Posted by Randy Barnett:
The Psychology of Different Ideologies:
This month's Liberty magazine has an intriguing article by Michael
Acree about the psychological attributes that may incline a person to
be a liberal, conservative or libertarian. The article, entitled,
[1]Who's Your Daddy? Authority, Asceticism, and the Spread of Liberty,
begins with a mention of a talk given by Robert Nozick to a
libertarian supper club in Cambridge in the 1970s on "Why Doesn't
Libertarianism Appeal to People?". (This may have been the talk by
Nozick that kicked off the dinner series I helped organize while a law
student.) Here is how Acree frames the issue:
The various explanations that have been offered mostly boil down to
the contention that people are jerks � consumed by envy, by needs
to control others, or whatever. There is obviously some truth in
these claims. The difficult point about such explanations is the
implication that libertarians are not afflicted with similar
character flaws � that we are more saintly or mentally healthy than
the rest of the population. Anyone who has experience with
libertarians in person, however, will have (or should have) trouble
swallowing that conclusion. There must be more to the story. [my
bold!]
Some of his psychological speculation has occurred to me. For example,
I mention in [2]The Structure of Liberty how belief in an
interventionist government to ensure that things come out right is a
secular and more scientific substitute for belief in an
interventionist God, and both may stem from the childhood belief in
(or need for) parents who make things come out right. And he is not
the first to notice that many people found their beliefs about why
government must compel people to be good (conservatives) or generous
to others (liberals) on introspection: they know that without some
compulsion they themselves would not be as good or generous as they
think they ought to be, and do not want to see others get away with
behavior that they deny themselves. Still, I thought the way he framed
the point was thought-provoking:
Start with the most famously transparent case of psychological
motivation for political beliefs: the obsessive campaign of
conservatives against pornography, which elicits a knowing smile
from everyone else. Susie Bright, noted author of erotica, says
that the Report of the Meese Commission on Pornography was the best
jill-off book she had ever read, the Commission having gone out of
its way to procure the kinkiest stuff. Look today at the amount of
coverage given by WorldNetDaily, to pick on just one popular
publication, to sex scandals, child prostitution, and other
titillating topics. Without their diligent reporting, many
pedophiles might never have considered the opportunities in
contemporary Afghanistan. Leftist intellectuals smugly infer
suppressed desires from this righteous crusade, but their own
positions may be vulnerable to a similar analysis.
Consider the odd resistance of left-liberals to lowering even their
own taxes. The very idea is as offensive to them as relaxing laws
against prostitution is to conservatives. That doesn't mean they
are indifferent to money, but it is important to them to appear
indifferent to money. Most of my liberal friends are wealthier than
my conservative friends, but they would sooner die than be thought
of as wealthy. They refer to themselves as "comfortable" � where
"comfortable" means having a home in the Berkeley hills, an SUV and
a sports car, and enough money for either private school tuition or
a condo in Aspen. But the insistent denial of concern for wealth,
we may suspect, betrays an underlying obsession.
What liberals and conservatives have in common, I suggest, is
having publicly subscribed to an ascetic code in which they are not
wholeheartedly committed. They have simply focused on different
aspects of Christian asceticism (an asceticism shared by most other
religions) � money or sex. . . .
Self-acceptance, or its lack, is key in both cases. Conservatives
who live comfortably within the bounds of their narrow code are
generally less agitated and zealous in their disapproval of
transgressions. Not feeling especially deprived by their moral
choices � feeling, perhaps, that their moral choices are their own,
rather than imposed from without � they have no reason to envy
others their greater freedom of action. Similarly with those
left-liberals who are comfortable with a very modest standard of
living. I think, in fact, that the range of peaceful behaviors we
are comfortable with in others is a pretty good index of our own
self-acceptance.
For left-liberals and conservatives alike, political beliefs derive
much of their obduracy from being rooted in morality and
self-concept. Conservatives can tell they are good people by the
strictness of the standards they espouse, and by the zealousness of
their advocacy � which generally means efforts at imposing those
standards universally. Challenging conservatives' political beliefs
will generally not get very far, because those beliefs are linked
to conservatives' sense of what is good, and of themselves as good
people. Anyone who has entered into political discussions with
left-liberals has tasted the similar righteousness of their
position. They believe their commitment to redistributionist
policies shows them to be good people; challenges to those policies
will likely be experienced as challenges to left-liberals' sense of
the good, and of themselves as good people.
Given his objective of being as critical of libertarians as those on
the left and right, however, I found his analysis generally weakest
when discussing the psychology of libertarians--or perhaps on a
different and less fundamental level. Here is just a taste:
A major factor in understanding libertarianism as a movement is the
simple fact that, in our cultural context, self-identifying as
libertarian entails a willingness to be perceived as deviant. There
are undoubtedly many people who would join the Libertarian Party if
most of the people they knew belonged. The importance to most
people of not being perceived as deviant is apparent in the
obsession of very many LP members � especially those coming from
the Right � with "mainstream acceptability" (where "mainstream"
refers to the conservative heartland), and with downplaying or even
eliminating planks on issues like gay marriage or the War on Drugs.
Apart from the end of this passage seeming to be internally in
conflict with its beginning, it fails to explain why libertarians are
more willing to be perceived as deviant, and why we should think that
they are more or less so than political activists of the right or the
left. More importantly, this and the other characteristics he
associates with libertarians--such as their approach to knowledge--are
not grounded in the same basic psychological processes as his analyses
of liberals and conservatives. To me, at least, something was missing
here, though to be fair to Acree his topic was why libertarianism was
not more appealing to liberals or conservatives so assessing their
psychology was more germaine.
Still, I would be much more interesting in hearing the candid thoughts
of libertarians about their own psychology and that of other
libertarians in ways that are not self-congratulatory, than I am in
hearing reactions to Acree's claims about the psychology of those on
the left or right. For example, if Acree is right that the
attractiveness of liberal and conservative ideologies depends their
resemblance to differing parental models (mother-state or father-state
respectively), then what comparable psychology accounts for
libertarians rejection of either parental model? To facilitate
measured and civil discourse on this topic, I am enabling comments.
I should make it clear that I am not necessarily agreeing with Acree's
analysis of the psychology of liberals or conservatives either, though
I find at least some of it intuitively plausible. Nor do I think it
fair or accurate to reduce all political belief to psychological
terms, though clearly psychology plays a role in everyone's political
beliefs and, when described, these psychologies typically sound
unflattering. I should also emphasize there is much more to his
analysis than the teasers I posted here that makes it more subtle than
these quotes suggest--some parts of which I had some trouble
following.
So before posting your thoughts about his claims, it would be good to
read the whole article, which is available [3]here, not just these
brief excerpts.
References
1. http://libertyunbound.com/archive/2005_04/acree-daddy.html
2.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0198297297/ref=ase_randyebarnetbost/102-8361876-7698553?v=glance&s=books
3. http://libertyunbound.com/archive/2005_04/acree-daddy.html
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