AS I SEE IT -- AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT AND LOYALTIES
COMPILATION AND COMMENTARY
BY LUCY WARNER
SEPTEMBER 9, 2017


LOOK AT THIS SHORT, BUT EXCELLENT ARTICLE FROM COMMON DREAMS. YES, IT’S A LIBERAL ORGANIZATION AND ORIENTED TOWARD MY KIND OF PATRIOTISM. AS FOR THE ISSUE OF WHETHER OR NOT FOX VIEWPOINTS ARE INNATELY MORE INTELLIGENT AND WELL-ARGUED IN THEIR PRESENTATIONS THAN A CNN, NPR, OR NBC IS, I DON’T THINK SO. I THINK DEMS ARE JUST MORE OPEN-MINDED AND EGALITARIAN THAN REPS ARE! IN FACT, THERE ARE AT LEAST TWO GOOD PSYCHOLOGICAL ARTICLES THAT I’VE SEEN ON BASIC DIFFERENCES IN THINKING PATTERNS BETWEEN THE TWO. ONE OF THEM FOCUSED ON THE FACT THAT REPUBLICANS TEND TO BE MORE NEGATIVE IN GENERAL IN THEIR OUTLOOK THAN DO DEMOCRATS. THAT REALLY EXPLAINS THE HOSTILITY TOWARD CERTAIN ETHNIC/RACIAL/RELIGIOUS GROUPS. I HASTEN TO SAY THAT I KNOW SOME VERY NICE REPUBLICANS. THE QUESTION IS WHETHER OR NOT THEY WANT TO WORK WITH BLACK OR HISPANIC PEOPLE, OR ARE MERELY TOLERATING THEM.

I’LL TRY TO FIND URLS FOR SOME AND ATTACH THEM TO THIS POST. OF THOSE WHOM I HAVE KNOWN WELL, DEMS ARE RELATIVELY OPEN, CURIOUS, AND GENEROUS AND REPS ARE MORE CLOSED, SEE THE WORLD IN TUNNEL VISION, AND MORE INTO “MINE” THAN “OURS.” DEMS WILL COMMIT CRIMES OF PASSION, BUT REPS WILL COMMIT CRIMES OF CALCULATING INTENTION. TAKE YOUR PICK. I KNOW WHICH VIEW I PREFER. SO, IT SHOULDN'T BE A SURPRISE THAT A FOX CHANNEL WOULD ATTRACT THE CURIOUS ATTENTION OF MORE DEMOCRATS, THAN ANY SOURCE -- OTHER THAN FOX, BREITBART, ETC. -- WOULD THE SAME NUMBER OF REPUBLICANS. “IF IT AIN’T WRITTEN IN THE BIBLE, IT AIN’T TRUE,” IS VERY OFTEN THEIR VIEW.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/09/08/your-worst-fears-about-fox-news-are-confirmed-new-study
Published on
Friday, September 08, 2017
by Common Dreams
Your Worst Fears About Fox News Are Confirmed By New Study
Everyone knows the news outlet serves as a virtual propaganda tool, but new research shows just how effective they are at it
by Julia Conley, staff writer

Photograph -- A new report found that watching Fox News for only three minute per week made an average Democratic voter more likely to vote Republican in the 2008 election. (Photo: @merovingian88/Twitter)

Fox News Channel has been recognized since its inception in 1996, when it was established by Republican operative Roger Ailes, as a right-leaning news source. But a new study published in the American Economic Review shows just how influential the channel is when it comes to changing viewers' minds, causing them to shift to the right on political issues—and even influencing election outcomes in ways that the outlet's more liberal counterparts don't.

Researchers at Emory and Stanford universities found that watching only three minutes of Fox News coverage per week would make Democratic and centrist voters one percent more likely to vote Republican in the 2008 election.

According to the study, this means that if Fox News hadn't existed in 2004, George W. Bush would have captured nearly four fewer percentage points, making John Kerry the popular vote winner. In 2008, Barack Obama would have won in a landslide if it weren't for Fox, capturing 60 percent of the vote, with John McCain winning 6.34 percent fewer votes.

Notably, the research shows that Fox appears driven by its ability to shift its viewership to the right even more than it's guided by its bottom line. According to Vox, the study finds "that Fox isn't setting its ideology where it ought to, to maximize its viewership. It's much more conservative than is optimal from that perspective. But it's pretty close to the slant that would maximize its persuasive power—that would result in the largest rightward movement among viewers. CNN, by contrast, matched its political stances pretty closely to the viewer-maximizing point, showing less interest in operating as a political agent."

