Jost is Liberal, which does change the peer review standards, but I think his point there was that overall, in those named countries, Conservative/groupism tendencies increased, so on the whole, threat and uncertainty increases Conservatism. The groupism might have even had a hand in setting the stage for WWII.
Unique attributes can bend the rules, (for example, if there are hundreds of Liberals and one Conservative, they may try to gang up on the Conservative, to redistirbute his stuff), but in most cases, Libs will go to ground, and avoid confrontation (or people genuinely become more Conservative - I’m not sure which myself), as people look for allies.
This is a highly thought-provoking article, and I appreciate your posting it.
I have a question that is somewhat related to the topic. I’m wondering if there are any psychological insights to be derived from my observations from arguing with progressives? As I have a bit of time during the day between clients, I often jump into political discussions online in mixed groups. It’s generally an unholy mess, but I have noticed a few things that are regular as clockwork about progressive minds-in-motion..
1. No matter what the statement is, I have to challenge the assumption. Practically everything that progressives open with is simply not true. I won’t even call them ‘liberals’ for that reason. This gets down to even basic word definitions.
2. Expect strawmen and absurd misrepresentation of other positions.
3. Expect faulty logic, distorted history and half-true stats.
4. Expect attacks against conservative moral legitimacy, general via accusations of racism, sexism, religious intolerance or general meanness.
5. Expect attacks against conservative intelligence, generally via accusations of being ‘anti-science’, but often on no grounds at all.
5. Expect high intensity offense to perceived hypocrisy. This is often true when there is in fact no hypocrisy at all, except from strawman projection.
6. Expect high intensity offense to any source of authority or information that runs counter to their own. Not just disagreement, but white hot fury. Fox News spelled with a swastika instead of an X. That sort of thing.
7. Expect sneering, sanctimony, closed mindedness and essentially every stereotypical trait they claim to hate about conservatives to be present.
These qualities seem specific to progressives (conservatives have other weaknesses when they argue) and broadly universal to them in varying degrees. I could go on at book length on examples of how these things manifest or in effective tactics to counter them (and I’d like to at a future time, as I’m very good at this), but I’m curious about the root of these reflexes. There are a lot of conservative ideas that are frankly not expressed well by many online conservatives, but even articulate progressives are without fail arrogant, moralizing ignoramuses teetering on the edge of emotional chaos.
I won’t go so far as to say it’s a mental disorder, but there’s some weird psychological mechanism at play in the progressive mind that I simply can’t identify. If you had any insight I would be interested to hear it.