Why Republicans and Democrats Will Never Agree
In today’s America, it’s an accepted fact that we’re divided, often bitterly, by politics. We disagree about everything, from immigration to school reform to tax policy to abortion. We agree only about how much is at stake in our arguments: everything.
Beneath all the rancor, though, there’s a basic optimism. When we imagine democracy at its best, we think of it as a national conversation, with voters swayed by reasoned arguments and new information. That’s why we argue—to change each other’s minds (and, ultimately, each other’s votes).
Unfortunately, according to Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist who studies morality and politics at the University of Virginia, our minds might not work that way. In his new book, “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion,” Haidt (pronounced “height”) argues that we’re mistaken about what’s really going on when we disagree about politics. We like to think that our opinions are shaped by reason and information. But the truth, Haidt says, is that many of our positions are intuitive and irrational at their core—driven by passions that we didn’t choose, don’t understand, and can’t articulate. On some issues, coming to agreement isn’t really possible, and never has been; instead of arguing, Americans ought to look for ways to live with their differences.
In recent years, Haidt has emerged as one of the country’s best-known psychology researchers, using a combination of psychology and anthropology to understand how we arrive at our moral attitudes. One of his key insights is that we are much less rational than we think we are. We tend to make moral judgments intuitively and immediately. If asked, we can produce reasons for our judgments, and might even believe that’s why we made our decisions—but, in reality, these are just rationalizations for our intuitive hunches.
His new book turns this lens on politics, drawing on decades of research to offer a sometimes unsettling picture of how our political culture is shaped by our underlying dispositions. When Haidt looks at American politics, he doesn’t see a free-flowing, open-minded exchange of ideas. Instead, he sees a conflict between two profoundly different moral mind-sets—a conservative mind-set and a liberal one—that dictate where people stand on issues, and are unlikely to change.
Republicans and Democrats do have intuitions in common: the intuitions that fairness is a moral good, and that doing harm is a moral wrong. But, by asking thousands of people to take surveys and ponder moral dilemmas, Haidt—who identifies as a liberal—has found that conservatives live in a broader moral universe. To a much greater degree than liberals, they draw on moral intuitions about loyalty, tradition, authority, and sanctity. That difference explains why Republicans are more concerned than Democrats about patriotism and family values. And, in their moral breadth, Haidt has found, Republicans are more typical of people around the world; the more tightly focused morality of liberals is rarer.
Ultimately, Haidt argues, the differences between liberals and conservatives are both natural and inevitable. The rancor between the groups, he argues, comes from something else: a human tendency toward groupish self-righteousness that takes over, obscuring the ways in which our own beliefs are irrational, and making it all too easy to demonize people who see the world through a different moral lens. “Human nature,” Haidt writes, “is not just intrinsically moral, it’s also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental.” A more practical and realistic political culture, Haidt believes, would accept and accommodate our natural moral differences, rather than seeking to eradicate them. Ultimately, Haidt argues, those differences should be objects of appreciation and curiosity, not anger.