CNN and MSNBC are also not as effective at shaping viewers' opinions. "Fox is substantially better at influencing Democrats than MSNBC is at influencing Republicans," said the authors of the study. While Fox was able to convince 58 percent of Democratic viewers to vote for Bush in 2000, and persuaded sizable minorities of Democrats to vote Republican in the following two elections, MSNBC did not have the same effect on conservative viewers in the same elections.

Fox News Channel "is consistently more effective at converting viewers than is MSNBC which has corresponding estimated persuasion rates of just 16 percent, 0 percent, and 8 percent," said the study.

The study confirms earlier research done after Fox was introduced in 1996, including a 2007 report from Berkeley which found "a significant effect of the introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000...Fox News convinced 3 to 28 percent of its viewers to vote Republican."

The newest research confirms what many critics already suspected about Fox News: that it's pushed conservative ideals and Republican agendas since its beginning, serving as a tool used by the GOP establishment to shift viewers to the right—and even swing elections.

The study did not analyze Fox's impact on the 2016 election, but according to a Pew Research poll taken in January, Fox News was the most-watched news source among Trump voters during the campaign, with 40 percent of his supporters relying on the channel for their news.


I SAID I WOULD SEARCH FOR ARTICLES ON PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF LEFT/RIGHT ORIENTATIONS. I FOUND SEVERAL, AND I DIDN’T SEARCH VERY LONG, SO THERE ARE PROBABLY MANY MORE. THE FOLLOWING IS THE MOST PSYCHOLOGICAL IN ITS’ ANALYSIS, WHICH WAS WHAT I WANTED TO FIND.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3520939/
PLoS One. 2012; 7(12): e50092.
Published online 2012 Dec 12. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0050092
PMCID: PMC3520939
The Moral Stereotypes of Liberals and Conservatives: Exaggeration of Differences across the Political Spectrum
Jesse Graham,1,* Brian A. Nosek,2 and Jonathan Haidt3
Liane Young, Editor

Abstract

We investigated the moral stereotypes political liberals and conservatives have of themselves and each other. In reality, liberals endorse the individual-focused moral concerns of compassion and fairness more than conservatives do, and conservatives endorse the group-focused moral concerns of ingroup loyalty, respect for authorities and traditions, and physical/spiritual purity more than liberals do. 2,212 U.S. participants filled out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire with their own answers, or as a typical liberal or conservative would answer. Across the political spectrum, moral stereotypes about “typical” liberals and conservatives correctly reflected the direction of actual differences in foundation endorsement but exaggerated the magnitude of these differences. Contrary to common theories of stereotyping, the moral stereotypes were not simple underestimations of the political outgroup's morality. Both liberals and conservatives exaggerated the ideological extremity of moral concerns for the ingroup as well as the outgroup. Liberals were least accurate about both groups.

Go to:
Introduction
“The national Democratic Party is immoral to the core. Any American who would vote for Democrats is guilty of fostering the worst kind of degeneracy. The leaders of this party are severely out of touch with mainstream, traditional American values. They are crusaders for perversion, for licentiousness, for nihilism and worse.”

—Joseph Farah [1], World Net Daily

“Republicans don't believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don't give a hoot about human beings, either can't or won't.”

—Michael Feingold [2], Village Voice

For as long as there have been political rivalries there have been unflattering stereotypes painted by each side about the other. These stereotypes go far beyond clichés about latte liberals and gun-rack conservatives; as the quotations above show, they often include the claim that the other side is immoral or downright evil.

Of course, evil is in the eye of the beholder, and liberal and conservative eyes seem to be tuned to different wavelengths of immorality. For conservatives, liberals have an “anything goes” morality that says everything should be permitted for the sake of inclusion and diversity, no matter how bizarre or depraved (e.g., [3]). For liberals, conservatives lack basic moral compassion, especially for oppressed groups, and take a perverse joy in seeing the rich get richer while innocents suffer in poverty (e.g., [4]). These views may be caricatures, but they suggest that accusations of immorality may differ in content depending on the ideologies of the source and the target. In this paper we use Moral Foundations Theory [5] to investigate liberals' and conservatives' moral stereotypes of themselves and each other—that is, their expectations about how strongly typical partisans would endorse values related to each of five intuitive moral foundations. Our study was designed to answer three questions: 1. How accurate are these moral stereotypes? 2. Are they exaggerations of real differences in moral values? 3. Where on the political spectrum do we find the greatest accuracy? Rather than examining general beliefs about the immorality of the other side, we sought a finer resolution of the moral domain to provide the first identification of patterns of inaccuracy for moral concerns.

Exaggeration and Accuracy in Stereotypes

Although the literature on stereotypes has tended to concentrate on biases and inaccuracies, several reviews have noted the accuracy of many social stereotypes in terms of real group differences [6], [7], [8]. The notion that stereotypes could be exaggerations of actual group differences was popularized by Allport [9] in The Nature of Prejudice: “a stereotype is an exaggerated belief associated with a category” (p.191). Stereotypes have long been thought of as motivated exaggerations both of stereotypical characteristics (Irish people are drunk every day) and in overgeneralization (Every Irish person is drunk every day).

