Some on the Left suffer Withdrawal
"Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive" (Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind)
Many long-term members of the Democrat party and other liberals have undergone a partial conversion to a more common sense political orientation, but still with lots of classical Democrat flavorings. What might be their motivations to suffer abandoning their habituation, aside from rejection of the new Progressivism as synonym for socialism? What if any are their continuing mistakes in understanding and adopting more of what Jonathan Haidt has called The Six Moral Foundations in his masterful exploration of group motivations, The Righteous Mind? Haidt notes that he and his handful of associate researchers were all committed liberals, and embarked on this project “to find out what was wrong with conservatives”. They were sophisticated and ethical enough to learn that was not the issue.
As well-established by his long research into this area in many different human cultures, he found that “…many moral matrices coexist within each nation. Each matrix provides a complete , unified, and emotionally compelling worldview, easily justified by observable evidence and nearly impregnable to attack by arguments from outsiders”.
In WEIRD societies such as ours (Western, industrialized, rich, democratic) his research identified six Moral Foundations. They are Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression. Liberals tend to operate almost entirely on the basis of Care/Harm and Liberty/Oppression, with some use of Fairness/Cheating, although in that last foundation they tend to ignore proportionality in judging fairness. Much of their judgements based in these foundations are Manichean, and largely favor the group over the individual. Liberals often trade away non-proportional Fairness if it conflicts with their compassion or desire to fight oppression, paraphrasing Haidt. Conservatives, Haidt found, have a relatively balanced use of all six Moral Foundations, and tend to apply Fairness proportionally rather than either/or. He had already intuited many of these differences well before his research revealed them.
Haidt writes that during John Kerry’s Presidential campaign against George Bush, he, Haidt, mentally re-wrote many of what he describes as “Kerry’s ineffectual appeals”. Haidt desperately wanted to make Democrats realize and accept that “Republicans understand moral psychology, Democrats don’t.” He felt that Republicans understood that personal intuition based on moral foundations guided peoples’ ultimate rationalizations, not the other way around. Thus “Republicans…trigger the full range of intuitions described by Moral Foundation Theory.” American society seems to be based in his explanation of sociologist Emile Durkheim’s construct, that the basic unit of society is the family, not the individual. That, per Durkheim, “man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs.” As in, a nation of people with similar beliefs. Paraphrasing Haidt again, the American Left sees a Durkheimian world as hierarchical, punitive, and religious. That vision must be combatted, not respected.
Haidt reviews the work of Drew Westen during the 2004 Presidential campaign. Westen studied extremely partisan Democrats and Republicans with functional MRI’s, and found sudden increases in activity in the reward centers of the brain with stimuli that matched or enhanced their belief systems. This might “…explain why extreme partisans are so stubborn, closed-minded, and committed to beliefs that often seem bizarre or paranoid.” Herein may lie on one side the hyperbolized, catastrophized, and often violent Democrat reaction labelled as The Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Trump’s promises and actions rest in a relatively even-handed application of each of the six Moral Foundations, and the largely conservative majority of Americans of all backgrounds recognize and appreciate this. Despite his elite background and accomplishments, another part of his political attainment is his ability to speak to all six Moral Foundations in plain language. Fairness is both proportional and sanctified. Care is available for those truly in need, with the expectation of effort to that person’s maximum ability to progress, if at all possible, beyond that need. Equality of opportunity, not of enforced outcome, is Sanctified, along with Loyalty to the underlying intentions of the American republic, even though those intentions have oft gone agley. Liberty of the individual is also sanctified, with its coda being the conservative notion of “live and let live”. The necessity of Authority granted via the operations not of mob democracy but of a constitutional republic are also recognized as necessary. Liberals are all too willing to ignore or nullify Authority when it conflicts with their underlying motivations of battling oppression, providing care to all at the expense of all, and requiring that fairness be an enforced equality of outcome for all their differentiated identity groups. Included in this are reparations for real and perceived past injustices. Given this background of Haidt’s ideas, and the recent continuing abject failure of the pure Democrat ethos to fully capture the majority, the partial evolution of some Democrats towards a more inclusive use of the Moral Foundations can be appreciated.
