My response…
……to articles like this one is: what about political changers like me? How do you explain us?
Political preferences seem to come packaged with a whole set of other kinds of tastes, with liberals and conservatives having separate preferences when it comes to things such as humor, food and even whether they want poetry to rhyme, according to John Hibbing, coauthor of the forthcoming book Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives and the Biology of Political Difference.
Hatemi, the Penn State political scientist, has written a forthcoming study that indicates political inclinations are deeply rooted ”” all the way down to the sensory level. Politically like-minded people tend to share preferences in taste, sense of smell and what their eyes are drawn to.
The article goes on to discuss the fact that most couples are uni-political. That does seem to be the case; although I know quite a few couples whose politics differ from each other and they appear happy enough, most of the couples I know do share each others’ politics.
But of course most of the people I know share each others’ politics: liberal all the way.
Being a changer is one of the things that has made me such a misfit nearly wherever I go. I’m no longer part of the liberal circle dance, and perhaps I never really was. But I’m not quite of the right, either, in some undefinable way. I’m not sure why, but just the way I look seems to make people assume my politics are at least somewhat to the left, and if and when I reveal the situation to be otherwise they tend to express shock.
Perhaps it’s that I smell like a liberal?:
How deep does it run? Make conservatives and liberals wash with the same shampoos and soaps, and like-minded people can still sniff them out. “Liberals found the body odor of liberals more attractive,” Hatemi says. “Conservatives found the body odor of conservatives more attractive.”
And here’s a finding that shows how much more divisive the country’s politics have become since I was a girl. This rings true to me:
A recent Stanford University study that people are more likely to have hostile feelings toward people of the other party than members of another race. The who say they would disapprove of their children marrying someone from the other party has shot up from 5 percent in 1960 to 40 percent in 2010.
You see that politics has become, among other things, the new religion. Very few people these days would object to racial intermarriage and probably the same is true of religious intermarriage. We are now “tolerant” of diversity in those things. But politics has a lot more emotional valence now, and it’s those on the other side of that divide who have become the enemy.
[ADDENDUM: It occurs to me that a lot of readers may not be familiar with the many posts I’ve written about the experience of being a political “changer.” So here are some links:
There’s a whole bunch on the experience of leaving the circle and becoming a political apostate. Here’s a good one to start with.
Then there are the ones about my own change experience, and that of other political changers.
Enjoy.]
all you did was discover that they ere lying abour representing you… thats all… you dont change, your knowlege of them changes, and so, you abandon them, when before, you believed the lies, and so sided with them as they were truth.
the fact you dont like the right is because the right is the bad cop version of the left. there is no left or right… there is only statism or not, and the right is accepting that we now have a choice between totalitarianisms, not freedom.
so they don’t represent you either..
the poem by neomoller strikes here, as now, because of your and so many siding with the lies, there is no one left to side with what you want…
they are either too old and dont care as they are leaving to the choir triumphant, or if dawkins, the great nothingness…
the young are already probrammed into how to think…ie. how to derive the answers that get them a pat on the head, and so on. they have learned that facts dont matter, might makes right, and slander is ok, and so on.
waking up 150 years into the program
or 90 years into it
or 45 years into it…
depending on which major era you ignored..
is still coming late to the game, and there is no longer anything one can do…
back in 2007, maybe.
now? nope..
and i wonder if this progressive will get a world war going like the other two… so far, cold war II is moving along nicely.
and you can really see the fit hit the shan if one of the 400 missiles stolen from benchazi takes out a plane at newark…
I am also a changer. I see at least two reasons for my doing so.
Reason 1: my time as a worker and tourist in Latin America showed me that the “progressive” dogma about Latin America did not correspond to reality on the ground. Nor did I find “progressive” dogma about Latin America supported by extensive library research. This skepticism towards “progressives” then extended to other areas.
Reason 2. Some have said that the difference between libs and wingnuts is that libs see Paradise as being in the future, whereas wingnuts see Paradise as being in the past. From childhood experiences, I saw that a contented status quo could change for the worse in the wink of an eye. That gave me a skeptical attitude towards any people who claimed that they had the super program which, if funded and implemented, would result in a Bright Shining Future. As is said in Venezuela, tell me another cowboy story.