A review by McCauley [10], however, found only weak support for stereotypes-as-exaggeration as a general cognitive process. For instance, McCauley & Stitt [11] found general accuracy with some underestimation of group differences when White students were asked to estimate characteristics of Black students. But in the cases of racial, gender and occupational groups McCauley [10] reviews, there may be motives to appear unprejudiced against outgroups, and these motives might counteract exaggeration tendencies. In cases where one does not wish to hide signs of intergroup hostility, motivational factors may have the opposite effect, increasing exaggeration and stereotyping.

This brings us to politics, where people are quite willing to report their preferences for ingroups over outgroups (e.g., [12]), and sometimes even relish the opportunity. Social identity theory [13] has been applied to political partisans, positing a motivation to maximize distinctions between the political ingroup and outgroup based on identifications with one's own political party [14]. Examining the accuracy of stereotypes about the issue positions of Democrats and Republicans, Judd and Park [15] found more exaggeration in the outgroup (vs. ingroup) stereotypes of either side; outgroup stereotype exaggeration was strongest for those most identified with their ingroup, suggesting that partisans of either side exaggerate more than moderates and centrists. Although this work made use of moral issues, we have found no studies looking specifically at the content of moral stereotypes, and how such stereotypes might be driven by processes beyond simple partisan outgroup derogation.

Moral Stereotyping along Five Foundations

Moral Foundations Theory was created to identify the moral content areas most widely discussed in the anthropological and evolutionary literatures. The theory posits five best candidates for being the psychological “foundations” upon which moral virtues and institutions can be socially constructed. The first two foundations are Harm/care (involving intuitions of sympathy, compassion, and nurturance) and Fairness/reciprocity (including notions of rights and justice). These two foundations are generally concerned with the protection and fair treatment of individuals; they are therefore called the two “individualizing” foundations. The other three foundations, in contrast, are called the “binding” foundations because they underlie moral systems in which people are bound into larger groups and institutions. (These labels are not meant to imply that welfare and fairness concerns can never be group-focused, or that the others can never be individual-focused; see [16]). These foundations are Ingroup/loyalty (supporting moral obligations of patriotism and “us vs. them” thinking); Authority/respect (including concerns about traditions and maintaining social order) and Purity/sanctity (including moral disgust and spiritual concerns about treating the body as a temple).

Graham, Haidt, and Nosek [17] found that liberals endorsed the individualizing foundations (Harm, Fairness) more than conservatives did, whereas conservatives endorsed the binding foundations (Ingroup, Authority, Purity) more than liberals did. This pattern has been observed across a variety of samples and methods, including self-report measures of (un)willingness to violate the foundations for money, text analyses of sermons in liberal and conservative churches, content coding of life narratives, and facial muscle movements [18], [19], [20], [21].

If this pattern is found so consistently, are people aware of these differences? Research on partisan stereotypes [15], as well as research on naïve realism and the culture war [22], suggests that the two sides will overestimate their differences on specific issues. Might they likewise exaggerate differences in fundamental moral concerns, stereotyping their opponents as immoral/amoral monsters? Would these moral stereotypes be characterized by general derogation of outgroup morality, or would there be more complexity or asymmetry to the stereotypes?

To examine the moral stereotypes that liberals and conservatives hold about each other, we took advantage of a method introduced by Dawes, Singer, and Lemons [23] of having partisans indicate the values of “typical” partisan group members, allowing comparison of these projections with the partisans' actual answers. Participants completed multiple versions of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ; [16]). One version asked participants for their own responses; we refer to these as the “actual” scores. The other two versions asked participants to complete the MFQ as a “typical liberal” would, or as a “typical conservative” would; we refer to these as the “moral stereotype” scores. These versions allow us to assess moral stereotypes about liberals and conservatives, and to quantify their accuracy by comparing them to the responses people gave for themselves.

