A Brief, Research-Based Guide to our Political Differences
Four years after President Trump’s upset win in 2016, the Democratic Party received another rude November awakening in 2020: half the country still does not agree with us. Democrats lost seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the party’s nominee, Joe Biden, won the presidency by only half the margin projected in the best national polls. Spending the past 4 years making their best case against the presidential incumbent and his policies, these results came as a shock to progressives. Even with years of New York Times safaris into small-town diners and deep dive interviews with Q aficionados, left-leaning Americans like me still have much to learn about what drives the other half of our country.
One starting point is a rich and growing body of scientific literature on the psychological foundations underpinning our political persuasions. Decades of cultural and social psychological research have yielded consistent differences between progressives and conservatives, holding across individuals, communities, and around the globe. These differences are not unpredictable or random. For the sake of simplicity, we can boil them down to three dichotomies:
- Security vs. Welfare
- Clarity vs. Complexity
- Familiarity vs. Novelty