Both reasons have a common thread: skepticism.
I do not have a problem with associating with people who do not agree with my politics, but I often find they have a problem with my expressing my disagreement.
People tend to assume that I am a lib.
Skipping the old question as to fundamental values, worldviews, and interests divergences, and referring only to feelings, the discussion on Sherman the other day brought to mind my readings on pre-Civil War American history.
And if people do in fact trouble themselves to read the prewar literature they will readily see that hatred, of the very persons of the others, the active and cultivated contempt for the lives and existences of these impediments to social reformation and reordering is not new.
As I said earlier, when going into the issue I experienced a bit of a crash while reading through many of the personal reminiscences and letters as well as the polemical literature of the “average northerner” (the ardent average that is). It became clear that even in the absence of the slavery issue there was a great deal of emotional ardor involved, and that many despised even the educated Southerners; despised their “backward” life ways, their customs, their sense of personal honor, their lack of collective sensibilities, their disinterest in transcendental/universalist ideas. The North was the land of sensitive, expressive and artistic natures and mass government organized social progress. Those who stood in the way or expressed a preference for folkways were just so much human material fit for no civilizing role as bringers of enlightenment.
The left’s contempt for bitter clingers, seems in some ways the same. Where the modern day free soilers, and copperheads will fall in the absence of a racial question is a matter I suppose for speculation.
Unless, that is, race can be kept in play, and the idea of personal integrity and sovereign conscience be made the villain as well.
by the way, notice how they are using the math bs that feminsts taught us meant women were oppressed?
just think… if women were honest… they would not have cheated with that, normalized it, and so on… it would not be used to exterminate them and their children over time…
[and notice that i am ahead of the curve on this stuff, but no one will talk.. until they are post curve and its not worth talking about… ie. water under the bridge]
or did you not read..
smart women are not having babies
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/07/smart-women-not-having-kids
‘Dying’ Russia’s Birth Rate Is Now Higher Than The United States’
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadomanis/2013/07/25/dying-russias-birth-rate-is-now-higher-than-the-united-states/
then there is police militarization
IPAB healthcare rationing
and the ever present civilian labor camps with troops stationed in them… (remember i showed the documents from the army website?)
First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.
just replace his thing with capitalist, christian, etc…
waking up AFTER you went over the cliff is bad..
nothing you can do about it…
smoke em if you got em, and try to enjoy the ride..
because there is no way to steer this boat back to anything other than where its going to end up..
which i said in 2007…
maybe paying attention to DHS suspending constitutional rights within 100 miles of a border, including beaches and canada is better to talk about. the ladies seem to focus on meaningless stuff. like oprah, and whether modern harridens who hate men, marraige, and family, can marry them…
given 400 missles missing
cold war II
new missiles and ships
suspension of constitition
and so on
who cares about relationships?
only the people messing them up and playing with them and so on care… and thats women. right now, the men dont care, thats why its a marraige strike. and the ladies are grousing over yellow fever taking their sugar before they can get it. and so on.
i looked at that article and wondered why you care
most women today who are educated are on the left, the men are not educated, so they are not on the left, and they are both sides exterminated..
your just wondering about dinosaurs who are on the way out…
I wonder how they would explain my family, which was raised in a liberal environment (Boulder) by classically liberal parents. Somehow during the mid-late 90’s my parents, my three siblings and I all become conservative – all while living in different states and living very different lives. I think a lot of it has to do with my parents’ values and our involvement in church (even though it was a very liberal one). I feel fortunate that I don’t have to dread family events such as Thanksgiving or Christmas. Sadly, the same shift did not occur with any of our childhood friends; they’re all hopeless Lefties.
I see that in skipping a question of values, I returned to it after all. Sorry.
Possibly “values” and interests, are merely another way of expressing the manner in which an organism, in this case a human organism, attempts to structure its life according to some partly innate dispositions.
