Bear with this article, it's really, really interesting. It's a discussion of a scientific basis for why some people vote Republican, and others Democratic, on cultural and psychological reasons. The author is Jonathan Haidt, the (atheist, liberal) psych professor who helped devise this popular online test of one's moral orientation. The essay to which I'm linking discusses the psychological roots of political personalities.
It's wonky, but here are the key excerpts:
This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion. [snip]I would say that the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way.
When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the "it" to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label "elitist." But how can Democrats learn to see--let alone respect--a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?
How did Haidt open his mind? Go read his account, or follow the jump for a truncated version...
Haidt went to live in India as a grad student, in a very patriarchal and traditional society. The practices of the people really upset his Western, atheist, liberal point of view. But the more time he spent there, the more he liked the people, and the more he came to understand (if not share) their traditionalist point of view.
He found that the Western view of the individual and society is a contractual one, associated with John Stuart Mill. Haidt:
Mill's vision appeals to many liberals and libertarians; a Millian society at its best would be a peaceful, open, and creative place where diverse individuals respect each other's rights and band together voluntarily (as in Obama's calls for "unity") to help those in need or to change the laws for the common good.
But that is not the only valid vision of society:
But now imagine society not as an agreement among individuals but as something that emerged organically over time as people found ways of living together, binding themselves to each other, suppressing each other's selfishness, and punishing the deviants and free-riders who eternally threaten to undermine cooperative groups. The basic social unit is not the individual, it is the hierarchically structured family, which serves as a model for other institutions. Individuals in such societies are born into strong and constraining relationships that profoundly limit their autonomy. The patron saint of this more binding moral system is the sociologist Emile Durkheim, who warned of the dangers of anomie (normlessness), and wrote, in 1897, that "Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free himself from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralize him." A Durkheimian society at its best would be a stable network composed of many nested and overlapping groups that socialize, reshape, and care for individuals who, if left to their own devices, would pursue shallow, carnal, and selfish pleasures. A Durkheimian society would value self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one's groups over concerns for outgroups.A Durkheimian ethos can't be supported by the two moral foundations that hold up a Millian society (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity). My recent research shows that social conservatives do indeed rely upon those two foundations, but they also value virtues related to three additional psychological systems: ingroup/loyalty (involving mechanisms that evolved during the long human history of tribalism), authority/respect (involving ancient primate mechanisms for managing social rank, tempered by the obligation of superiors to protect and provide for subordinates), and purity/sanctity (a relatively new part of the moral mind, related to the evolution of disgust, that makes us see carnality as degrading and renunciation as noble). These three systems support moralities that bind people into intensely interdependent groups that work together to reach common goals. Such moralities make it easier for individuals to forget themselves and coalesce temporarily into hives, a process that is thrilling, as anyone who has ever "lost" him or herself in a choir, protest march, or religious ritual can attest.
Haidt says most Democrats fail to understand that politics is more like religion than shopping. People vote not based on a shopping list, but based on deeper, even pre-rational motivations -- things that transcend mere material desires. Democrats, with their secular, rationalistic orientation, consistently fail to understand what motivates most voters, most of the time, and therefore fail to meet deeply felt emotional needs. This is not about cheap therapeutic politics that make individuals feel better; it's about providing for the basic psychological and emotional well-being of the group, including addressing the very human need for a sense of unity and transcendental purpose.
That this need can be manipulated and abused by politicians -- and often has been -- does not obviate it. As Haidt writes:
Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation. The three Durkheimian foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so.
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I agree without insurance, medical costs would be cheaper...but it would require the insurance industry not existing at all. Look at free clinics, which manage to provide a level of medical care that would be very expensive if they actually had to deal with insurance companies. Same with random doctor's offices...you can indeed, find good deals. Or look at optometrists, who are rarely covered by insurance.
NOT AT ALL. Insurance can not only exist, but it can flourish, in a scenario where we stop using insurance as the everyday bill payer.
How on earth did you read my whole post and never catch on?
