Political spectrums are predicted by personality.
Those high in conscientiousness are likely to be conservative. Those low in conscientiousness tend to be liberal.
Often contentiousness and openness to experience are negatively correlated. So often liberals are high in openness to experience and conservatives are low in openness.
Openness is positively correlated with IQ, so high openness usually predicts high IQ and higher IQ usually predicts high openness to experience.
It also predicts creativity. While conscientiousness predicts punctuality, rule following and general conformism; conventionality.
With these foundations, we can understand why politicians and citizens disagree amongst themselves on policy that affects daily life.
And here’s what I wanted to say: I think conservatives succeed fiscally and otherwise in life by pushing everyone else down below their level with structurally disadvantageous rules designed to keep people unlike themselves down. I think liberals succeed fiscally and otherwise by lifting everyone else above their own level and then hoping that after they’ve been elevated they’ll reach back down and finally pull them back up with the rest of the group.
In other words, one pushes people down below the other needs to trust that others will lift themselves up after lifting them up first.
I actually think this is how it is.
Many policies seem to fit this sort of line of reasoning. Often when conservatives argue against liberal policies they seem to be implicitly rejecting the premise that ‘after they have been lifted they’ll reach back down and lift us up with them’ because they probably don’t believe that fellow conservatives would ever do such a thing because they make their careers out of doing the exact opposite.
We can see this in the formation of hierarchies and structured organizations with ownership rights. Often such organizations are designed from the ground up to keep people who the designer doesn’t want around out.
Cities that are master planned by conservative thinkers, such as much of Orange County, big businesses, banks, stock markets and even capitalism as a economic system with the right to own the means of production.
Liberal politicians, in contrast, offer things like the Affordable Care Act which is supposed to offer consumer protections for health care insurance policies. The bill implicitly places the health insurance provider in charge of whether or not to raise fees on patients or simply provide more expansive coverage without substantial price increases.
Conservatives, of course, objected that the bill would cause prices to soar. But that’s only true if the companies didn’t care about sick people. Some, of course, don’t and raised the hell out their policies prices to provide better coverage to people who need it.
If you paid attention to the California governor race for 2019 you would have seen this same divide between Gavin Newton and John Cox.
Cox’s big campaigning platform was about reducing the cost of housing by eliminating environmental protection policies on development and by eliminating a gas tax that would be used to generate revenue to repair public roadway infrastructure.
The liberal candidate argued that we need protection policies to keep the planet healthy, and that costs can be absorbed by the contractor.
Its the same debate. Conservatives argue that no contractor would care and ended up transferring costs to the consumer because that’s the self-interested thing to do.
So yeah, that’s the point I wanted to make here.
In many ways I think this accurately describes conservative and liberal tendencies. How they think and how it influences behavior in communities that are heavily conservative it heavily liberal.
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