liberal as they gain neighbors? Or do they choose to live somewhere with more neighbors because they are already liberal?
The military isn't as conservative as many people think -- it's actually a pretty good representation of the voting preferences of the public at large.
"It is true that the upper echelons of the military tilt right," but "only 32 percent of the Army’s enlisted soldiers consider themselves conservative, while 23 percent identify as liberal and the remaining 45 percent are self-described moderates." [1]
For reference, the officer corps of the military only makes up ~16% of the total number of service members.[2]
As an urban republican, I find this intuitive, although there is significant variation from neighborhood to neighborhood even holding density constant. Even amongst republicans, you still see major policy opinion differences that are divided by urban vs exurban. I'm hoping the urban variant becomes more prominent :)
That aside, please please pretty please do not do statistical analyses with Excel.
This is just a re-telling of a well known fact. Rural areas tend to be red and urban areas tend to be blue. Only this is retold with the connotation that republicans are somehow antisocial.
I'd just like to point out that proximity is not equivalent to interaction. In my experience social interaction was higher in rural settings. In a small town you will know all your neighbors, and probably half the people at your local stores. In a city it's the opposite, strangers abound.
Agreed, in my mind I like to picture republican areas like the "King of the Hill" cartoon. All really nice & sociable people, just have a few opinions that differ from my own only because of different life experiences. Also, the areas that see the most foreigners will give more points of view to consider. I'd like to see political-affiliation related to distance from a major airport.
We tend to know the same number of people total, so when you're in a more densely populated area, you're dividing the same number (or even a larger number) by a much, much larger number of people around you. Maybe it's not that people in small towns are more social; they just have a smaller pool.
Having fewer places in town results in meeting people you know more often. Having fewer people doesn't - your probability of meeting someone is the number of people you know (which is arguably larger in a city) divided by the number of places they could be. The number of people you don't know in a place is mostly irrelevant.
It's anecdotal, but I went to high school in a town of 1300 people, and I'm comfortable having friends of all ages. My friends from Denver, Seattle, and DC tend to associate exclusively with people closer to our ages (mid-20s).
I wonder what the data looks like when you account for the fact that our biggest, densest cities also have huge minority populations which vote democrat for reasons that have little to do with population density.
I'm pretty sure it maps out the same if you filtered for, say, non-Hispanic white voters. The curve might shift towards GOP overall, but the correlation would still be there, because the cities also tend to skew more educated and that correlates in a positive way with voting DNC.
If that statement were true, we will never see a republican government in the USA again. Considering the fact that more people live in cities than don't, and this percentage of people has only been rising for the past century: http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2009/aug/18/percent...
The line between "Republican" and "Democrat" moves, which is why it tends to be so close to 50% (all things considered) for so long. If the line becomes lopsided in one direction or the other, the parties shift.
It's pretty early to say that, and a lot of things can change in the meantime. But for the short term, remember that in the U.S., representation is not entirely proportional to population. Voters in Wyoming have quite a bit more influence than those in California due to how the Senate and electoral college works, and voters in Iowa have more influence than either due to the whole interaction between media and the election process.
As a present-day Urban Libertarian, who grew up as a Rural Conversative (in name) with some Liberal tendencies (eg, I was a Libertarian all along, but didn't know it, because I didn't know the term), this seems fairly reasonable to me. More urban areas tend to attract people from lots of different places, and you get a blending of worldviews and ideas, which - from what I've seen - has a generally "liberalizing" effect (using "liberal" here in the "classical liberal" sense, not necessarily anything to do with modern day Democrats). So I find that urban areas tend to have more "modern liberal" / "democrat" types, AND more Libertarians, than more traditionally conservative / rural areas. I think you also see a lot of "small l" libertarians in more rural areas, who are very libertarian but maybe don't describe themselves that way for one reason or another.
I've never understood the staunch support of a political party to the extent that you label yourself one or the other. Is it really like that - people go out of their way to identify as a party member?
