Political Affiliation and Personality

When the Republicans won in 2004, the media (not being Republican, for the most part, and not able to understand why anyone would be) went looking for answers. Red state/blue state was the Seussian refrain, and the quest for explaining political differences as emotional/psychological profiles began. What sort of person would live in Kansas, anyway? What makes a person "go red"?

Behind all this analysis lies an assumption that should insult anyone who thinks about it long enough: the assumption that it is not because you are a rational creature (as Plato would argue) making your voting choices based on what you have reasoned and discerned, but rather that you are a slave to your emotions or, in other cases, your genetics or your environment. This line of thinking tends to pigeonhole people based on their personality (internal factors beyond one's control) or their level of education or religion (external factors).

Besides being insulting, this also makes for some silly conclusions. This article in Newsweek a few months ago asserted that you could tell someone's political preference just by looking at their desk.

According to Wray Herbert, a cluttered desk = a liberal mind, and this amazing data shows how political preference is actually shaped by personality.

As anyone who has ever had to live with me knows, I disprove this theory immediately. My workspace is almost always in some sort of disarray, though I strive to clean and organize once or twice a year. I keep contact information on post-it notes and, at home, my space is crowded with piles of articles and papers and books. I am not a neat person. In fact, the definition of a liberal's workspace seems to fit my own:

The conservatives' rooms were not only tidy and orderly, they were full of utilitarian stuff like cleaning supplies, calendars and postage stamps. The liberals' rooms were painted in bold colors and cluttered with books and art and travel brochures. The Red rooms, if you will, were places to hole up and be safe, while the Blue rooms felt more like staging areas for exploration.

Basically, the author is arguing that conservatives are boring and conventional while liberals are exciting and expressive:

Again these are our stereotypes, but now there is a deeper psychological explanation for these predictable tastes and attitudes. It's human nature to crave certainty and structure. But individuals crave security to varying degrees, depending on how fearful they are. People who are the most fearful see safety in stability and hierarchy, where more emotionally secure people can tolerate some chaos and unpredictability in their lives. The psychologists gathered data from 12 different countries to test this out, and they found that conservative politics were inextricably linked to several measures of emotional insecurity: intolerance of ambiguity, need for structure, desire for closure, and so forth. They also found that conservatives had a more intense existential fear of death.

Where to begin? First, the idea that liberals are more emotionally secure than conservatives is absurd. Take a random sample of Republicans from Chattanooga and a random sample of Democrats from Seattle, and compare their emotional security -- heck, forget security, let's just check their emotional stability -- and see what you find.

Second, linking conservatism to fear is short-sighted at best and likely self-serving on the author's part. (At least he's upfront about his political bias before he graciously dismisses anyone on the other side of the aisle as a coward.) That conservatives favor order in society is true -- because order brings beauty and goodness with it. As G. K. Chesterton wrote, "The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it . . . Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere . . . I tell you that every time a train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has won a battle against chaos . . . it is things going right that is poetical."

There are reasons to favor order that have little to do with fear. Love of poetry is one of them.

"Ah, but it's the conservatives who argue that the world is coming to an end soon, that we must fight an endless war against terrorism and secure the border at all costs!" you say. Of course, that is true -- but that a man locks his door at night does not mean he is given to unreasonable fear. The Greatest Generation may have been called many things as they marched off to defend American soil against the Axis powers -- fearful was not one of them. It is not the coward who stands guard and arms himself, but the brave and calm man. To point out a danger and insist that it is real and needs to be addressed is NOT a trait of fearfulness.

Of course, there may be some truth to the whole "conservatives are neat and liberals are messy" paradigm. I don't fit it myself, but I know one or two people who might. The problem is not that I'm the exception that proves the rule, but that the accountant who fits the conservative desk stereotype is.

Why I Support John McCain

Come November, I'm not going to be wincing as I pull the lever for McCain. I'm going to campaign for the man as best I can, and mostly because he can say something like this:

There is a tendency in our age to accede to the spurious excuse of moral relativism and turn away from the harshest examples of man's inhumanity to man; to ignore the darker side of human nature that encroaches upon our decency by subtle degree. There are many reasons for this. Blessed with opportunity, and intent on the challenges of work and family, our own lives often seem too full and hectic to take notice of offenses that seem distant from our own reality. There is also the threat in a society passionate about its liberty that we can become desensitized to the dehumanizing effect of the obscenity and hostility that pervades much of popular culture. It is in our nature as Americans to see the good in things; to face even serious adversity with hope and optimism. And yet, with so much good in the world, for all the progress of humanity, in which our nation has played such an admirable and important role, evil still exists in the world. It preys upon human dignity, assaults the innocence of children, debases our self- respect and the respect we are morally obliged to pay each other, and assails the great, animating truths we believe to be self-evident – that all people have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- by subjecting countless human beings to abuse, persecution and even slavery.

Confronting evil has never been easy – in our age or any other. But the failure to do so affects even those who are complacent with our own blessings and secure in our human rights. Accepting the degradation of values we believe are universal is to relinquish some of our own humanity. America was founded on the belief in the inherent dignity of all human life and that this dignity can only be preserved through shared respect and shared responsibility. We can retain our own freedom when others are robbed of theirs, but not the sense of virtue that made our revolution a moral as well as political crusade, and which recognizes that personal happiness is so much more than pleasure, and requires us to serve causes greater than self-interest.

There is no right more fundamental to a free society than the free practice of religion. Behind walls of prisons and persecuted before our very eyes in places like China, Iran, Burma, Sudan, North Korea and Saudi Arabia are tens-of-thousands of people whose only crime is to worship God in their own way. No society that denies religious freedom can ever rightly claim to be good in some other way. And no person can ever be true to any faith that believes in the dignity of all human life if they do not act out of concern for those whose dignity is assailed because of their faith. As President, I intend to make religious freedom a subject of great importance for the United States in our relations with other nations. I will work in close concert with democratic allies to raise the prominence of religious freedom in every available forum. Whether in bilateral negotiations, or in various multi-national organizations to which America belongs, I will make respect for the basic principle of religious freedom a priority in international relations.

Call it McCain's Wilberforce speech–he invokes the abolitionist hero of evangelical political activists at the beginning and the end of his speech, committing himself to fighting human trafficking and child pornography, in addition to standing for international religious freedom.

I haven't heard a lot of reporting on it yet, but if McCain can keep making this call, Evangelicals need to listen. He's not flouting his religion or forcing it on anyone–but here is a man who stands for honor, for human dignity, and for America:

We must remember that our freedoms are not only defended by our diplomacy and military power but, very importantly, by the decency and respect with which we treat one another, and by our belief that as we our dignity is entitled to respect so are we obliged to respect and defend the dignity of others. Ours is a nation with a conscience, and thank God we are. As William Wilberforce said so many years ago, "When we think of eternity, and of the future consequences of all human conduct, what is there in this life that should make any man contradict the dictates of his conscience, the principles of justice, the laws of religion, and of God?"