Michael Shermer, the publisher of
Skeptic magazine, wrote a brief note recently that is wondrously confused, or deviously confusing.
He was writing in response to an article in
Edge by Jonathan Haidt, entitled
What Makes People Vote Republican . Haidt, a psychology professor at University of Virginia, asked why it is that rural and working-class Americans routinely vote against their class interest by voting for blatantly pro-corporate Republican candidates. The customary 'liberal' answer is that they are drawn to the authoritarian appeal of conservatism:
"... conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world."
Haidt believes that this 'diagnosis' is off the mark. He agrees that Republican voters are guided by moral reasoning, but argues that their morality and, historically, most moral systems are based on more dimensions than are recognized by liberals. Many of us think of morality as
"prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other." Haidt argues that there are historical and empirical reasons to believe that there are additional moral dimensions. Specifically, the enlightenment / liberal view of morality encompasses two dimensions : harm-care, and fairness-reciprocity. Conservative and traditional (pre-enlightenment) morality add three more: ingroup-loyalty, authority-respect, and purity-sanctity. Haidt explores the evidence for this view, and its ramifications at some length.
Readers of Edge know that the general format is: medium-length article by an academic plus several brief commentaries by other academics. It's a Delphic model, not a forum. This usually leads to high quality and high content discussion. But, as we shall see, Michael Shermer is better at throwing sand in our eyes than he is at offering insight. His notes can be found as the third note in The Reality Club response page.
After a brief and transparently insincere acknowledgment of Haidt's position, Shermer tells us what he is exercised about : "The liberal bias in academia is so entrenched that it becomes the political water
through which the liberal fish swim—they don't even notice it." Already he has moved the discussion away from the question at hand to an entirely different question. This is intellectually dishonest, but it is the only recourse Shermer has. When he tries to address the issue at hand he fails miserably. He refers to the famous paper by Jost et al, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, and says "it is not the data of these scientists that I am challenging so much as it is the
characterizations on which the data were collected", then after a brief rant, says "once you
set up the adjectives in the form of operationally defined personality traits and cognitive styles, it's easy to collect the data to support them." Really? What evidence does he have for that claim? This certainly isn't an obvious claim, yet he offers no evidence of any kind. Maybe he simply does not grasp the distinction between 'collecting data' and 'making stuff up'.
He moves directly from there to a set of irrelevant factoids. To 'rebut' the idea that 'conservatives win most elections because of their Machiavellian manipulation of voters' emotional brains' (an unattributed claim that, presumably, Shermer simply posits as a strawman), he cites a number of facts about the relative win-loss ratio of Democrats and Republicans from the mid-19th century to the present. What does he imagine that could possibly tell us about liberal versus conservative appeal? We have two possibilities here: either he believes that the readers of Edge are ignorant of US political history, or he is himself ignorant of US political history. Think about what you have to believe to think that 150 years of Democratic / Republican political races can tell us anything about conservative versus liberal appeal. You would have to believe that Republican = conservative, and Democrat = liberal; and that this has been true for the past 150 years. Moreover you would have to believe that candidates win or lose elections based primarily on their position on some liberal-conservative axis. Of course, the Democratic party was the party of slavery until the end of the Civil War, and remained the party of white southern racists in the south until 1972, at which point many southern Democrats left to become Republicans. And the Republican party really didn't exist as such in 1828 (where Shermer's presidential race factoid begins). From Lincoln until the early 20th century, Republicans represented what might be termed the 'liberal' wing of big business. I ask again: how could Shermer's dive into Wikipedia factoids possibly shed any light on the question of why people vote for conservatives?
It might be tempting to say that Haidt also falls for the Republican/conservative, Democat/liberal fallacy. But he is not making any claims about the history of the Republican party. He is clearly talking only about recent history. And it is simply the case that the Republican party has been a far-right party for the past 28 years, so it is legitimate to equate voting Republican with voting conservative (except where it's not, as in Vermont).
Shermer goes on to cite some survey data regarding the self-reported 'happiness' and 'mental health' of liberals and conservatives. The data says, unsurprisingly, that conservatives report themselves to be happier, and claim 'excellent' mental health at a significantly higher rate than do liberals. I regard this as unsurprising, because it fits with my observation that conservatives are self-satisfied, incurious, and impervious to any challenges to their own beliefs. So why wouldn't they report themselves as happy? He goes on to say that conservatives donate 30% more money than liberals. He doesn't provide a source for this statistic, or any context. He gives the game away, though, when he says "conservatives believe charity should be private (through religion) whereas liberals
believe charity should be public (through government)." Ignoring for a moment the fact that giving money to a church is not the same as giving money to a charity, we see that Shermer has accepted Haidt's view: the church is in fact the vehicle for the ingroup-loyalty, authority-respect, and purity-sanctity dimensions that Haidt posited.
Shermer then asks "why are academic social scientists so wrong about conservatives?", as if he has in fact demonstrated that they are wrong about conservatives. His answer is: because they're liberal! Wow. For someone who claims to be a skeptic, Shermer is not a very critical thinker.
Shermer's final paragraph is laughable:
Why do people vote Republican? Because they believe their lives—and the lives of all Americans—will be better for it. And as often as not they are right.
Right. We are now in the midst of the biggest financial collapse since the great depression. A collapse that is entirely due to the financial deregulation that conservatives have been pushing for the past 28 years. We have lost 4500 soldiers in Iraq, fighting a war of aggression that was begun by conservatives; a war that has cost $500 billion so far. We have lived through 40 years of conservative attacks on unions; attacks that have been so successful that few of us have unions as an option; and our wages reflect that, being essentially stagnant since the opening days of the Reagan administration. We are seeing the greatest disparity of wealth since the end of the 19th century. Shermer's claim that people are 'often right' to believe that their lives are better under Republicans is factually and provably incorrect. But then, so are most claims made by conservatives. It doesn't matter - they keep saying the same things over and over again, impervious to evidence, blind to relevant facts.
