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
Security vs. Welfare
Conservatives are attuned to external threats. Relative to the rest of us, conservatives tend to have larger and more active right amygdalas, the part of the human brain responsible for noticing and producing responses to perceived threats. Even drawing people’s attention toward or away from threats can make them more or less conservative respectively. It should be no surprise then that maintaining a strong military is an especially high priority for the most conservative Americans.
Progressives instead are driven primarily by two other moral foundations: care (cherishing and protecting others) and fairness (rendering justice according to shared rules). Where conservatives tend to focus on mitigating threats to society, progressives tend to focus on advancing societal well-being. To illustrate just how wide reaching this tendency is, here is an excerpt from the platform of Japan’s leading progressive party: “In a fair and open market, we…
