Are Conservatives More Open Minded than Liberals?
Slate on the current dating scene makes me glad I’m not in it:
As a result, Match began “weighting” variables differently, according to how users behaved. For example, if conservative users were actually looking at profiles of liberals, the algorithm would learn from that and recommend more liberal users to them. Indeed, says Thombre, “the politics one is quite interesting. Conservatives are far more open to reaching out to someone with a different point of view than a liberal is.” That is, when it comes to looking for love, conservatives are more open-minded than liberals.
Waahut? I thought conservatives=closed minded troglodytes and liberals=open minded human beings, at least that’s what I had been lead to believe reading the Huffington Post and Vanity Fair. But here was Amarnath Thombre, the engineer hired by Match.com to update the sites matchmaking algorithm, stating the near opposite: conservatives may still be troglodytes, but they are open minded trog’s at the very least. And liberals might be closed-minded, but they are still human beings and better than their lesser human right-wing counterparts.
What’s interesting is that in my personal experience, Liberal-Liberal pairings predominate. The Wife has a wealthy friend who was horrified to learn that neither Linda nor I voted for Obama in 2008. “But you can’t be Republicans,” she spat. The very idea that the Wife could share the woman’s viewpoint on humanitarian issues like health care in Africa, yet diverge on other issues such as health care and foreign policy simply didn’t make any sense at all to her.
Recently I had the opportunity to meet one of her colleagues and his wife. He is primary care physician with over 35 years of experience and a fundamentalist Christian who believes in Intelligent Design. His wife also does mission work in Nagorno-Karabakh, and seem stunned that I was familiar with the area and its history. Yet both are hard-core Leftists that left me bemused at the dining table for the cognitive dissonance that must exist between their religious and political beliefs. I saw the same situation with a sister of mine and her husband, a retired Lutheran minister who believed in Hope and Change but not Evolution. My son couldn’t believe it and began to challenge him, but a wink and a wry smile from me made him back off.
Although she did vote for McCain, I consider our relationship to be a Liberal-Conservative pairing with either one of us taking the opposite position depending on the issue. For example, I support killing America’s enemies no matter where they hide. This requires international engagement. The Wife thinks America needs to pull out of Afghanistan, Iraq, – and Europe and Asia too. When it comes to gays in the military, I am 100% in support of allowing them to serve openly while the Wife thinks it’s a bad idea that could endanger unit cohesion and soldier’s lives. Being that she served and I didn’t, I weight her opinion significantly although not enough to switch my position.
As for conservative-conservative pairings, I don’t know of any although I don’t doubt their existence. Perhaps its my educational background, but the vast majority of my friends and colleagues are Liberal-Liberal, with a few in Liberal-Conservative relationships. It’s the reason why I avoid discussing politics with all but the best of friends, and avoid it altogether on social media sites like Facebook. I learned that the hard way when an old friend defended Helen Thomas’s comments on Israel. Certain subjects are friendship killers, and the anti-Semitic rant that came out of his mouth reminded me why I was no longer friends with the bigot. Unfortunately his Jew-hatred was generally accepted and condoned by other liberal friends we held in common. The argument was one of the more gut-wrenching experiences that I have had online.
As my experience suggests, people are more complex than the labels used to describe them. I’ve personally never felt comfortable with the label “conservative” that I’ve donned to differentiate me from “liberals” on certain issues like the Global War on Terror over the past 10 years. Conservatives like Mike Huckabee and John Boehner don’t represent me just as liberals like Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid don’t. I hold a leftist position on gay marriage, a rightist position on support of the military, a hard-leftist position on the bankers (I want to see them tarred and feathered – seriously) and a hard-conservative position on the size of the federal government (the 14 Amendment was put there by Satan). Thombre’s algorithm at Match.com would have a heckuva time finding me a mate – which is why I’m grateful and appreciate my luck at finding the Wife when I did.
I have found self-described “liberals” some of the most intolerant folks around. We couldn’t raise the topic of politics around my brother-in-law our last trip to St. Louis for fear that he would blow his top while arguing. The Wife’s wealthy friend admitted to her that she was the only “Republican” friend she had. These are but anecdotal incidents that anyone could refute with their right-wing brother or crazy Republican aunt. And I do have liberal friends who are open-minded. I treasure these friendships because they keep me from the excesses of the extremes, reminding me that while they may have a different opinion on a specific topic, they are still decent human beings.
By I do wonder if Thombre is on to something. On broader issues self-identifying liberals seem as keen on censoring the media and viewpoints they disagree with as much as the Moral Majority did in its heyday in the 1980s. Conservative or libertarian groups are not pushing a “fairness doctrine” to take a popular radio personality off the air the way liberals are with their attempts at silencing Rush Limbaugh. Nor are activists on the Right writing sponsors to avoid advertising on MSNBC the way Leftists are with their DropFox campaign backed by Emperor Palpatine George Soros. People laugh at the “fair and balanced” tag of Fox News, yet I’ve seen just as many Democratic politicians on it as Republicans, watched left wing commentators Bob Beckel, Mara Liasson and Juan Williams hold their own against Charles Krauthammer, Bill Krystol, and Steve Hayes, and seen stories achieve notoriety there long before they appear in the New York Times.
Whereas Ed Meese and other conservative Reagan appointees raised the banner of censorship in the 1980’s, the flag was passed to Tipper Gore and the Left who have carried it through the ‘90s to today. Campus hate speech codes put in place by progressives are nothing more than censorship with a happy face slapped on it. 25 years ago the Religious Right controlled the Conservative agenda. Today the religious right is increasingly irrelevant to the Republican party’s fortunes as the libertarians gain influence and the party becomes open to ideas that were owned by the Left until now.
If true, what could explain the open mindedness of conservatives? Most of the conservatives I know are former liberals, while most of the liberals I know have never changed. It is possible that conservatives who for whatever reason changed their thinking may have not forgotten their previous beliefs and affiliations. During the 1980’s I protested against the Reagan administration and supported Leftist causes. 9-11 changed my worldview but it did not change my core beliefs. I still value human rights; I just don’t support Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch anymore because of their anti-American and anti-Israel biases. I still want to help the less fortunate, but not by replacing personal initiative with entitlement. I want to protect the environment, but not by covering property owners or businesses with red tape. It would be interesting to survey self-described liberals and conservatives to see if they have changed their affiliations over the years. If as I suspect more conservatives are ex-liberals than vice versa, then the change could explain Thrombre’s finding.
Phil:
Why do you suppose more conservatives are former liberals than the other way around? Maybe because they woke up and smelled the coffee when they got older? I know I did. With all the liberal indoctrination that goes on in the school systems let alone the universities, could one expect anything different?
30 March 2012, 5:51 pm