Posted on 04/28/2012 12:41:24 AM PDT by neverdem
The Case for Polarized Politics: Why America Need Social Conservatism, by Jeffrey Bell (Encounter, 322 pp., $25.95)
I recently attended a political meeting in New York City at which the people tended to identify themselves as “fiscal conservatives and social liberals.” They argued that conservatives should focus on the nation’s economic challenges while either ignoring or downplaying social issues. It’s a point of view shared by Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, among others. When he was considering a presidential run, Daniels memorably told an interviewer that the next president “would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues.”
But in The Case for Polarized Politics: Why America Needs Social Conservatism, Jeffrey Bell argues that social conservatism is uniquely and idiosyncratically American, emerging from basic principles of our national politics, and that it would be ill-advised for those on the libertarian right to try to make it go away. Social conservatives remain a key constituency in the Republican Party; socially conservative principles continue to come to the fore in public debate; and social issues have helped Republicans more than hurt them at the polls. In 1984, for example, Ronald Reagan argued in an address to Protestant clergymen that people of faith should unapologetically defend their values in the public square. Walter Mondale, the Democratic nominee, castigated the president for inserting religion into politics and compared him with an “ayatollah.” Yet in the two months after the speech was delivered, Reagan took a huge lead in the polls that he never relinquished.
Four years later, GOP strategist Lee Atwater persuaded George Bush to highlight his disagreement with Michael Dukakis on a variety of social issues, helping turn Bush’s deficit in the polls into a resounding triumph: an eight-point winning margin in the popular vote and victories in 40 states. The 1988 election set the stage for further social activism within the Republican Party. More recently, President George W. Bush argued that the values expressed in the Declaration of Independence were universal, a position held by most American social conservatives; the Left, unrelenting in its battle against traditionalism, detested him for it. Bush served two terms. As Bell notes, Republicans who shift to the left on social issues won’t simply alienate the substantial number of Americans who remain committed to our founding precepts; they’ll also make political enemies of the many recent immigrants who are socially conservative.
The book’s thesis—that Republicans who embrace social conservatism can win, and that social conservatism is in keeping with American tradition—is a useful one in this political season. Bell holds that the narrative of the nation is tied inextricably to religious influences. To deny these influences comes with a hefty political price; to embrace them requires courage, but in the end, they foster respect for the national purpose. As Bell sees it, America needs social conservatives, even if their presence leads to polarization.
“Our goal as conservatives should be to dismantle the throne that progressivism has built on government ‘values’ RATHER than coronate another RINO who would be king.”
I agree again wholeheartedly. But have you ever thought about the implications of turning that thrown against the left. Then using that period where they told themselves that “the throne has gone mad” to really drive in our message about the dangers of centralized Government power to them?
We would be forcing the left to face a basic reality of life. As long as there is diversity in man(A concept they claim to cherish) There must also be as a consequence a proportional need for a diversity in governance.
Indeed the very fact that we are different is the reason why what works best for one group is harmful to anther. For that reason our efficiency and happiness as both a civilization & individuals is undermined by the inherently homogeneous solutions of centralized government.
Also, if we don’t continue the drug war, what will we do? It is superficially attractive to say nothing but I used to practice criminal law and I really don’t think we want to just throw up our hands and not give a sh*t. This stuff (not marijuana but speed, coke, crack and whatnot) is nasty and insidious especially when spread among 14 year-olds.
I don't deny what hard drugs do. I'm in a different part of law, but have seen enough to realize that those things are bad and cause people to lose control. However, there is an extremely high price paid in the war on drugs by giving up our freedoms (From Terry Stops onward), and putting a ton of people in jail or slapping them with felonies reducing their employment chances if they ever do get clean. Felonies should be reserved for what they were originally intended. Murder, rape, robbery, child molestation, assault with intent to do great bodily harm, grand larceny, fraud, embezzlement, etc. Evil, not stupidity.