While residual fanatical liberals rant about the current administration’s reduction in force, many more were harmed by the prior administration’s very liberal destruction of individual autonomy for “the common good” during the Covid epidemic. The people noted to have lost positions due to Covid mandates are all members of government service unions and bureaucracies, whose long-term bread is buttered by an interlocking relationship with Democrat administrations for wages and benefits generally outstripping those obtainable from a free market. Their extra "margins" are, after all, funded by the private wealth confiscation of taxation and ever-expanding municipal, state, and national debt. Even more damaging to the national psyche was the wholesale dismissal of members of the military, those ultimate purveyors of Loyalty, Sanctity, and Authority. Those actions and many others emboldened uber-liberals. As a result, “Progressives” of various degrees of extremity have cleaved the Democrat party apart.
The "old" Democrats have left some of their core constituencies behind, abandoning lip service to several of their Moral Foundations. They have no new policies and especially no new concrete procedures to enact those policies to counteract the simple populist platform of safety, freedom from all-encompassing governmental intrusion/intervention, and opportunity to improve their lives by an individual’s own efforts uncolored by social or economic redistribution or replacement by newer imported constituencies.
The only Democrat policy for the past decade has been "whatever Trump wants or does is bad and must be opposed."
Progressivism’s eclipse of the party drowns out any residual reasoning with irrational chants of “everything for everybody” paid for “by somebody else”, and more of the same for only certain liberally-defined identity groups. Reduction in taxes is bad--because it reduces resources for redistribution. Reduction in force of federal employees is bad--because it reduces their abilities of administrative and regulatory control, the direct tools of power.
Here we can quote a character in Frank Herbert’s Chapterhouse Dune, one-sixth of his underappreciated magnum opus on human society’s foibles. He wrote, “All governments suffer a recurring problem. Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.” Thus the real ongoing dangers in Woodrow Wilson’s vision of professional lifetime politicians and a technocratic administrative state. So reduction in regulation amplifies liberal bizarre and paranoid reaction since it directly threatens their fiefdoms and noble offices.
Reduction in illegal immigration is bad--because it reduces those whose fealty is based in indentured servitude to public benefits, expansion of Congressional representation via the census, gerrymandering these seats for the Democrats (since these new immigrants largely self-segregate and do not assimilate), and who become their intended future newly enfranchised voting constituents. Eliminating the importation of illegal low income labor reduces the sustenance of areas of the economy that are otherwise unsustainable, but profitable to certain larger corporate constituencies. A repeat of the economic imperatives behind our Civil War.
Requiring long-term allies to sustain themselves aside from our foreign aid and defense spending reduces our imperial power, influence, and profitability of our war economy.
The current "chaos" in international trade markets that indirectly throws out international wage and price controls mimics, in some form, classical ideas of a free market, wherein every (national) participant has to make moment-to-moment decisions in their own short and long-term best interest.
Requiring higher educational institutions to compete in non-subsidized fashion in a freer market and to obey the spirit and letter of the law (King did not say we should be judged for admission by the color of our skin rather than the content of our character) reduces the effectiveness of educational elites to portray our history not solely as a tale of conquest and subjugation--admittedly an evolutionary characteristic of all hominids--but mainly of our ongoing efforts, at least in Western ideology, to overcome those baser instincts and to "form a more perfect union".
Quoting Haidt again, “Nations decline or divide when they stop performing this miracle.” Many of the current administration's policies are of questionable value, but I believe the underlying intent is sensed by the broad electorate, a return to the Common Sense voiced by Thomas Paine.
As classical Democrats suffer through their ongoing withdrawal, how does the new Democrat Party fare? David Hogg, previously a Vice Chair of the DNC, was a young establishment voice of the new Progressives. He declared openly that he wanted to use the Democrat National Committee and its money to unseat many of the establishment Democrats, not just defeat Republicans. He clearly defined the underlying intent of the Progressives at the very end of his recent interview on the Bill Maher show. His last statement to Maher, paraphrased, was that our youth, our people, should not have to worry about the everyday necessities of life. These should be provided by the government, All they should have to worry about was "getting laid and having fun" ( find it on YouTube).
The ultimate irony is that he was expelled from the DNC based not on these new Democrat beliefs, but because they (DNC) conveniently noticed they had violated their own Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness policies and procedures,. They needed by quota to replace him with someone non-white and non-male. I still expect him to pop up as a potential leader of a new party such as the Democratic Socialists, perhaps after the midterms depending on how well their star candidates perform.
I actually look forward to and hope for the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of NYC and Omar Fateh as mayor of Minneapolis. They will take these two great cities down the same path that Democrats have walked in San Fransicko and Oakland, with perhaps more ruinous results for their populace. Ditto Los Angeles under Venceremos veteran Karen Bass. Usually the hard consequences of addiction can only be learned from hitting bottom. I simply hope that the nation doesn't have to learn the same lesson from a President Newsom.