Julie Delegal“How did conservatives get this radical?” That’s the title of a recent New York Times Opinionator blog — one that’s chock-full of cutting-edge voter psychology research.
The older, more basic poli-psych concepts, however, like normativism, humanism, religiosity, and punitivism might shed light on some of today’s conservative voters and politicians.
These ideas shed light, for example, on U.S. House Speaker John Boehner’s repeated attempts to shut down the government over Obamacare. They may also explain why Florida’s ruling party members refuse to accept billions of dollars of federal taxpayer money that would help bring health insurance to millions of Floridians.
GOP members instead strain to conjure ridiculous images of jackbooted bureaucrats, armed with (gasp!) pens. The aim is to frighten voters by using baseless claims that Obamacare clerks will steal their personal information when gathering data needed to make the program work.
Enter “normativism,” which provides an insightful poli-psych primer. The author Frank McCourt, born and bathed in Catholic guilt, went to confession twice over the course of his memoir, “Angela’s Ashes.” The first priest — decidedly normative — was disgusted with Frank and said something to the effect of, “You broke the rules! Repent and be punished!”
The second priest, on the other hand, was more of a new-covenant guy. He empathized with Frank, felt his pain, and issued words of comfort: “How awful! Are you alright?” This priest demonstrated humanism similar to how Pope Francis decried the church’s “obsessions” over gay marriage and abortion.
Normativistic thinkers prize rules and despise rule-breakers. They harbor punitivism (desire for punishment) in their hearts. There’s some evidence that voter personality traits like punitivism get magnified when times get tough — as in a recession. This phenomenon is what my husband (a political scientist) calls “the politics of personal resentment.”
When resources are scarce, our baser instincts kick in. Some of us go on the lookout for other people who might get something that we ourselves aren’t getting, like food stamps. Rhetoric about nonworking people “breaking the rules” ensues, and lawmakers issue punitive measures like cutting food stamps in an economic recovery. Never mind that the rhetoric is light on facts.
Thank God that the Federal Reserve isn’t buying the punitive austerity nonsense, and has instead decided to keep investing in the economy.
The desire to mete out punishment to those who are perceived to have broken society’s rules pairs nicely with fear-based religion. And those fire-and-brimstone brands of religion, as President Reagan learned around 1979, pair up nicely — in linguistic terms — with sound bites about “traditional American values.”
Trickle-down economics, homophobia, anti-feminism and lots of other “bells” summoned voters to the polls in 1980 and 1984, some who drooled nostalgically for a return to a past that never really existed in America.
Unfortunately, one of those electoral motivators was racism, which was given cover by Reagan’s thinly veiled campaign appeals for “states’ rights,” and against “welfare queens.”
One social psychologist, Harvard’s Jim Sidanius, sees voter racism in terms of belief in “group superiority,” a phenomenon that happens with people who put a lot of stock in society’s historical pecking order. Group chauvinists — be they white supremacists or intolerant Christian fundamentalists — are steeped in what Sidanius calls “social dominance orientation.” Pecking order is the biggest rule of all, and, as Boehner demonstrates, as Americans shed their historical social castes, apparently the entire nation must be punished.
Three decades of classical conditioning are difficult to dismantle. The new bell is the anti-socialist-Muslim-Kenyan brand of racism. Only one GOP lawmaker in this writer’s memory, Sen. John McCain, has stood up to denounce the “birther” foolishness. He also revived his mavericky, pre-Palin persona when he slammed Sen. Ted Cruz’s 21-hour filibuster folly, and chided him for comparing Obamacare to Nazi “appeasement.”
McCain would fit the definition of a “real conservative” put forward by author Christopher Parker for Thomas B. Edsall in the Opinionator: “… [F]or the sake of order and stability, real conservatives are amenable to political compromise with their opponents.” Parker uses other words to describe the radical Tea Party.
