Conservatives: it’s all about ignoring the very, very obvious

Friday, May 9, 2008

A headline on CNN.com says:
Why are conservatives happier than liberals?
My initial reaction was to answer the question thusly: because conservatives ignore facts and don't engage in any of that pesky "thinking for themselves."
Then I read the article and was astonished to discover that this is basically the conclusion of the study.

A study published in the journal “Psychological Science” says it’s because conservatives are better at rationalizing inequalities.

Regardless of someone’s income, marital status or church attendance, people with right-wing ideologies report greater satisfaction with their lives than those with left-wing beliefs. Researchers found that conservatives also score highest when it comes to the ability to justify inequalities.

For example, a conservative might support the idea of a meritocracy – that if you work hard and perform well, you’ll move up the economic ladder… and if you don’t, you probably won’t. But the study shows liberals tend to be troubled by this. Inequalities take a greater psychological toll on liberals, apparently because they can’t rationalize away the gaps in society and thus end up more frustrated by them.

The study goes on to say that this research can be applied to areas other than economic inequalities. One example is that feminists may not be as happy in their marriages as more traditional women because they’re frustrated with the division of domestic chores.

These latest results go along with a Pew poll from 2006. It found 47% of conservative Republicans described themselves as “very happy”, compared to only 28% of liberal Democrats who felt that way.

I've always found that ability to rationalize inequalities to be the cornerstone of conservatism. It explains how poor and downtrodden people continually vote Republican despite the fact that when Republicans are in power the poor get poorer.

Which brings us to another interesting article:

The past three decades have seen a momentous shift: The rich became vastly richer while working-class wages stagnated. Economists say 80 percent of net income gains since 1980 went to people in the top 1 percent of the income distribution, boosting their share of total income to levels unseen since before the Great Depression.

Despite the historic magnitude of this shift, inequality has thus far had little traction as a political issue. Many Americans seem to accept the conservative view that escalating inequality reflects “free market” forces immune to amelioration through public policy. As Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson put it, perhaps a bit defensively, the growing income gap “is simply an economic reality, and it is neither fair nor useful to blame any political party.” Paulson’s assertion, however, is strongly contradicted by the historical record. While technology, demographic trends and globalization are clearly important, purely economic accounts ignore what may be the most important influence on changing U.S. income distribution — the contrasting policy choices of Republican and Democratic presidents.

The Census Bureau has tracked the economic fortunes of affluent, middle-class and poor American families for six decades. According to my analysis, these tabulations reveal a wide partisan disparity in income growth. The real incomes of middle-class families grew more than twice as fast under Democratic presidents as they did under Republican presidents. Even more remarkable, the real incomes of working-poor families (at the 20th percentile of the income distribution) grew six times as fast when Democrats held the White House. Only the incomes of affluent families were relatively impervious to partisan politics, growing robustly under Democrats and Republicans alike.

The cumulative effect of these partisan differences is enormous. If the pattern of income growth under postwar Republican presidents had matched the pattern under Democrats, incomes would be more equal now than they were in 1950 — a far cry from the contemporary reality of what some observers are calling a New Gilded Age.

Anyone who can interpret a simple graph knows that the economy is strongest and our fiscal health better under Democratic presidents; one needs only look at a graph of the Federal budget deficit over the last few administrations to see that. I think I've posted that here before, you can search if you like. Such a graph shows a slow, steady march toward a budget surplus over the Clinton era, then a steep, harrowing plunge back into a hellishly large deficit almost immediately under Bush. And yet, people voted for Bush (twice) because... well, I don't know why.

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