You recognize the whole distortion and problem with third party paying for your daily needs... So HOW can you possibly advocate worsening the issue with single payer/provider takeover and worsening all of these?
NOT AT ALL. Insurance can not only exist, but it can flourish, in a scenario where we stop using insurance as the everyday bill payer.
You say tomato, I say tomato. (That expression doesn't appear to work in text.)
The insurance companies' power must be seriously reduced to fix health care. If you want to argue that this can happen with them continuing to exist but only providing catastrophic care, I will not argue with that.
As long as they are no longer able to threaten to withhold patients from hospitals for not playing ball. As long as every medical establishment doesn't require one full-time person just to deal with insurance companies. (Again, not exaggerating on that one.)
You recognize the whole distortion and problem with third party paying for your daily needs... So HOW can you possibly advocate worsening the issue with single payer/provider takeover and worsening all of these?
Because 'single payer insurance' is an insanely stupid way to do anything.
The government ought to pay hospitals and doctors for the work they do. The patients should be irrelevant to this. If a doctor does a surgery, he should get paid whatever the AMA, or whatever system we have in place to determine a fair price, says that surgery is worth, multiplied by a regional correction for differing costs of living.
See, a lot of people talking about government provided health care are under the delusion that we want the government to operate as a insurance company. No sane person wants that, because insurance companies are crap. No sane person wants the government to demand you get less health care, or make any medical decisions at all. (Just like they don't want a private company doing that.)
No, we want the health care industry to operate like any other private contractor: They provide services, the government pays them for whatever services they rendered.(1)
No 'authorization' or anything at all before something is done. (Yes, yes, if it's really that important, we can check for legal residency.) Maybe a few procedures might need to be validated (By other doctors) for medical necessity, like breast implants and plastic surgery, but 99% of everything the doctor just does, document that he did it, sends in the paperwork, and gets paid. Granted, we'll have to trust that the health care industry is not providing extra services to pad costs.
Which is where medical ethics and review boards come in, helped by the fact that most people actually don't like to visit doctors and are unlikely to just go along with unnecessary procedures. But doctors already have fairly strong rules about that.
We might have to make some sort of rules about various types of lab testing, I can see doctors, just be default, checking off every possible test on blood samples and whatnot if there's no disincentive to only do relevant tests (And it's not unethical to run pointless tests on blood, so no rules about that.), but mostly the problems should work themselves out fairly rapidly. Actually, most of them can be fixed in advance.
And excessive tests are not only better than too few, but probably cheaper in the long run.
And, also, of course, there's the risk of actual fraud, doctors just claiming they did things to non-existence patients, but that's not hard to stop with spot checks.
"The left, which is not actually a fan of abortion, meanwhile attempts to reduce it with education about sex, and expanding adoption service and health care to mothers." DTC
TR: I think you're going on a caricature of the Right. Many people I know on the Right also want to expand adoption service and help pregnant women. They may just see different things as better helping pregnant women.
TR: I think you're going on a caricature of the Right. Many people I know on the Right also want to expand adoption service and help pregnant women. They may just see different things as better helping pregnant women.
I wasn't trying to imply they didn't, I was simply pointing out that the right's tactics WRT to abortion have been somewhat inane. Something like 75% of abortions are due to economic concerns, and if those concerns were totally removed, via 100% prenatal medical coverage and 100% painless adoption, I really have to wonder how many abortions would actually happen.
But, no, the right has to attempt to very slowly replace the Supreme Court, a plan that might never work, and certainly by the time it does, abortion will be so accepted that it won't actually be outlawed anywhere. This has, in fact, already happened in most parts of the country, so the plan has already failed...they are attempting to cross the finish line after the spectators, and more importantly the referee, have already gone home. There's a 'moral' victory there, but not an actual victory victory.
This is because the plan was invented by people who do not actually care about reducing the number of abortion, but about getting reelected 'until' the plan works.
Good insights by Haidt.
Haidt's ingroup loyalty I would call love, as in "love your neighbor."
Haidt's authority/respect I would call justice.
Haidt's purity/sanctity I would call holiness.
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