Conservatives tend to seek balance in life. We work hard but are satisfied with moderate success. If we are making a contribution to society with our work and earning enough to provide for our family, that is usually enough. We also want to spend time with our families, pursue a variety of interests, and also have a spiritual life.
Leftists are usually driven by the single-minded pursuit of power and status. They take on every extra assignment no matter how pointless, work every evening they are asked to, stay until the very end of every meeting, no matter how meaningless, and then hang around afterwards to network.
As a result, leftists tend to rise to the top of organizations, particularly organizations where advancement is based on networking, visibility and perceived loyalty to the organization, rather than objective measures of performance.
This applies to government and corporate bureaucracies, entertainment, media and volunteer organizations. And it applies from the local to the national level.
In the last few years, we’ve learned how pervasive the expectation has been in Hollywood that young performers will perform sexual favors for people in positions of power. Is it any wonder that today’s “stars” are all leftists? People with moral standards all left to pursue other careers early on, when it became apparent what the expectations were.
My wife worked in professional theater until her late 20s. She was in technical production rather than acting. There were no sexual expectations, but for the 3-4 weeks before a show opened, the expectations were that they would work until midnight or 1am 7 days a week and then go out drinking for another 2 hours with the rest of the production crew. She ultimately decided she’d rather start a family and be a mom. The people who are designing costumes for shows on Broadway today are less talented than her, but were willing to spend their lives working and drinking until 3 am for weeks at a time.
15 years ago, when my kids were young, I was on the Board of Elders for the Presbyterian church that I belonged to at the time. The meetings were on Sunday nights. When an issue came up that had political implications (e.g,, let’s only serve “Fair Trade” coffee during the social time after church, the liberals were willing to debate the issue until 9, 9:30, or 10pm, however long it took. Myself and the other more conservative members would look at our watches and know we had to get home to help our spouses get the kids into bed. The liberals were either childless or thought that the correct brand of coffee was more important than parenting. More often than not, the liberal viewpoint would prevail.
This process repeats itself in every bureaucracy, giving us Comey, Mueller and McCabe.
At one point, I worked at a company that was into "management by consensus". This quickly turned into "dictatorship of the most obstinate".
You're right.The weakness of most conservatives is that we have lives outside of the organization.