Is it not a hindrance in finding common ground and working together?
On this side of the pond, I find that people "support" a party, rather than consider themselves a member of one (even if they are).
Mother Jones, Huffington Post, or CNN will undoubtedly make a post shortly entitled "New Study Shows Republicans are Anti-Social and Despise Their Neighbors". However, all this data shows is that Democrats tend to be on the lower income side ( see http://n.pr/QFg1Yo ). Lower income people tend to live in higher density areas.
But you may also be struck by the shape of that trend line (Sen is quick to note, by the way, that he's not a statistician). It roughly suggests a political tipping point somewhere around a population density of about 800-1,000 people per square mile.
My guess would be that this is a linear fit using a least squares minimization. The fit is dominated by the upper right portion of the plot and has a relatively arbitrary x-intercept of around -10. Population density going negative doesn't make sense and shouldn't be a feature of a reasonable model. There's no tipping point, it's just how the line shows up on a log plot and it's almost entirely determined by the data with population density much great than 1000.
I think it would make a more sense to plot population density on the x-axis because the scatter in the data is really coming from the Cook PVI rather than the population density and the Cook PVI can be interpreted as a dependent variable. We know very precisely what the populations are and we can also see that the magnitude of the Cook PVI scatter looks roughly constant as a function of population density. After this a simple least squares fit would be more reasonable to apply but again a line would not fit the data at all. Just by eye I would say that (Cook PVI)=AxLog[ (Population Density)xB ] would do a much better job modeling the distribution.
Overall, it's a nice plot to motivate discussion but the fit doesn't really add anything to it and might even detract from it.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadhttp://www.meltingasphalt.com/the-ecology-of-personal-politi...
Liberals are known for their high fertility rate as well as their opposition to abortion to ensure the highest number of offspring.
Likewise the conservative obsession with childhood nutrition, education and welfare lines up well with their high-investment child-rearing instinct.
Sarcasm aside the infinite/scarce resource division seems like an interesting one to observe. See also the forager/farmer distinction[0].
[0] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/10/two-types-of-people.ht...
Firstly, he doesn't actually define r/K selection theory and then map it onto politics by showing an actual mapping. He simply defines r-selection according to his disfavored strawman of "liberalism" and K-selection according to his favored strawman of "conservatism".
"The theory was popular in the 1970s and 1980s when it was used as a heuristic device, but lost importance in the early 1990s as it was criticized by several empirical studies."[1] Emphasis mine. Furthermore: if we actually try to make a mapping, we find exactly the reverse of what your blogger describes: it's the highly-educated, urban-dwelling, blue-state "liberals" (as alluded to in the Atlantic article) who are actually observed to have fewer children and invest more in each child, while the less-educated, rural-dwelling, red-state "conservatives" produce more children with less investment in each.
It's really, really amazing just how wrong your blogger has managed to get his ecology, how completely backwards. For one thing, if we look at Wikipedia, we find that human beings simply are not considered an r-strategist species at all, at least not modern humans.
But hey, let's go ahead and extend the analogy, because I'm feeling particularly evil today and thus see no reason not to map between evolutionary/ecological behaviorism and actual moral philosophy for real people as if such a thing isn't outright blasphemous to the very concept of human dignity. An r-strategist population is held in check from becoming K-selected by... what? Well, some form of external population culling, something that kills off the less-fit in large numbers and thus ensures the population as a whole has no need to evolve more complex behaviors or lifestyles.
What, in conservative politics, is the culling agent? Well, capitalism. It's an r-strategist economic system: produce lots of low-human-capital proletarians and then just work them until they either drop dead or manage to reproduce.
What, in left-wing politics, follows K-selection strategies? Well, the entire emphasis on social investment in individual lives, actually.
And yet half the population feigns moral offense at the notion that human beings, a K-selected species in the first place, should shift further in the direction of K-strategizing by going from capitalism to socialism! And in the face of a slow-motion planetary-level ecological collapse driven by human overpopulation in the most conservative, r-strategist societies, nonetheless!