Regarding our first research question (Are moral stereotypes accurate?), because of the pervasiveness of the actual liberal-conservative differences, we predicted that participants would, on average, correctly guess that liberals value the individualizing foundations more than conservatives do, and that conservatives value the binding foundations more than liberals do. Regarding our second question (Are these stereotypes exaggerations of real group differences?), although McCauley [10] found only weak evidence for a general cognitive process of stereotypes-as-exaggeration, we expected that the hostility between liberals and conservatives could create motivations to exaggerate the existing group differences. It is even possible that liberals and conservatives would exaggerate the moral concerns of their own group, not just the outgroup, perhaps as motivation to further distinguish their group from the other [14]. Regarding our third question (Who is most accurate?) we find reasons in the literature to generate three hypotheses, among which we hoped to adjudicate:

Moderates most accurate. Studies on ideological polarization (e.g., [24], [25]), the ideological extremity hypothesis [e.g.], [ 26], [27,28], and naïve realism [22] suggest a symmetrical exaggeration of differences when liberals and conservatives try to look at the world through the eyes of the other. Partisans should distort equally (presumably by underestimating their opponents' moral concerns) because both sides think the other side does not truly care about morality. On this view, political moderates should be the most accurate, morally stereotyping liberals and conservatives the least.

Liberals most accurate. Social psychological work on conservatism [see 29, 30 for meta-analytic reviews] shows relations between conservatism or authoritarianism and mental rigidity, intolerance, and close-mindedness. Similarly, Carter et al. [31] found that acceptance of stereotyping was highest in individuals with conservative traits. These findings suggest that conservatives might be more threatened and less able to see the world from an alternate moral standpoint, and therefore more motivated to stereotype liberals than vice-versa.

Conservatives most accurate. Moral Foundations Theory suggests that liberals may have a harder time understanding conservatives' morality than vice-versa. If liberals don't intuitively feel what could be considered moral about Ingroup (racism?), Authority (oppression?), and Purity (sexual Puritanism?), then they may be forced to conclude that conservatives simply don't care about morality—specifically, that conservatives don't care about Harm and Fairness, because they support policies that seem to hurt and cheat people for no morally good reason.

Following the existing stereotype literature, we consider the first hypothesis to be the default prediction: if the results only show outgroup derogation by partisans about each other, then moral stereotypes are no different than other forms of stereotyping. However, if the results show asymmetrical inaccuracies (hypotheses 2 and 3), inaccuracies about the ingroup as well as the outgroup, or overestimations as well as underestimations of moral values, then this would suggest that moral stereotypes involve novel psychological processes beyond the well-understood intergroup stereotyping processes driving exaggeration of outgroup characteristics.



THE FACT/MYTH ARTICLE HERE IS USEFUL, BECAUSE IN THE 50 OR SO YEARS THAT I HAVE BEEN WATCHING, LABELS ARE SO OFTEN USED IN A MANIPULATIVE OR PEJORATIVE WAY, OR SIMPLY INACCURATELY, THAT THE TERMS ARE BLURRY AROUND THE EDGES DUE TO THEIR PASSAGE THROUGH HISTORY AND THE PARTICULAR VIEW OF WHOEVER IS TALKING ABOUT IT AT THE MOMENT. IT IS ALSO A GENUINELY COMPLEX MATTER TO MAKE A SINGLE AND COHERENT DEFINITION OF WHAT AN INDIVIDUAL ACTUALLY DOES BELIEVE INTELLECTUALLY AND EMOTIONALLY, MUCH LESS WHY. SO OFTEN WE DON’T LET OTHERS KNOW WHAT WE BELIEVE, FOR GOOD OR BAD REASONS. THEN THERE ARE THOSE WHO ARE DEEPLY UNABLE TO MAKE A DECISION, AND THOSE SOUTHERN LADIES WHO BELIEVE THAT THEY WILL VOTE THE SAME WAY THEIR HUSBAND VOTES AFTER DISCUSSING IT WITH HIM TO COME TO A MUTUAL DECISION. THEY WILL TALK, AND HE WILL TELL HER HOW TO VOTE. THAT’S A KIND OF MARRIAGE THAT I REALLY COULDN’T TOLERATE, BUT IT’S THE MOST HIGHLY RELIGIOUS AND TRADITIONAL WAY.

OH, YES, AND THEN THERE ARE THE CONGREGATIONS WHERE THE PREACHER, RABBI, IMAM TELLS EVERYONE HOW TO VOTE. PERSONAL HONESTY AND INDEPENDENCE ARE SIMPLY NOT AS HIGHLY PRIZED IN SOME INDIVIDUALS AS IN OTHERS, AND WITH SO MANY, THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN LIFE IS TO “FIT IN.” THE NEXT THREE ARTICLES ALL ADD INFORMATION TO THE CONVERSATION OF WHAT CHARACTERISTICS MAKE US MORE PRONE TO GO TO THE LEFT OR THE RIGHT.

http://factmyth.com/conservatives-moderates-liberals-and-progressives/
Conservatives, Moderates, Liberals, and Progressives
Posted by Thomas DeMichele on August 3, 2016

How to Understand the Terms Conservative, Moderate, Liberal, Progressive, and Radical
We explain the political terms conservative, moderate, liberal, progressive, and radical and how they are used in different contexts.