Not all, but a lot of the real bad drugs are from plants/labs outside the US. Actual border control can reduce a lot of the cocaine, crack, and heroin. It won't stop meth, pills, or pot, much of which is homegrown, but it can reduce some of the supply.
I think addicts need treatment more than jail. I don't have the major solution, but status quo obviously isn't working. I can get most drugs without even leaving my township. I can get crack in probably 30 minutes without leaving the county. Same with meth. Pot in 5 minutes. I have no plans to do it, but I can, and I don't practice crim law.
I did not go for "more on this" at the pdf, but perhaps you can indulge one question.
These seem to be survival strategies of any competitive group. Is the Left pursuing a survival strategy or an annihilation strategy?
Rock, hard place, us.
I’m hoping for a revolution at the convention.
In this work, the Left/Right divide around group competition isn’t about two groups of ideologues competing with each other. Rather it is about one psychology in our species that is composed of group-centric individuals who seek to form altruistic groups and try to win competitions with other groups, and one psychology composed of selfish individualists, who seek to parasitize any group they can, while pursuing their own personal self interests at every turn.
The left is pursuing an individualistic strategy within a group competitive species. John Jost (himself a Liberal) has done a lot of work showing that Liberals are more open to out-group interests, and less loyal to in-group. This allows them to do anything in their interest, up to and including allying with an out-group, against their own in-group, so as to use betrayal as a survival strategy.
How many Freepers could ally with Al Qaida, against fellow Americans, just to advance their own position? Liberals are actually driven to do this, and to think it is noble. They wanted to free the Uighurs in Guantanamo onto the streets of DC. They still oppose CIA blacksites.
In the 60’s Hippies sought to aid the Vietcong and North Vietnamese, and viciously opposed our own soldiers. Imagine if that war was fought on our southern border, we were roughly evenly matched, and America were to lose. The VC and NVA would have taken us over, and put Hippies in position of power, overseeing the occupation. Full blown defective retards, drugged up and physically pathetic, would have elevated their status above that of every other American, by being more open to out-group interests, and less loyal to in-group. By using betrayal of their in-group as a survival strategy in group competition.
The pdf makes a step by step case that K-selection (diminished resources forcing competition among peers to acquire them) produces a competitive, monogamous, high-investment parenting psychology. This is well established in biology (where it is called r/K Selection Theory), and it is in most basic biology textbooks. K-selection is the foundation of the Conservative psychology, and K-selected species in nature are where one should look for a more primitive incarnation of our psychology in other species. Think wolves, lions, etc. (as contrasted with the prey species, such as rabbits, which are r-selected).
r-selection (the plentiful availability of resources) offers no advantage to the fit, as both fit and less fit get free food, absent a need to compete for it. There, the most sexually prolific win by out-reproducing peers (even if all of their offspring are defective idiots – there is no competition for food to cull the defective idiots and make them less fit than highly adapted individuals) So r-selection produces a psychology of copetition aversion, early age promiscuity, and low-investment (get them out the door to make way for the next brood) parenting. Find an r-selected species in nature (think rabbits, who can never eat all of the grass available, due to predation reducing their numbers), and you will find a species which avoids competition between peers, is sexually promiscuous, thinks nothing of very young offspring having sex, and in which offspring are raised by single moms.
In group competition for limited resources (ie K-selection), the K-type psychology has evolved to seek to win the competition. Thus, K-types amass into functional groups, and compete for limited resources. As the competitions proceed, the population is culled for individuals who self assort into functional groups, and win. This favors K-types who exhibit pro-sociality, loyalty, altruism, etc.
Under this model, r-types would get wiped out if they tried to compete - they are less fit, less competitive, and less capable (due to the r-type’s aversion to competitive selection). Those r-types who survived this environment were those who adapted to exploit their competition-aversion and selfishness, to deceptively parasitize K-type groups, while seeking their own personal advantage at every turn, often through pursuing a strategy of betrayal for personal advantage.