I know that I do not find all “liberal females” unattractive … the tattooed and pierced and fat and coarse featured aside of course.
But “liberal” males, do by and large give me the creeps. There’s something off and fundamentally unhealthy seeming, both physically and “spiritually” about them. However, as they are less sexually dimorphic than conservative males according to some research, that feeling may be no more than a dislike of being around androgynous, whining, and somewhat masochistic types whose sense of right and wrong is thought by them to be demonstrated through collective commitment and submission rather than through personal rectitude and honor.
Like many who are drawn to Neo’s blog, I also underwent a change from liberal to conservative. When my wife and I met, I was fairly liberal and she a moderate. I think it causes her some discomfort that I have changed from the person she first knew, while she has stayed about the same.
Like many moderates I know, she avoids politics in general and is uncomfortable when she complains about some issue like taxes, Obamacare, etc. and then I point out how it is the left who are to blame; she calls these “my rants”. So, I’ve learned to tone down “my rants”.
However, her sister and I are totally in tune politically, and my wife rolls her eyes when my sister-in-law and I start in on politics. 🙂
You can’t choose your race, but you can choose your political affiliation/beliefs.
Changers are one counter factual to the idea of political outlook as some kind of in-born trait.
Another, is the strong correlation between socioeconomic position and political outlook. Just to take the easiest example: Married women with kids voted mostly for Romney while unmarried mothers voted overwhelmingly for Obama. There are two possibilities for the correlation: One, liberal women are not interested in marriage, choose men poorly or are just hard to get along with. Two, once in the position of single-mom, they vote their interests–since they lack a husband, they want Uncle (sugar daddy) Sam to help them out.
In my own family, this has borne-out. Me and my three siblings were always conservative, three of us still are. The three that married and stayed married are still conservative, the one sister who had kids and then got a divorce is very liberal. The three conservatives are each pretty different too: One atheist/libertarian one evangelical Christian and one paleoconservative.
I too am a changer and don’t fit the stereotypes of either the right or left. I’m partially in agreement with libertarians, conservatism and classical liberalism. I attend no church, yet believe in God and Jesus profoundly. I strongly believe in judeo/christian principles but fully accept Heinlein’s aphorism that, “Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other ‘sins’ are invented nonsense.” I own no gun and fully support the right to bear arms.
Groucho Marx, when asked what organizations he might belong to commented, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” those who don’t ‘get’ what he meant, are I suspect, fairly conventional in their thinking.
Whether on the right or left, the quality of one’s thinking, whether dogmatic and conventional or rational and reasoned is IMO, a more distinctive difference than any conservative – liberal dichotomy.
That’s because dogma exists on both sides of the political divide and conventional thinking accepts dogma without examination.
Socrates opined that, “the unexamined life is not worth living” and that is profoundly important because “If you can’t explain what you’re doing [or believe in] and why [what rationale supports that view] you’re doing it to any intelligent layman, that really means that you don’t understand it yourself.” Allan Bromley, former President of the American Physical Society
Again, to risk, to engage in, in fact, repetition: was the change in what one viewed as a worthwhile way of living and worthy and satisfying goals, or merely over the proper methods for publicly getting other people, who may have been motivated to go, there?
I went through my 20s in Madison, Wis as a non-political liberal (what else?), and began voting conservative after a religious conversion when I could no longer align with the party of abortion. Gradually I realized conservatism was a better fit for me all the way around.
BUT, I remain anti-vaccine and have found the only relief for various physical and mental ailments in alternative medicine: homeopathy, qigong, etc. The assumption in alternative medicine circles is that you’re liberal, and the assumptions in conservative circles is that you go to the regular doctor. Also, I am an artist, and people assume liberal from that.
My brothers, all Christians of various denominations, were shocked and dismayed when they learned I voted for Romney, and I was shocked to learn they voted for Obama. I asked my Catholic brother, How could you when Obama is so extreme for abortion? And he said, in essence, “Yeah, abortion. But social justice.”