Specifically we’ll look at how these terms work as political qualifiers to denote specific ideologies such as: progressive left-wing social liberal populist, or moderate right-wing pro-business conservative.

TIP: In general it works like this, each term considers how fast change should occur (either change forward toward “progress” or change “conserving” back to a less liberal or progressive time). NO CHANGE OR SLOW CHANGE: Conservative, Moderate, Liberal, Progressive, Radical: REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE NOW.

TIP: Don’t confuse the terms liberal and conservative with the basic political ideologies “liberal and conservative”, they have common meaning, but our terms here are qualifiers that work in conjunction with those terms. Consider “a liberal pro-business conservative” would tend to be more moderate on government spending on social issues than “a radically liberal progressive”.

TIP: Radical and Progressive are often used as synonyms with radical being used as a sort of light insult. A great example of this is the conservative, moderate, and radical Republicans of Reconstruction (where radical meant progressive, they were progressive liberal Republicans).

An Introduction to the terms Conservative, Moderate, Liberal, Progressive, and Radical
Each political party, political faction, or coalition on the left or right in U.S. and world history, who forms around any issue or ideology, can be subdivided into conservative, moderate, liberal, and progressive or radical factions. Each party can also be given an overarching conservative, moderate, liberal, and progressive label, and each stance on each issue of each faction or faction member can be described with these qualifiers as well.

Each term’s meaning changes depending on context, issue, and time-period, but they all have broad common definitions that we can illustrate with examples. By better understanding these terms and other political left-right qualifiers, we can better understand the world’s many political factions.

Political Ideology: Crash Course Government and Politics #35. No one video fully sums up our discussion, but as always CrashCourse comes close.

FACT: Not only can we subdivide the parties into conservative, moderate, liberal, and progressive factions to better understand them in retrospect, they were often divided this way in their time (for example the moderate, conservative, and radical Republicans of Reconstruction), with either the parties themselves or their opposition using the aforementioned terminology. In cases where no label was used at the time, historians have often agreed on a label.

TIP: Not only the U.S. parties, but the British, French, and pretty much every political party in history can be subdivided this way. Movements and political parties almost always have mixed views as a whole, so understanding the factions in a party, and comparing that to the party as a whole and the opposition per issue, is often the only way to get a clear reading of history.

What Do Conservative, Moderate, Liberal, and Progressives Mean?
From a historical perspective we can define the terms conservative, moderate, liberal, and progressive as:

Liberal: Can mean classical liberal (individual rights ideology rooted in the late 1600 – 1700’s) or social liberal (an evolution of classical liberalism that includes aspects of socialism, arising in response to the age of Robber Barons as social justice and progressive values take on new importance with voters). This term is sometimes used as meaning “not a conservative.” In current usage, the U.S. classical liberals are called libertarians, and social liberals are called “liberals.” See an essay on “what is liberalism?“

Progressive (or Radical): Always means wanting to push forward. For example, one can be radically social-liberal (a progressive populist in a true sense), radically classical-liberal (like a staunch libertarian), radically nativist (radically “right wing,” favoring a native population over non-natives), or radically anything. One can even be radically puritanical, with prohibition and temperance being progressive populist movements of sorts, or radically imperialistic. Progressivism typically implies altruism, but not all good intentions have positive outcomes. Likewise, radical typically implies “going too far,” but not all radical movements have negative outcomes. See an essay on “the types of progressivism“.

Conservative: Either opposes liberalism or progressivism, its meaning changes with the times. As liberalism, socialism, and progressivism changed, what conservatism meant changed in response. The Conservative Federalists of the late 1700’s wanted order; a conservative nativist populist Democrat of the 60’s, like George Wallace, wanted to return to the old southern classical liberal way and a time when segregation was king. Later, after changes in the parties, modern Republicans often run on a radically conservative platform. They may, for example, favor state enforced religious laws. Meanwhile, progressive movements like Prohibition have conservative aspects to them. See an essay on “comparing liberalism and conservatism“.

Moderate: Taking a balanced view on any issue, not being fully “liberal,” “progressive,” or “conservative” as compared to the opposition. People often hold mixed moderate views on most issues. Moderate views aren’t always appreciated, for instance, leading up to the Civil War in the 1860’s and up to Civil Rights in the 1960’s moderates ignored mounting issues related to race resulting in drastic measures and political realignments.

TIP: These terms are always comparative. For example, if one faction is far-left and the other slightly less so, the slightly less left-leaning faction is conservative.

TIP: These terms are NOT a measure of authoritativeness, any of the above can be authoritative or not depending on context.

TIP: See also “left vs. right” (which describes authoritativeness and individualism vs. collectivism) and the related basic party types (social liberal, classic liberal, conservative, socialist).