[1] -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_theory
How much of the above is at all accurate or precise? Well, probably not very much, but more than that godawful "Anonymous Conservative" blog entry, most likely. Do I care? Not entirely, the point was more to rant and to show that you can easily argue either "side" of the so-called political "spectrum" (which is actually far more complex than "liberal versus conservative", a dichotomy produced entirely by the idiocy of First Past the Post voting systems) based on any given ecological/evolutionary theory, because real scientific theories are not moral or ethical arguments!
I think a lot of liberals see conservatives as authoritarian in that they support the police/military parts of government. Even your tea party libertarians tend to see the police/military as 'our people', culturally speaking and as a necessary part of the state philosophically speaking. Liberals tend to distrust police/military a lot more.
So while your libertarian is a lot less friendly to 'The State' and 'Big G Government', typically they're thinking about zoning boards, the FDA, FCC and welfare when they're against those things -- not particularly hierarchical organizations compared to military/police.
Basically, you're thinking economics, we're thinking marching orders.
(as a liberal, I find it ridiculous when I hear conservatives talk about the tyranny of big govt while pushing for an increase in defense spending and more militarization of police)
Regardless of arguing against caricatures of the 'other' side. I think a majority of Americans could agree on a majority of issues. The problem is the gamesmanship of politics.
Most conservatives do actually support more spending on military/security and less spending on everything else -- that's not a straw man position really, I was just describing a slant on it.
I'm curious where you get the idea that liberals distrust the police/military. I certainly haven't observed this trend. Liberals tend to favor disarming everyone except the police/military, for example, while conservatives want to retain the ability of their community/family to defend itself. Not just ability - liberals tend to be against self defense, neighborhood watch programs and similar things they perceive as "vigilantism", both politically and culturally.
As for the military, the last mainstream politician to eschew militarism was George "Humble Foreign Policy" Bush. (That lasted all of 9 months.)
I could agree with your characterization if you were talking about hippies in the 60's, and I'm well aware that many people still take that view of the world. But that's the world of 50 years ago.
Domestically, mainstream Democrats are also a little schizophrenic: they want to leave defense to the police, but they usually support restraints on police regarding profiling, due process, etc. (Those who join the police skew conservative, as authority and violence are intertwined; liberals know this instinctually, therefore feeling conflicted about depending on them.)
Some of this is explored by cognitive scientist/linguist George Lakoff (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics)
I'm not buying the whole thing, but recent studies about one's affiliation correlating with various ways of viewing the world bear out some of Lakoff's thoughts.
Liberals don't see the state as an authority, but rather, the community. After all, the people you are working with are literally neighbors, locals, friends. This also works with my own experience in dealing with getting state services for my children. The people we deal with come to the house, work with us, and are our equals. They form a community of people.
Admittedly, I'm culturally an extreme NY liberal, so I have little contact with this side of America. I've never been part of such a community, and could be totally wrong. If so, please tell me - I don't purport to have much first hand knowledge of such communities.
http://religions.pewforum.org/affiliations
I would also debate that many people calling themselves Protestant who go to mainline churches aren't really christian except in a cultural way. Unlike their Evangelical brothers, they have a tendency to not show up at church
http://religions.pewforum.org/comparisons#
It's funny you describe liberals as relying on authority and hierarchies - I'm reminded of a quote from Will Rogers "I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat." Ask liberals about this, and you'll get a bunch of laughs and nods… they even pride themselves on not exactly have the same point of view as each other, much less "leadership".
So, no.
Conservationism has historically been associated with a strong central government, under the belief that a selected group of suitable people are better at governing than the general population. The definition of "suitable" has changed throughout the years: typical examples are "King chosen by divine right" or "general with enough troops to seize the capital".
Liberals have emphasized the idea that the general population should have a loud voice in their own future. In an ideal liberal society, people lead their own lives according to their own desires, with decisions affecting the entire group made by group consensus. Authority figures would be temporarily elected by consensus to lead the group during times of danger, and would step down once things are back to normal.