There is definitely a personality component going on, and I would love to do a study. People who are very involved in popular culture and who need to align with cool tend to be liberal. I’ve noticed that it is very uncomfortable for people who care what others think of them to be conservative, even when their beliefs land them there.
I wouldn’t worry much about “not fitting in” on the right. It’s the nature of the beast. Conservatives, much more than liberals, are individualists, prizing individualism and personal responsibility, whereas liberals favor collectivism and collectivist solutions. As such, you have lots of company in your new found home.
About that disapproval of their children marrying someone from the other party going from 5 percent in 1960 to 40 percent in 2010 — here’s a bit more info:
“In 1960, about 5 percent of Americans expressed a negative reaction to party intermarriage; in 2010, about 40 percent did (Republicans about 50 percent, Democrats about 30 percent).”
That 20 percent more Republicans disapproving surprised me; I would have placed a bet on it being the other way around.
Humans need something to hate or fear. Otherwise our emotions and survival mechanisms start turning neurotic. So the leaders of a community express this desire in several fashions, some are productive while others are destructive.
If humans are taught not to fear or hate those of a different skin color or religious faction, then they will hate other humans based upon other criteria. If religion and “color” are thus ruled “same as you”, then humans will find other differentiating criteria like “eye color” or “left hand vs right hand” to fear and hate instead.
Not so.
“The who say they would disapprove of their children marrying someone from the other party has shot up from 5 percent in 1960 to 40 percent in 2010.”
Ann (above), citing an Atlantic piece from last fall, citing a chart by Kevin Drum at Mother Jones, very misleadingly characterizes what all the data says.
First, Drum – a Leftie loyalist economist – beat the foundations for the narrative that Right-wingers are racist: see how much more disapproving of party intermarriage they’ve become since our Black president Obama was elected? Very suddenly they are RACIST! Or at least that’s the implied narrative that completely massages MSM-Leftist prejudices.
First, the reason Obama occasions kvetching on the Right is that Obama is correctly seen as a hard-core Leftist – something both his Senate voting record and a series of well-researched biographies about Obama’s origins, produced by the Right, amply support. In other words, ideology – not race – is at stake here.
Second, since the end of the long crisis of the Cold War, domestic political polarization has returned to politics, but on a scale of hostilities nowhere comparable to the 19th century, when party affiliation could get people killed.
Third, in Claude Fischer’s deeper account of the Stanford study, these “colleagues agree with earlier researchers who have found that Americans have not polarized around ideology or policy. The ANES asked the warm/cold question about liberals and conservatives, and the temperature gap between ‘my’ ideological group and ‘that’ ideological group has stayed about the same since the 1970s — liberals express about a 20-point warmth gap and conservatives about a 30-point gap.”
Accordingly, for a log time “most Americans cannot reliably identify which specific policies each party supports….” And thus the recent political polarization results from media intensification of political attacks – eg, the 25/7 news cycle, which didn’t exist two decades ago (ie, during the Cold War).
In sum, my friend Tobin Spratte is a expert on political opinion. He, I and others find the claim that more on the Right are hostile of children’s political intermarriage than those on the Left unsustained by face validity tests. We all find the Left much more hostile and socially rejecting of the Right than the reverse.
In the online dating world, for example, Match.com did a study and found that Right-wingers were much more accepting of dating the political Leftists than the reverse were. My experience at the online dating site OKcupid.com – which is much more aggressively secular – amply confirms this skew of hostility by the Left against the Right.
Read “Back to Blood” where Tom Wolfe asserts that because religion is mostly gone from modern life that race has taken its place.
And so much of politics is now based on race.
Neo and Wolfe are both right.
I have a famous artist friend in Omaha (yes, Omaha) who is conservative. People, however, routinely assume he is liberal because he is an artist.
Liberals own almost every aspect of the arts.
Orson, that Atlantic piece is linked to in the NPR piece Neo linked to. The full piece simply adds more detail to the comment she included in her post about the growth in disapproval with regard to children marrying someone from the other party.
Changer here. I lost a lifelong friendship because of it.
