Conservatives and liberals have been name-calling at each other across a widening gulf for some decades now. The question is whether the gulf can still be bridged, or if both sides would be better off laying down minefields and machine-guns to fortify it instead. Considering how intractable divides within a society have been resolved in history, it would be better to look for alternatives to the otherwise inevitable resort to massacre and mass murder.
The gulf never used to be this wide, despite all the partisanship of earlier decades. However, perhaps it was an early liberal bias in the social sciences that really heightened things in the aftermath of the Second World War. A number of experiments made reference to the supposedly conservative predilection for deference to authority and ignoring Hitler and the Nazis’ progressive socialist inclinations, they assigned the evils of Nazism to conservative values and ran some famous experiments to argue their point. Things got worse with the advent of post-modernism in the 1960s.
The worst of the name-calling that riled tensions still came out of the social sciences and perhaps the lowest blow ever struck came from the American Psychological Bulletin in 2003. In that year, the Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin released a paper entitled “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition” (Glaser, Jost, Kruglanski, Sulloway Psychological Bulletin 2003, Volume 129, No. 3 339-375). The paper was the result of the four researchers’ examination of 50 years of purported conservative journals from which they drew their learned conclusions
They observed: “The study identified some factors of conservatism as ‘dogmatism’, ‘intolerance of ambiguity’ [indeed, conservatives still mistrust the term ‘social justice’ – whatever that is]; and ‘uncertainty avoidance’. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the researchers also pointed out that conservatives “appear to shun and even punish outsiders and those who threaten the status of cherished world views.”
Some people get paid far too much for their two cents worth (see the book by Stanislav Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery).
The press release that accompanied the paper was even more telling, revealing a host of the interpretations that people would make of the paper. It contained some gems such as:
- “At the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality.” [No, the resistance is to unnecessary or forced change, not change itself… a very critical distinction. Nor are conservatives any fonder of inequality than liberals are];
- A “key dimension of conservatism’s endorsement of inequality is a view reflected in the Indian caste system, South African apartheid and the conservative, segregationist politics of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.).” [So being conservative automatically makes one a racist and xenophobe… this would be news to many conservatives who are far more colour-blind than many a liberal.]
- “Hitler, Mussolini and former President Ronald Reagan were individuals, but all were right-wing conservatives because they preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality in some form … talk show host Rush Limbaugh can be described the same way.” [Funny, Hitler and Mussolini both thought of themselves as socialists and hoped to create a classless society – while Reagan and Limbaugh would be strange bed-fellows (in the political metaphor) with each other let alone with Herr Hitler and his Italian chum.]
In any event, one major direction of the American Psychology Association’s utterances for the last few decades has been about the dysfunctionality of conservative thought and belief; trying to brand it as a mental condition. Fair enough, if one was to engage in a purge of book-stores for wastes of paper and ink, the political science and social science shelves would yield tons of material that make no real contribution to our understanding of ourselves… and there are more than enough “liberals are stupid poo-poo heads” texts out there on neighbouring shelves to add to the piles.
Should a retraction and an apology ever be forthcoming from the APA in the near future, conservatives should be glad to graciously accept it. Then, at a feast of reconciliation with a celebratory bonfire of papers and journals that view conservatism as a mental illness, conservatives might themselves toss in their copies of Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan. It would be wonderful to return to bickering merely for fun and mutually constructive criticism. However, should such a happy day arise, conservatives should keep their books from P.J. O’Rourke and William F. Buckley; some humour and wisdom is timeless… as Will Rogers or Jonathan Swift can testify.
