I read your comments on the dictionary definitions of conservative and liberal with interest.

I would listen to discussions in my family when I was a kid forty years ago. My uncle was the only “conservative” voice in my family and I admired his courage as he was completely outnumbered.

But I had always been indoctrinated and misled into the traditional definitions of ‘conservative’ as being reactionary, and ‘liberal’ as being progressive. These family ‘discussions’ exposed me to alternative points of view, and I was startled to observe that what was considered ‘conservative’ were the most radical and sometimes revolutionary ideas around at the time. “The ‘liberal’ agenda seemed to promote the status quo by comparison.

The ideas of Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and other free market economists were nothing short of radical at that time. That these were ever considered as originating from a ‘conservative’ mind set was just a misnomer.

Those ideas that support and empower ability, responsibility and individual liberty ought, by all reason, be a definition of progressive. Those ideas that tend to encourage dependence, discourage initiative, and really help make people less able would seem to me to be old-school reactionary.

These are 1984 type re-definition of words.

Just one person’s point of view.

Best,

Scott Sorensen

Los Angeles, CA

I agree that you have said that one cannot argue with a RWA but Altemeyer goes a little further than that claiming that social conservatives are a threat to U.S. democracy.

Considering that evangelical faith has dominated U.S. religious belief for a considerable period of time, if Altemeyer was right, how would an American democracy still exist? To claim as Altemeyer does that evangelical christians were not organized before now, is historical inaccurate. One can point to 2 examples, the underground railway and the American Revolution where religious christians organized against the British.

In Ch.7, Altemeyer compares the religious right in the U.S. to the Nazis in Germany. One can hardly compare evangelical christians to fascist mass murderers. I find this suggestion offensive and I am an atheist.

The Authoritarians summarizes experimental findings by description but does not present the actual data. Without looking at the actual results, one has no idea whether the findings are being fairly characterized or whether you are merely being told something that is a load of wally.

Any reader should be looking up the footnotes before they swallow the bait.

If one does not listen, understand or respect others, is it any wonder that they are not responsive to one’s ideas?

I believe there is more to be learned from How to Win Friends and Influence People, Commanding Heights (which puts the 2 dominant economic views of the 20th century into historical context), or Getting to Yes produced by the Harvard Negotiating Project.

I believe that we can agree that there is a challenge to continue to feed the world’s population particularly as 3 crops dominate the world food supply. Threats such as the U99 wheatrust are of particular concern given their potential to go global. The benefits of the green revolution never made it to Africa and there is a great deal that can be improved here. I am more hopeful that we can continue to produce new crops and agricultural technologies. The use of genetic marker technology (non-GMO) has accelerated the development of new crops as even Borlaug could not have imagined.

You keep imputing motives and positions to me. This is using ad hominem argument and is (usually) a sign of a poorly formulated position.

If you don’t like my take on things than you have to counter the arguments not the person making them.

To make it easy, I’ll state my points (again).

1. Easterly (remember him?) makes a point that various political positions in the US are not representative of thinking elsewhere. This seems fairly obvious, the blindness of Americans as to what is happening elsewhere is well-known.

2. I stated that there seems to be a correlation between views of the proper form of social organization and certain types of psychological makeups. I cited Altemeyer as one who has studied this. I also cited the work of those who deal with “social dominance organization” although I didn’t provide links. Altemeyer aside, this work can be traced back to Adorno and Arendt among others, so there is plenty of other material, if one wishes to read it. My point is that to the extent there is a correlation between personality and political philosophy getting such people to change their views is unlikely to succeed.

3. As an aside I mentioned the need to adapt to a finite planet. There is plenty of research on this as well, starting with Herman Daly and extending through many others. There are two arguments that are popular to counter their points, you offer both. The first is of the type that Malthus was wrong. The second is that technology will find a way.

Both argue by historical analogy, this is not a valid approach. The levees in New Orleans were deemed safe by historical analogy. This turned out to be false. That Malthus’s or Erlich’s predictions were premature proves nothing. We have 6.7 billion people now, not less than the one billion in Malthus’s era.

The green revolution was a boon and was mostly unanticipated, but this does not prove that there will be similar discoveries of sufficient magnitude in the future. Depending upon this is just wishful thinking, not science.

There will be another 3 billion people by mid century, if you don’t think this makes an unprecedented differenced than you are free to believe as you wish. Prudence, however, demands that steps be taken to plan for the worst case, not the best, if disaster is to be minimized.