And I don’t entirely fit in on the right, either. The “social issues” are felt so deeply that I’ve been expelled from some of those circles, too.
Faceless Commenter:
You might enjoy reading some of my posts on political apostasy, then.
Or perhaps the ones about my own change experience, or other political changers.
Here’s a good one to start with.
Well, the first thing to observe is that this “change” is nearly always from left to right. In the past 60 years I can think of exactly one prominent conservative–Gary Wills–who moved to the left. That plays into the chestnut that Left v. Right is in fact Idealism v. Experience. I think it is not as simple as that. Also you are not alone; in fact I believe that 50 years ago most conservative intellectuals had been leftists. And I think the word “intellectual” is the key: These people became intellectuals and then THOUGHT themselves right. Since that time a cultural infrastructure has been built that enables people to become conservative and intellectual at the same time. But even now the friends I have that are politically active and conservative are just as likely to be “converts.” I did not have to convert at least not since I was, oh, nine and so I wonder what that conversion experience was like.
Finally there does seem to be a line crossed or a membrane that is passed through when you change your political outlook. Most people move from left to right for a particular reason or set of reasons: the Vietnam war, 9-11, direct experience of paternalistic policies, crime, disgust at racial politics etc. But once on the other side a lot of things you had not considered begin to look different. Most of the writers in Commentary that started out on the journey to the right in the 60s eventually sounded not so different from the National Review masthead. Even the doctrinaire libertarians I know do not regard religious conservatives with the same horror you see permeate the left. This is because they both share something profound which is hard pinpoint. It displays itself in a common revulsion to PC cant.
Thanks, neo. I’ve read a few of those!
Edward W. Wagner:
Political change, unidirectional.
One other prominent right-to-left changer, however, would be David Brock. I read his account of what happened, Blinded by the Right, and it seems to me he always was a very shallow thinker (whether on the right or the left) and into sensationalism and self-publicity rather than much of anything else.
“Political preferences seem to come packaged with a whole set of other kinds of tastes, with liberals and conservatives having separate preferences when it comes to things such as humor, food and even whether they want poetry to rhyme”
The White Dove flies
with a poop in the skies
and the Seagull release
makes the shove okay
Well, I least I tried, goddammit. I least I tried, to create (cretin plus ate) a rhyming tune, you blasted bufoon, that expressed universal sympathy.
All right. Let us get seer we us.
We all belong to Nothing before we belong to Something. Because of Choice.
And our choice, although capable of being plotted by science, isn’t quite science, is it?
The Quantum of the wavelength principle which even the great Newton had to reduce by subterfuge.
In other words, we can’t figure it out, that is ourselves.
But character, which is the incorporation of objective reality into our subective actions, matters. In other words, what we intuitively perceive to be good cannot be gainsayed without damage to the organism.
And thus changers, which presupposes an objective standard.
My beloved wife is liberal. I “changed” about the same time as Neo. At first my darling was uncomfortable with the change (but still loved me — go figure!)
But as time has gone on she has moved, while not to the right of center like me, definitely toward the center. And she “gets” conservatism, though she doesn’t always agree with me.
Perhaps I should add that she was by far the best student in our medical school class.
🙂
Jamie Irons
The image and language of left and right emanates from the French Femolution (that ought to please art).
Yeah, its true. Before then reality was holistic and even science was holistic. In other words, science sought observable results not expedient political truths.
Ich. Shit. Get it off me. Science.
Fuck science.
Find Truth.
LOL. C’mon down to the south, and see how often we have supporters of nemesis teams in families.
Yeah, there are some people who would never marry outside their fan base, but if Gators and Bulldogs can live in the same house and even the same bed — if Tide fans and War Eagles can coexist, something as trivial as political opposition is a piece of cake….
😀
sharpie, were there any coherent thoughts you wanted to express…?
A lot of the right to left converters were zealots, fanatics, or band wagon followers. Which is to say, they took Christian, Catholic, and other beliefs at face value or were indoctrinated them from childhood. They never thought about it, just believed on faith alone. When that faith was fund wanting and devoid of substance or foundation, they took up Leftist beliefs, with an even more fiery ardor.