Examples of Factions of Parties and Party Members that Illustrate the Above Terms
Here are a few examples of factions of parties, or prominent party members in those parties, that illustrate conservatives, moderates, liberals, and progressives at different points in history.

Tories Vs. Whigs: In England, starting around the time of the Glorious Revolution and the proper birth of Liberalism the classical liberal Whigs opposed the conservative Tories. The Tories favored aristocracy. The Whigs wanted individual rights and free-trade. See the Birth of Liberalism.

During the American Revolution: In American “patriots” often considered themselves aligned with the radical Whigs of England (the Whigs who opposed Burke), conservative loyalists considered themselves aligned with Tories. See the founders were liberals.

Old New Whigs vs. the New Whigs: In 1791 Edmund Burke wrote a somewhat famous book pleading with radical New Whigs (radical liberals) to embrace the conservative values of the conservative Old Whigs. The New Whigs supported the American and French Revolutions. Burke supported the American war, but feared the radicalism of the French Revolution. See An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.

During the French Revolution: The radical-liberal-populist Jacobins opposed the conservative-progressive-liberal Girondins. The Girondins were “more” conservative than the Jacobins. See the French Revolution and the History of Left and Right. See Jefferson the radical.

The Federalists Vs. Anti-Federalists: Early Federalist-leaning American newspapers during the French Revolution referred to the Democratic-Republican party as the “Jacobin Party.” Jefferson, the father of Anti-Federalism and the Democratic-Republican Party along with Madison, considered Hamilton’s Federalists a bunch of conservative Tories. Both parties were classical liberals. The Federalists favored a more conservative Old Whig-like version of classic liberalism, the Anti-Federalists, a more Jacobin, or New Whig, populist progressive spirit.[1] See Federalists Vs. Anti-Feds.

Lincoln: Lincoln was a moderate anti-slavery Republican, and the first Republican President. His policies were very progressive for the time, his favoring of authority makes him one of the first (if not the first) notable social liberal leader in the West. Lincoln became President in 1861. Marx’s Manifesto of the Communist Party was published in 1848. Lincoln’s socially liberal policies and the events of the war split the Republican party into many factions of varying degrees of liberalism, conservatism, and progressivism. See Lincoln was a Republican.

Third Party Radical Republicans: During Civil War Reconstruction, after Lincoln, radical Republicans were those who wanted to punish the southern confederates severely. This is a type of progressive radicalism we saw with the Jacobins and is opposed by the conservative Republicans who wanted to heal the wounds and quickly restore the union. Both were opposed by the moderate Republicans who wanted less divisive action. See the story of the parties switching platforms.

Progressive Populists Vs. Nativist Populists: In the progressive era of the late 1800 and early 1900’s we get two types of populists. One type wants progress; another wants a sometimes radical return to classic liberalism. As social liberalism took hold of the West, classical liberal views became conservatively right by comparison. Thus, we got conservative Democrats who favored segregation next to socially progressive Democrats. We also found more traditional authoritative conservatives in the Republican Party of the time next to the parties own social and classical liberal and radical factions. See Populism and Nativism.

Modern Democrats and Republicans: Today we call Democrats liberals and Republicans conservatives, but this is rough comparative language at best and is mostly a misnomer. Democrats are progressive social liberals with a radical economic policy of spending and finance. They are also radical in using the authority of the government to ensure social welfare. Republicans are mostly radical classic liberals and social conservatives. They tend to have a radical economic policy of tax cuts and to favor select businesses. They are radical in using governmental authority to ensure social conservatism. They are only really conservative in that they opposed social-liberalism and want to “return to the old days of classical liberalism.” See the 2016 election on the issues.

Conservative, Moderate, Liberal, and Progressive Factions Within Factions
Now finally, consider, that within each of the above factions there are conservative, moderate, liberal, and progressive factions, and this can change from issue to issue.

A modern Democrat might be conservative on trade, but progressive on other issues. A modern Republican might be socially liberal when it comes to LGBT rights, but very conservative when it comes to Religion.

The parties are split today like they always were. Consider the stark contrast between 2016 Candidates. We can hardly consider the moderate conservatism of Jeb Bush to be equivalent to the populist nativism of Trump, or the progressive populism of Sanders to be equivalent to Clinton’s social-liberal-conservatism. Likewise, we can hardly place the followers of any of these politicians in a single conservative, moderate, liberal, or progressive group, not just on all the issues, but on any single issue.

Finally, the “conservative, moderate, liberal, and progressive” qualifier is only one of many that we can (and historically do) assign to political factions to give us a better understanding of where they stand on what issues and in comparison to what.

Other key qualifiers include “left vs. right“, the related basic party types (social liberal, classic liberal, conservative, socialist), and importantly an “authority index” (a measure of how authoritative a faction is with its views).