K-types will be fitter, and better at acquiring resources. But loyalty, altruism and other pro-social traits come with a cost – you may end up dead for your peers. r-types will be less fit, and less capable, but they can do whatever they need to in order to survive during periods of violence, including fleeing, or betraying their own group. And if they can make it to a period of free resource availability, their r-strategy of producing large quantities of offspring, will allow them to build their numbers up significantly.
The pdf basically makes the case that r and K strategies are genetic, one of the genes which produces them has been identified as correlating with political ideology in humans, and thus this whole political debate we have is a battle between two genes, and two reproductive strategies. K-types want to amass into groups, and acquire resources in competition, while r-types attempt to infiltrate the groups, stymie their success (to stall the advance of the K-type allele into the population), and pursue their own self interest.
Understand r/K Selection Theory, and how it relates to group competition, and you will understand politics, in a way few do.
It will even explain the societal decline of successful civilizations. Give the r-strategy free resource availability, to reduce mortality due to competitive selection, and it will reproduce very quickly, like an invasive species. But r-strategists are not highly motivated to succeed like K-strategists – their environment never required high levels of motivation (which the pdf supports with genetic and personality studies of Liberals and depression/low incentive salience).
So if you have a population which has undergone competitive selections for fitness (ie K-selection), it’s large majority of K-strategists will be highly fit and highly productive (and highly Conservative). But their excess production produces free resource availability, which fuels the gradual growth of r-types (and Liberalism). r-types are mostly evolved to just reproduce their own defective offspring, using selfishness, and cowardice to stay alive, and promiscuity, early age at first intercourse, and single parenting to maximize their reproductive rates.
Thus, a successful society, through it’s success, creates a rapidly growing sub-population of non-productive individuals who reproduce ever faster. As they grow, they demand more and more free resource availability, while promiscuously producing single-parented offspring who do more of the same.
Inevitably, they will reach a point where their numbers are so great relative to the K-types, that the K-types will no longer be able to support them. At that point, the system will collapse, and a ruthless competition for resources begins (K-selection). You see this in the Roman Empire, Greece today, The Dark Ages following the Medieval Warming Period (which provided free availability of crops) and everywhere a highly successful society of producers has gradually found the few remaining productive individuals unable to provide for an entitled class of low-IQ, low-producing, sexually promiscuous degenerates, demanding free stuff.
We should have hit that point a while back, but we borrowed from China, allowing us to extend the period of free resource availability and delay the collapse, by feeding the r-types using government debt. Eventually, that debt will run out, and as it would in every other species in nature, the period of r-selected free resource availability will end. Resources simply cannot be supplied in limitless quantities forever. Unfortunately, I suspect that the cessation of incoming debt, combined with the need to pay back the old debt with interest, will provide a pretty harsh selection pressure to our population in the form of extremely diminished resources available to the poor. It will be ugly, even if we don’t end up with some Global Cooling lowering crop availability, or creating other problems.
Well, from a Christian standpoint, pride is a sin, after all. Mayhaps the Jews are due some credit for it, also.
Thank you very much for the detailed answer.
Let us say the palliatives like borrowing from China and intimidating oil suppliers fail, no rational political solution is arrived at because of the r-selecteds running the political show, and we have a collapse of the American system of government.
Do you think the r-types will be forced to adapt to the changed environment and behave like R-types? in other words, is the distinction wholly genetic? We see people “converting” to conservatism all the time, do we not? In fact, it is even a well-known process: a student is naturally drawn to leftwing politics because he stands to gain from them; then as the student becomes a worker and a taxpayer, all of a sudden he becomes conservative. This seems to militate against the gene theory.
Also, the American left does not fit the r-Selected paradigm in at least one way: while they are advocates for promiscuity, they are not advocates for fecundity. It is conservatives who make babies in this country.