There’s not much difference from some guy following a belief because his parents told him it was right vs the guy on the left that follows Obama because that’ll make him smart and right.
Coherent lasers require a focus crystal and sustained power bursts. Uncontrollable reactions, unstable power fluctuations, and changes in the Earth’s magnetic and gravi metric axii will be problems.
It’s a belief in the reality of reality; and the meaningfulness of the term truth, and the significance of logical inference, and the intelligibility of the world.
On the other hand you have “the social construction of reality”, the anti-metaphysical metaphysics of Marx; “gender” as a kind of garment that is chosen or one is habituated to; the denial of the law of non-contradiction; the defining of the significance of life as primarily sub or unconscious; reason reduced to an instrumentalist function; right and wrong as radically conventional, and values statements as mere emotive utterances … and on and on.
Conservatives and libertarians on the one hand, and modern liberals on the other, inhabit different psychological worlds which produce different moral visions. That the modern liberal vision is a destructive delusion, doesn’t mean that many will not find it congenial and satisfying.
“After all, ultimately it’s all for nothing anyway so what’s it matter if what I believe is “true” or not? The important thing is to feel good and eventually check out painlessly”
I’m more and more seeing the left – right division as similar to religious division. Religion beliefs are often inculcated while growing up. So too with politics. People leave their church or sect when they find a creed that seems more true to them.
Religion gives a person a framework for how to live one’s life. Now that government has grown so large and intrusive, political creeds are very influential in the framework for living our lives.
The left sees politics as a way to create a more fair and just society. They have no confirming evidence that this is possible. It is a matter of faith. And their faith appears to them to place them on a higher moral plane than those who recognize that equality of outcomes through central planning doesn’t work. The left is also believes that being militarily strong encourages one’s enemies. They believe that a society can befriend its enemies – all we need to do is “Give peace a chance.”
The right, has evidence that we point to all the time about the failure of the left’s policy prescriptions, but it is ignored because it is not as “kind and gentle” as the left desires.
I believe much of the differences are the result of the proclivity of people to be open or closed minded. This trait runs on a scale of continuity from very open minded to very closed minded. Changers are more open minded and willing to look at evidence.
No time to develop this further – just a few thoughts.
Ymarsakar:
I always exempt from true “changer” status those who changed political affiliation while still young, for example in college. It is very common for people raised by parents on the right to switch to the left as teenagers or in their early twenties, when adult political identity is forming.
“Changers” (to my way of thinking, anyway) are those who change after that period—after their adult political identity has been formed.
Thank you, Neo (BTW have you ever noticed the coincidence of your handle and the fate of the character of the same name the movie ) for the links on this subjet and the other ones I found on your homepage. This topic is fascinating because it is focused on precisely the bloody ground where the battle is joined. I hadn’t really thought of David Brooks as a left-turner although he recently wrote a column defining “neo-conservatism” in a way I sure would annoy you. The case of Thomas Nagel especially interests me although I’d already read some on it.
Incidentally, have you read any Sarah Hoyt? She is a sci-fi writer and blogger who Glenn Reynolds sometimes allows on to Instapundit. She posted earlier this year that when she “came out of the closet” as a libertarian she was dumped by 4 out of the 5 publishers she wrote for and had to rebuild her career via self-publishing. Some people take greater risks by speaking out than being snubbed at parties or dropped from Christmas card lists.
My old/new standard is that certain people when asked what their goals are, choose one of these 3 options when faced with despair and obstructions.
1. Change themselves
2. Change the world
3. Don’t know.
Thus the Marxists, totalitarians, and Islamics prefer to change the world, as they have failed to change themselves for the better.
Whereas those in opposition prefer to leave the world as it is and change themselves, since they believe that a bunch of rapists and serial killers certainly can’t change the world for the better. Changing human individuals should be the start of this “social justice”.
And for the majority, perhaps, the answer is “I don’t know”. So they follow along on whatever band wagon looks fastest.