Both extremes have been tried during various times in history, and there's a lot of evidence that we don't yet know how to make either one work. Purely conservative societies tend to degrade into dictatorships when the wrong leader comes to power, while purely liberal societies fall apart when they grow past the size of a small town.
Major modern nations are a compromise between both conditions. A liberal nation might have a leader with weaker powers elected by direct vote from every adult. A conservative nation might have a leader with strong powers, elected by successful businessmen or the aristocracy. Smaller societies tend to be more extreme than large ones, with successful examples of both totalitarianism and communism existing in small towns throughout the world.
Among liberals, one of the popular ideas is that everyone should have some basic quality of life. This can be accomplished either through government (e.g. taxing according to earnings and then distributing according to need) or non-government (e.g. church or charities) mechanisms. Strong liberals prefer the first because it can be more fair and efficient, whereas more moderate liberals prefer the latter because it gives the donor more choice over who receives help.
Personally, I lean more towards the liberal side because I feel there is significant evidence that when a program needs to cover a large majority (say 90+%) of the population, letting it be run by the government will make it more effective and less costly than letting it be run by a corporation.
http://thisishistorictimes.com/2009/04/all-the-better-to-hea...
Obama has pretty much pissed off most of the constituency that formerly called itself "liberal".
Joe Biden's reaction to the Patriot Act was simply to protest that Ashcroft just copied his 1996 bill.
Wiretapping and spying was a Democratic position under Clinton, and the virtuous Republicans opposed it. Wiretapping and spying was a Republican position under Bush and the virtuous Democrats opposed it. Do you honestly expect, though, that there wasn't spying under Bush Sr., who had been head of the CIA? And obviously wiretapping and spying was J. Edgar Hoover's position under a host of administrations of both parties.
Really, in recent times wiretapping and spying support/opposition in politicians seems to better track the power held by the politician than anything else.
American conservatives say that in the context of debates over federal engagement in certain types of government programs as a reason for opposing them there (which, incidentally, the same conservatives also oppose at the State level), but not about the kind of programs they support, like, say, national defense.
The areas that American conservatives make the biggest stinks about state power are identical to the ones where they make the biggest stink about the function not being a proper role of government at all.
> American liberals favor power in the federal government (i.e. centralization).
Er, no, American liberals don't. American liberals are often characterized as supporting centralization by American conservatives when they support the federal government doing things that American conservatives don't think government should do at all. (They are, surprisingly enough, not accused by American conservatives of "opposing centralization" when they oppose the federal government doing things American conservatives think it should do, e.g., spending more money than the rest of the world combined on national defense.)
Both American conservatives and American liberals tend to conduct multipronged efforts to get the same general policy preferences adopted at both state and federal levels (and tend to push all levers of power available, executive, legislative, and judicial -- and, at the state level, direct citizen initiative) at both levels.
In addition, American conservatives tend to accuse American liberals of centralization whenever they push a policy conservatives don't approve of at the federal level (particularly through legislative action), of seeking to "overturn the will of the people" whenever they seek to overturn a policy conservatives approve of through judicial action, of dictatorship whenever they seek to implement policy conservatives oppose executive action, and of infringing on the authority of the executive when they seek to implement a policy conservatives disapprove of through legislative action, at least, when the executive is in hands viewed as friendlier to conservatives.
Looks like it's too late to edit my post.
Liberals do fuel a larger central government, but the narrative comes in the form of "we". Government is seen a vessel for popular will: "taking care of the homeless/planet/etc is our responsibility".
Conservatives are community-oriented, but tend to support authority as a valid context for community creation, from God and pastor in a church, to a security state to keep community safe, to the value of elders and traditions.
Libertarians, meanwhile, have a characteristically hard time unifying, being either out on the fringe, or split between the parties: the anti-war libertarians hold their nose and lean blue, and the anti-nanny-state libertarians hold their nose and lean red.