My prediction is that following the collapse something that can be described as neo-feudalism will emerge. People will be forced to work at what they are good at to survive. The k-selecteds will either learn to work or they won’t survive. I think, most will learn to work.
Liberalism has been linked to a specific allele of the D4 dopamine receptor gene. The gene is also tied to competitiveness, drive for reward, sexual drive, promiscuity, infidelity, and rearing styles, so it intimately involved in regulating all of the r/K traits together. A genetic correlate to political ideology is also correlated to all of the r/K traits. Check the paper for all the cites.
From a structural standpoint, it would appear Liberalism is likely a result of failed amygdala development, likely related to the altered dopamine function produced by the DRD4 variations. Liberals have smaller amygdalae, and pathologically diminished amygdala function is associated with docility, elevated sexual drive, poor parental investment, and an inability to perceive malice in those who mean them harm, or judge them unapproachable. One researcher even described monkeys with damaged amygdalae as “retarded in their ability to foresee and avoid dangerous confrontations.” In other words, this is a mechanism by which to imbue a strategy of conflict avoidance through friendly approach of threats.
That said, we have evolved an adaptive ability, as the paper discusses. But is has been laid over the underlying r/K mechanisms. If all of this is correct (and I firmly believe it is) it takes a level of amygdala development to adopt Conservatism. Since we are not born with fully functional amygdalae, we will begin our lives with undeveloped amygdalae, and tend Liberal, only to become more Conservative as we age, and our amygdalae develop.
So there will be a tendency for the young to be r-type Anticompetitive. This is good, as an r-type strategy is the best strategy for an inferior, less fit individual to employ to survive in a competitive environment. If I am a child who weighs 50 lbs, and a 280 lb mixed Martial Artist takes my lollipop, it would be bad for me to get angry and stab him in the eye with a pencil. I would probably get killed. So when I’m young and less able, my less developed amygdala will protect me from the dangers of competition by making me docile, and I will, as a result have a psychology predisposing me to Liberalism. He takes my lollipop, and I then try to make friends. As I mature, my amygdala will either develop with the rest of my brain, perhaps in part due to a specific allele of the DRD4 gene producing the tendency to develop, and I will become more competitive, and Conservative, or my amygdala will not develop, and I will go through life as an r-strategist, averse to confrontation/competition, prone to seek the friendship of threats, and prone to be Liberal.
Notice the amygdala is associated with threat perception. Face a robber (or bad economic times), and your amygdala will flag the threat, and apply aversive stimuli until you resolve a solution to it, such as getting a gun and getting trained up. This mulling over the threat until a solution is reached will exercise the amygdala, and develop a pathway to a solution. Unless, of course, you develop an alternative means by which to neurologically shut off the amygdala, like telling yourself the robber is not a threat, and you will never be robbed, so you don’t need to be able to protect yourself.
Thus a mild Liberal with the capacity for intellectual analysis, who is mugged, may become a Conservative, though there are some boot-licking cowards who will never come around.
If you check the paper you will see the Hippie example, which further supports r/K and Liberal/Conservative predispositions as having a genetic underpinning.
Finally, as I have said, ideology is like the natural world. Zoom in to the quantum level, and our world operates by the laws of Quantum Mechanics. Everything is hazy, undefined,, and impossible to fully characterize. This is much like examining an individual’s ideological predispositions. But zoom out, and the world is neat and orderly, operating according to the simple laws of Newtonian Physics. Likewise, zoom out to the level of our nation, and you find two ideologies, each based upon psychological drives which are exactly identical to the drives which motivate the r and K-selected psychologies in nature. Four traits, (Competitiveness/aversion to competitions, monogamy/promiscuity, abstinence in children/early sexual exposure, and high-investment two-parent parenting (family values), or low-investment single parenting (Murphy Brown)), and each correlates exactly to it’s ideological out-growth. To think that the underlying psychological forces which produce r and K-type psychologies would not affect the way an intelligent organism would structure a government, is actually far less likely than the idea that such defining motivators of behavior would produce actual philosophies devoted to expressing how the world should be.