TIP: Lincoln was a moderate, conservative, Republican, who implemented progressive policies. In his day he was an anti-slavery Republican. The radical Republicans opposed him, and the conservative Southern Democrats hated him. Lincoln is more like a modern Democrat than a modern Republican. His record is clear, but his character, like most, is complex. Qualifiers help us understand viewpoints, but a single qualifier rarely defines a person or their views.

Citations
Jacobin (politics)

"Conservatives, Moderates, Liberals, and Progressives" is tagged with: Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Hamilton, American Politics, England, France, James Madison, Liberalism and Conservatism, Thomas Jefferson, United States of America

What do you think?



https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-hidden-agenda-the-political-mind/201504/do-most-people-fit-in-liberal-and-conservative
Jason Weeden Ph.D. Jason Weeden Ph.D.
The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind
Do Most People Fit in Liberal and Conservative Boxes?
The public can’t be described by just two political labels
Posted Apr 13, 2015

Photograph Source: Pro-choice on Everything – Libertarian Party
Carolmooredc/Wikimedia Commons

It's common these days to think that ordinary people are typically either liberals or conservatives. Most political surveys ask people to label themselves as overall liberals or overall conservatives, without other options except "moderate." The two major political parties have platforms containing mostly liberal positions on one side and conservative positions on the other. The vast majority of national elected officials agree with the vast majority of their own party's ideologically aligned positions. Some political researchers have even proposed that fundamental psychological forces cause people to naturally cluster in these two ideological camps.

But then there's a long history in political science of findings that the general public in fact doesn't tend to cluster neatly on a single left-right axis (here's a recent example). In particular, people's opinions on "social" and "economic" issues are often liberal on one set and conservative on the other. Yet there's also evidence that liberal-conservative consistency has been increasing in recent years.

I'm a fan of economist Paul Krugman, and a regular reader of his New York Times blog. But last week he waded into these waters with a genuinely goofy post.

Krugman correctly noted "the fact that not many Americans consider themselves libertarian." Indeed, a 2014 Pew poll found that only 14% of the public say that the "libertarian" label describes them well. But then he said things that are, umm, less factual: "There ought in principle, you might think, be people who are pro-gay-marriage and civil rights in general, but opposed to government retirement and health care programs—that is, libertarians—but there are actually very few." He claimed that while there are tons of robust liberals and robust conservatives, libertarian views represent a political box that is "basically empty." Further, when considering the opposite side from libertarians—people who combine conservative social opinions with liberal economic opinions, a category Krugman calls "Hardhats"—he says this box is "maybe even emptier."

In our book, Rob Kurzban and I took a deep dive into public opinion. In one section, we addressed this exact point, comparing General Social Survey data on public opinion on same-sex marriage and income redistribution, splitting it out in a simple way to show that there are in fact plenty of people who mix and match liberal views on one and conservative views on the other. Indeed, when FiveThirtyEight’s head number-cruncher, Nate Silver, responded to Krugman’s post last week, he used exactly these same variables from the same dataset to make the same point.

Silver's version, though, involved a tremendous bit of over-simplification: He threw out everyone in the sample who had a neutral opinion on either issue. This was not a trivial move—it's almost one-third of the sample. If you want to see our more detailed numbers leaving these folks in, you can check out pages 10 to 12 from chapter 1 of my book, a chapter Princeton has made available online.

I've been working on a new paper on these topics, so I happen to have a boatload of freshly prepared data on this. It's also from the General Social Survey, but this time I've combined people's views across a number of religious/lifestyle opinions (whether abortion should be legal in various circumstances, whether premarital sex is morally wrong, and whether marijuana should be legal) and also combined views across a number of economic opinions (various items relating to income redistribution and government help/money for the poor).

Combining survey items produces a clearer picture of people's overall lifestyle and economic positions. One aspect of this clearer picture is that lots of people really are properly considered "moderate" on these broader political dimensions. The bad news, though, is that you have to make fairly arbitrary decisions about where the cut-off points are between left, middle, and right.

For this post, I considered people's responses on these two dimensions for the full range of available survey years (1975 to 2014). I categorized both dimensions into three equal pieces (liberal, moderate, and conservative), which, as I said, involves arbitrary cut-offs, but ones that I think wouldn't greatly offend many people's intuitions when considering the details of who ends up in these categories. Then I simply calculated the percentages that were lifestyle conservatives and economic liberals (a group Krugman calls "Hardhats," but which I’m giving the more conventional "communitarian" label), lifestyle liberals and economic conservatives (libertarian), lifestyle moderates and economic conservatives (no label), and so on.