Wishing won’t make it so. Sorry…

Well said.

Robert,

If you insist upon proselytizing about the work of Dr. Altemeyer as you have done repeatedly, you can’t just pass the buck to Dr. A when someone challenges these ideas. Funnily, your willingness to believe that anyone who holds religious or conservative ideas is either a member of a vast right wing conspiracy or a mindless zombie reminds me of a quotation by the late William F. Buckley.

“Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”

I can assure you that I did read Dr. Altemeyer’s book apparently, a bit more closely than you. Actually, I wanted to try to understand where you were coming from which is why I bothered to read the book. I was frankly very disturbed by the prejudicial nature of this book which borders on propaganda.

You have suggested “new ideas” and resurrect a bunch of chesnuts from the 1960’s, namely, those from The Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth and the Population Bomb by noted entomologist and butterfly specialist, Paul Ehrlich. The idea of limits was throughly upended by Julian Simon while Norman Borlaug, Nobel lauret was among the leaders in the Green Revolution in agriculture. You might wish to read The Man Who Fed Millions, a biography of Dr. Borlaug whose tireless work on crop breeding and plant pathology has ensured that the world can feed its population. Some folks carp about problems and some folks get the job done!

The problem with the idea of limits is that it does not adequately factor in changes in technology. Quite simply, the way resources are used changes through time ie. we don’t use whale oil and candles anymore. This interview with Paul Romer presents a more 3-dimensional view of scarcity which doubtless you will ignore since it does not align with your preconceived notions.

James,

I could not agree more. The Republicans are not conservatives anymore than Elizabeth Taylor is a virgin.

The reality of politics is that there are political fringes like Ron Paul or moveon.org but the majority of citizens are in the centre. Anyone wishing to gain electoral success has to have broad based popular support like Clinton or Obama. In Bush’s case, Americans were very concerned about terrorism after 911 and he seemed to provide stronger leadership on this particularly as the Kerry plan did not look very different from the Bush plan.

In the U.S. today, we’ve got conservatives arguing FOR torture, FOR government spying on U.S. citizens, FOR military intervention abroad, AGAINST personal privacy, AGAINST gay marriage, FOR the prohibition of drugs, FOR government-mandated religious education, etc. Try comparing these positions with those of the Cato Institute or the Libertarian Party and you will see that conservatives and classical liberals disagree on all of them. All of these conservative positions are in opposition to individual liberty and smaller government.

Conservatives hate the American Civil Liberties Union because it fights FOR greater individual liberty and AGAINST government power. Compare this with the libertarian Cato Institute which sides with the ACLU very, very often.

The only classical liberal in the Republican Party is Ron Paul. He didn’t get anywhere in the Republican primary because most conservatives hate the freedom he fights for.

The Enlightenment is old and has become the status quo (and is indeed supported as traditional both in today’s argument from the authority of the “founding fathers” and the founders talk of traditional english liberties). Supporters of monarchy or a Pope with more divisions than Stalin had to contend with would not be conservative, but radical.

David Friedman criticizes Altemeyer’s surveys here, as he stacks the deck toward different desired correlations in the U.S and Russia. Friedman isn’t in the same field as Altemeyer, but Chris of Mixing Memory is a cognitive scientist like Lakoff and has a number of posts tweaking him, though his review of The Political Mind seems to be on permanent hiatus.

He specifically has stated that his conclusions only relate to North Americans of the present era. He makes no extrapolations to other times or places. Furthermore the questionnaire he shows in his book is only representative of those that he used over his 40 years of study. It was not intended to create a psychological profile of an individual, but was used with other tests to make connections about populations in general.

He also makes no claims about libertarians or “liberal” authoritarians because he has stated that he didn’t have a large enough sample size since they are so rare in the general population.

You can associate his work with those who have studied the “social dominant organization” type of personality as well to see where movement leaders tend to fall in the spectrum. He did not study this type explicitly either.

Several sites are now discussing the latest rant by Posner on his own website where he disowns modern “conservativism”. I see this as a perfect example of the disconnect between libertarians and social conservatives.

If it makes you happy to put labels on things (especially extinct philosophical movements), feel free, but I don’t know what is to be gained. The important point is that the alliance between libertarians, social conservatives and big business is falling apart and the recriminations are getting more heated.

This is an opportunity for new ideas to appear and open discussions of alternative social policies to emerge. The policies of the 19th Century really need to be finally put to bed. We are entering an era of over population and resource limits and the old ideas are not adequate to deal with such a world.