These people are real smart. Of course I could have saved them years of research it took to arrive at this;

Now, writing in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in response to Hibbing roughly a decade later, Jost and fellow scholars note that;


There is by now evidence from a variety of laboratories around the world using a variety of methodological techniques leading to the virtually inescapable conclusion that the cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite different. This research consistently finds that conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemic concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety.

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Pretty much yeah, libs think everything is awesome and peace will solve all problems as we gather for our dinner of salad greens.

Conservatives go out to make sure the border is safe, carry guns, just in case and remain practiced with them. We also will be sitting down to a dinner that includes steak, chicken, hog, or other meat. (OK, I forgot fish, but only if you hunt them with dynamite. :)

In my younger days I was a liberal and a registered Democrat, and now I am a business conservative registered Libertarian. What the hell is going on in my brain?

Thanks, again, Maph. After sleeping on this, it is pretty clear to me that _conservatism_ (not merely progressivism alone) was a motivator for the villains and their government in _Atlas Shrugged_.

Historically, the 19th century socialists found _conservatives_ to be their political allies against capitalism, the rise of industry, and bourgeois culture, all of which were "liberal" in their time. The labels do not matter, but the motives do.

In _Atlas Shrugged_ the high water marks of government control were all _conservative_ to preserve the status quo to prevent change. Ultimately, they had Project X for "law and order." Cuffy Meigs wanted to conquer Mexico and Central America. Meigs, of course, was disdainful of Dagny Taggart, calling her "the little girl who knows a lot about railroads." Remember that in Rand's time it was the communists who opened engineering colleges to women. Note also, however, that Karl Marx complained that capitalism was destroying the family by taking women out of the household. Again, in that time, the 1850s to 1900, the socialists and conservatives were allied against capitalism.

Marx was really a conservative whose utopia was a village. Until the Russian Revolution, no socialist tried to imagine wonderful new cities - those were the playgrounds of the rich in Jack London's _Iron Heel_ and Thea von Harbou's _Metropolis_. And those cities were hell for the proletariate.

Right now the 21st century "conservatives" wish for the good old days of US Steel and Bethlehem Steel, of Ma Bell, and Chrysler, Ford, and GM - and Nash, Hudson, and Studebaker if they are really old. But in those times of the 1950s, the conservatives longed for the simpler days before the Depression. Before the Depression, 95% of Americans lived on farms. Even today, the mythical "Jeffersonian yeoman farmer" is a paradigm.

According to "conservatives" here in the Gulch, cities are where socialists control masses who get welfare from producers -- producers of _what_?? Corn and hogs?? Important as those may be, they are only industries -- and conservatives HATE "agribusinesses".

Ayn Rand called the political side of Objectivism, "radicals for capitalism." She was not a conservative. She wanted social change - moreover, a changing society in which change was the order of the day ... unpredicted and unpredictable change... One biographer called Ayn Rand "The Russian Radical" with good reason.

Interesting. It reminded me of a ted talk that discusses the differences between introverts and extroverts.
http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_...

This reminds me of the time my daughter got her first paycheck while working at Target. She got in the truck and the first thing she said, "Who the heck is FICA and why do they get any of my money?" I knew she was ready for the "tax" talk.

Thanks. I would have thought you would get lots of Thumbs Up from people who were proud of their fear responses, armed to the teeth, and ready for disaster. It remains, also, that conservatives are happier with their lives than liberals are. The subject is complicated.

It seems, though, that leftwing people are more likely to have a laundry list of problems to be solved: healthcare, discrimination, income inequality, violence, etc. Rightwing ideology, as I understand it, says these things will be resolved without a central plan, which sounds more positive than the laundry list.

Maybe there are negative people of both ideologies, but it comes out in different ways: concern over long-term problems vs.immediate physical threats.

To me this is so subjective that it's very hard to study scientifically. For example, does the research show people's ideas on issues really do tend to cluster around two polarized ideologies?

Assuming for the moment that there is some element of truth to the left/right dichotomy and the research is correct, I wonder which way the causal vectors run. Does being rightwing make you more negative, being negative make you more rightwing, or does some third factor cause both?