So what's the bottom line? How ideologically aligned are the public's lifestyle and economic opinions? First let's look at the recent years, 2004 to 2014. If you're like Krugman, and have been lured by all the talk of liberals and conservatives into thinking people really are just liberal or conservative, the picture will come as something of a shock: (SEE WEBSITE)
Jason Weeden
Source: Jason Weeden

In recent years, it turns out that people who have lifestyle and economic opinions that are either both solidly liberal or both solidly conservative total 25.6% of the public (14.4% liberal and 11.2% conservative). While this is a bigger group than the 20.7% of folks who are either solidly libertarian (11.3%) or solidly communitarian (9.4%), it would be nonsense to characterize the libertarian and communitarian regions as "empty." Further, of course, there are lots of people in the middle on one issue set but not the other, as well as overall moderates who are in the middle on both.

While simple labels are often useful, one should never forget that people are complicated. In fact, keep in mind that we're just looking at two sets of issues here—lifestyle and economic. We could add still others (like immigration, affirmative action, death penalty, and so on), and simple views of ideological consistency would break down even further.

So how is our recent decade different from the good ol' pre-polarization days of the past? Here's the picture for the sample from 1975 to 2002: See website.

Sure enough, in days of yore there were fewer liberals and conservatives (22.5%, rather than the current 25.6%) and more communitarians and libertarians (22.2%, rather than the current 20.7%). Indeed, the number of liberals/conservatives was almost identical to the number of communitarians/libertarians. So, yes, left-right consistency has been increasing recently, just not as much as our everyday talk would suggest.

It's also important to recognize that different demographic groups contain very different levels of left-right consistency. Here's one last picture for the recent years (2004 to 2014), contrasting whites with 4-year college degrees (on the left side of the picture) and non-whites without 4-year degrees (on the right side): SEE WEBSITE.

These days, it's clear that among whites with 4-year degrees there are markedly more liberals/conservatives than communitarians/libertarians—it’s 32.9% versus 20.1%. On the other hand, for non-whites who lack 4-year degrees, there are fewer liberals/conservatives (20.2%) than communitarians/libertarians (24%).

Demographic characteristics really matter in figuring out people's issue positions. On the right side, among non-whites without 4-year degrees, for example, there just aren't a lot of economic conservatives (and thus not many "conservatives" or "libertarians"). But this doesn't mean these folks are mostly left-leaning when you consider lifestyle issues. In fact, this group has more "communitarians" than "liberals."

For whites with 4-year degrees, in contrast, "communitarians" are exceptionally rare. This helps explain why Krugman said of this combination: "I don’t even know a good catchphrase for it." In fact, there is no widely used label for those who are conservative on social issues but liberal on economic issues. But it's not because such people don't exist; it's because researchers and political elites don't spend much time thinking about them.

In the book, Kurzban and I drill down on the demographic details. People have complex combinations of lifestyle opinions and economic opinions in large part because the two sets of issues have very different intersections with people's real lives. Views on lifestyle issues relate strongly to things like how much time people spend in church versus hooking up and partying. Economic opinions, in contrast, have a lot more to do with the classic divisions of race, class, and gender.

We explore these kinds of features to show how complex opinions emerge. For example, who's most likely to have libertarian views? White men with higher socioeconomic status who don't go to church much. Who's most likely to have communitarian views? Non-white churchgoers with lower socioeconomic status. And so on, and so on. We've posted an interactive tool that shows how different real-life features (gender, education, religion, etc.) relate (on average) to a wide range of issue opinions.

It would makes things a lot simpler if people naturally clustered into consistent, easily described political profiles. And it’s fine to use ideological labels as a way to try to get your head around the maddeningly complex reality. Supposing that the simple labels are the reality, however, is a fantasy.

Related articles:

Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life: Why are THEIR political views so blatantly self-interested?

Pleeps.org: If being routinely liberal or conservative is a human universal, why is it true only of recent college-educated whites?

Time.com: What makes a Democrat a Democrat and a Republican a Republican? It’s more complicated than you think.

This View of Life: We like to think people vote against their self-interest. Research shows it’s not true.

New York Times: Your very predictable vote.

About the Author
Jason Weeden, JD, Ph.D., is a senior researcher with the Pennsylvania Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology and a lawyer in Washington, DC.
In Print: The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won't Admit It


AND IF THAT WASN’T ENOUGH FOR YOU, LOOK UP THESE THREE OTHER ARTICLES FOR YOURSELF IF YOU’RE STILL INTERESTED. –

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/moderates-who-are-they-and-what-do-they-want/370904/
http://www.salon.com/2016/06/06/study_liberals_and_conservatives_have_different_brain_structures_partner/
http://www.salon.com/2014/01/23/the_psychology_of_political_parties_why_conservatives_fall_in_line_and_liberals_dont_partner/