“Also, the American left does not fit the r-Selected paradigm in at least one way: while they are advocates for promiscuity, they are not advocates for fecundity. It is conservatives who make babies in this country.”
If there were no birth control, r-type and Liberal behaviors would produce more babies. One aspect of the r-type psychology is low-investment parenting. This means r-type males have no urge to be associated with child-rearing, and r-type females want to get the last kids out the door, so as to make room for the new one on the way. That means less emotional attachment to children, and less desire to rear them. Combine a reduced desire to rear children, with a new-fangled technology that allows one to avoid having a kid by following a simple regimen, like taking a pill, and you have a sub population driven to promiscuous sex, but prone to avoid actually having children. K-types love children, as that facilitates monogamous couples rearing them for long periods. This makes children something most K-types actively want, once they are in committed relationships.
I believe the r-type cohort as a whole is still adapting to this new birth-control selection pressure, though. As time goes on, those who have promiscuous sex, but responsibly avoid pregnancy will cull themselves. What will become the defacto form of the r-type population will be a less responsible female who has promiscuous sex, but doesn’t consider the consequences. Think welfare moms, with twelve kids, and no dad in sight. It’s a Brave New World. Of course, that is going to be dealt with by Darwin with a vengeance, when the time comes.
“My prediction is that following the collapse something that can be described as neo-feudalism will emerge. People will be forced to work at what they are good at to survive. The k-selecteds will either learn to work or they won’t survive. I think, most will learn to work.”
Correct. Our government will collapse, as the r-types who fail to produce will continue to multiply until it does. Producers will no longer have to provide for the sloths, and people will either be removed from the gene pool through prison, leave for more socialist environs, or find themselves afflicted with medical problems they will not be able to get treated properly. It will be ugly, but it will remove a lot of the dead weight on our economy and our nation. The K-types who best succeed will also be well functioning in groups, as they will need the protection. A lone K-type, good at what he does but tightly allied with no one, will eventually confront violence, with savages trying to take what he has earned by force. Those who are part of a community which can help ward off the savages will have enough of an advantage over the lone wolves, that eventually group functionality will be important again to our natures. Pro-sociality will return. It’s so funny that all the traits which are good within us, require such a nasty anvil be applied to our population, but I guess that’s how nature has always worked.
Thank you for the questions. I am in the process of beginning the promotional campaign for this among Conservatives, and every honest challenge I am presented with prepares me to face the questions which are coming with speed and accuracy.
BTW, the pdf is not a trick, or a marketing gimmick designed to catch your attention but tell you nothing, in order to rope you into some further purchase. It is genuinely the most concise, substantiated form of this research I could produce. It is designed to give everyone who reads it a full understanding of the research, and what it indicates. I do have a book for sale, but it is just a more technical version, designed to confront any challenges over group selection and address the finer points of r/K Theory. I expect a lot of push-back from the Libs in Polysci and Evo-psych, and that book is designed to cut that off. The pdf is all anyone of moderate scientific inclination needs to grasp the work fully, and to be able to use it as an argumentative tool against Liberals.
Yes, thank you. I will read the pdf. I was not finding time earlier, but I will make time.
Newt was right on that.
For crying out loud, a single quote from a candidate, being interviewed by a lib magazine for a lib audience in 1975, and you got a quote that you find deep and meaningful, and that forever freezes the candidate into that interview quote according to you. Do you realize how ridiculous dredging up that lonely, isolated second of pandering is?
If you have a valid point, then you should be able to find all kinds of Reagan writings and speeches, and political statements, etc., over a 90 year life span to illustrate your point of Reagan being one of the nuts, even in that very interview, within seconds, he proceeds to defend social conservatism and rebuke the lib nuts.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.