Very few people unilaterally reject any of the three survival strategies. It comes down to which is most prominent in the story you tell yourself about what a perfect world would be, and your role within it.
There is the joke "A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged"
One could add: "A liberal is a conservative who just lost their health insurance"
or "A liberal is a libertarian whose neighbor just blocked their waterfront view"
"A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested."
If you live in a dense, cosmopolitan city, you need local government to make sure that all those diverse transient strangers around you are coordinating their lives properly through the shared explicit protocol of secular government.
If you live in a distant suburb, on the other hand, it's not the cops that make you feel safe, its the fact that most people around you look and dress like you do, water their lawns, go to church, and generally display themselves publicly exhibiting the norms of your community. But of course, you better be exhibiting those norms too.
I wonder if in the years to come as population density increases, will more and more people vote Democrat, or will the magic number of 800 people per sq. mile. simply increase?
Watching self-discovery instead of being hit over the head with it is always fascinating.
Every 20 something thinks with absolute certainty that their political views wont change with age. And that it's only a matter of time until the rest of the world catches up to their 'correct' views.
You think 50 years ago they ever thought there would be gay conservatives? Conservatives that would support gay marriage? So they aren't socially conservative, at least not completely.
On the other side, I am not sure how to explain this properly but I find I am less liberal with age but even more progressive.
Personally, I've actually become more culturally liberal the further I get out of university. College liberals are awful and horrendously stupid to boot, but seeing people who've left their parents' support and still manage to hold liberal positions drives me towards that position.
Kind of like how conservatives tend to oppose gay marriage right up until meeting the average actual gay couple, and realizing that, hold on, those "godless liberals" are just like us "normal, decent folk"!
And in their defense, conservatives have been getting steadily more "liberal" every generation. Even my grandmother doesn't hate other races and ethnicities from us the way her grandmother did. Grandma even crossed one of her our people's real lines by accepting my Christian girlfriend.
Anyway, the usual causation question arises: do people become more liberal as they gain neighbors? Or do they choose to live somewhere with more neighbors because they are already liberal?
"It is true that the upper echelons of the military tilt right," but "only 32 percent of the Army’s enlisted soldiers consider themselves conservative, while 23 percent identify as liberal and the remaining 45 percent are self-described moderates." [1]
For reference, the officer corps of the military only makes up ~16% of the total number of service members.[2]
[1] http://andrewgelman.com/2009/05/05/how_soldiers_re/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces#Pers...
That aside, please please pretty please do not do statistical analyses with Excel.
I'd just like to point out that proximity is not equivalent to interaction. In my experience social interaction was higher in rural settings. In a small town you will know all your neighbors, and probably half the people at your local stores. In a city it's the opposite, strangers abound.
I wasn't trying to imply that rural people are different, merely that the setting creates more opportunities to have social interaction.
Is it not a hindrance in finding common ground and working together?
On this side of the pond, I find that people "support" a party, rather than consider themselves a member of one (even if they are).
"If you know many members of local government personally, you're probably a Republican."
My guess would be that this is a linear fit using a least squares minimization. The fit is dominated by the upper right portion of the plot and has a relatively arbitrary x-intercept of around -10. Population density going negative doesn't make sense and shouldn't be a feature of a reasonable model. There's no tipping point, it's just how the line shows up on a log plot and it's almost entirely determined by the data with population density much great than 1000.
I think it would make a more sense to plot population density on the x-axis because the scatter in the data is really coming from the Cook PVI rather than the population density and the Cook PVI can be interpreted as a dependent variable. We know very precisely what the populations are and we can also see that the magnitude of the Cook PVI scatter looks roughly constant as a function of population density. After this a simple least squares fit would be more reasonable to apply but again a line would not fit the data at all. Just by eye I would say that (Cook PVI)=AxLog[ (Population Density)xB ] would do a much better job modeling the distribution.
Overall, it's a nice plot to motivate discussion but the fit doesn't really add anything to it and might even detract from it.