What Makes People Vote Republican?

By Jonathan Haidt, Edge. Posted September 16, 2008.

Not everyone who votes Republican has been 'duped'. Conservative
ideals appeal to some because they reflect heartfelt visions of a
'good society.'

What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class
and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when
their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic
policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology
ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long
ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal
insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism,
diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes,
and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our
diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait
that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of
hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death.
People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity" -- a
simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in
much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with
their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

Diagnosis is a pleasure. It is a thrill to solve a mystery from
scattered clues, and it is empowering to know what makes others tick.
In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically
liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional
pleasure of shared righteous anger. We can explain how Republicans
exploit frames, phrases, and fears to trick Americans into supporting
policies (such as the "war on terror" and repeal of the "death tax")
that damage the national interest for partisan advantage.

But with pleasure comes seduction, and with righteous pleasure comes
seduction wearing a halo. Our diagnosis explains away Republican
successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the
moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to
learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one
of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the
last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral
order to the one offered by Democrats. To see what Democrats have been
missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and
think about what morality really is.

I began to study morality and culture at the University of
Pennsylvania in 1987. A then-prevalent definition of the moral domain,
from the Berkeley psychologist Elliot Turiel, said that morality
refers to "prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare
pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other." But if
morality is about how we treat each other, then why did so many
ancient texts devote so much space to rules about menstruation, who
can eat what, and who can have sex with whom? There is no rational or
health-related way to explain these laws. (Why are grasshoppers kosher
but most locusts are not?) The emotion of disgust seemed to me like a
more promising explanatory principle. The book of Leviticus makes a
lot more sense when you think of ancient lawgivers first sorting
everything into two categories: "disgusts me" (gay male sex,
menstruation, pigs, swarming insects) and "disgusts me less" (gay
female sex, urination, cows, grasshoppers ).

For my dissertation research, I made up stories about people who did
things that were disgusting or disrespectful yet perfectly harmless.
For example, what do you think about a woman who can't find any rags
in her house so she cuts up an old American flag and uses the pieces
to clean her toilet, in private? Or how about a family whose dog is
killed by a car, so they dismember the body and cook it for dinner? I
read these stories to 180 young adults and 180 eleven-year-old
children, half from higher social classes and half from lower, in the
USA and in Brazil. I found that most of the people I interviewed said
that the actions in these stories were morally wrong, even when nobody
was harmed. Only one group -- college students at Penn -- consistently
exemplified Turiel's definition of morality and overrode their own
feelings of disgust to say that harmless acts were not wrong. (A few
even praised the efficiency of recycling the flag and the dog).

This research led me to two conclusions. First, when gut feelings are
present, dispassionate reasoning is rare. In fact, many people
struggled to fabricate harmful consequences that could justify their
gut-based condemnation. I often had to correct people when they said
things like "it's wrong because ... um ... eating dog meat would make
you sick" or "it's wrong to use the flag because ... um ... the rags
might clog the toilet."

These obviously post-hoc rationalizations illustrate the philosopher
David Hume's dictum that reason is "the slave of the passions, and can
pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them." This is the
first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the
mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people
want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The
Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing
uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments
were forms of persuasion.

The second conclusion was that the moral domain varies across
cultures. Turiel's description of morality as being about justice,
rights, and human welfare worked perfectly for the college students I
interviewed at Penn, but it simply did not capture the moral concerns
of the less elite groups -- the working-class people in both countries
who were more likely to justify their judgments with talk about
respect, duty, and family roles. ("Your dog is family, and you just
don't eat family.") From this study I concluded that the
anthropologist Richard Shweder was probably right in a 1987 critique
of Turiel in which he claimed that the moral domain (not just specific
rules) varies by culture. Drawing on Shweder's ideas, I would say that
the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about
how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about
binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living
in a sanctified and noble way.

When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the
"it" to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god,
and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of
morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these
positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn
the label "elitist." But how can Democrats learn to see -- let alone
respect -- a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and
dumb?

After graduate school I moved to the University of Chicago to work
with Shweder, and while there I got a fellowship to do research in
India. In September 1993 I traveled to Bhubaneswar, an ancient temple
town 200 miles southwest of Calcutta. I brought with me two
incompatible identities. On the one hand, I was a 29-year-old liberal
atheist who had spent his politically conscious life despising
Republican presidents, and I was charged up by the culture wars that
intensified in the 1990s. On the other hand, I wanted to be like those
tolerant anthropologists I had read so much about.

My first few weeks in Bhubaneswar were therefore filled with feelings
of shock and confusion. I dined with men whose wives silently served
us and then retreated to the kitchen. My hosts gave me a servant of my
own and told me to stop thanking him when he served me. I watched
people bathe in and cook with visibly polluted water that was held to
be sacred. In short, I was immersed in a sex-segregated,
hierarchically stratified, devoutly religious society, and I was
committed to understanding it on its own terms, not on mine.

It only took a few weeks for my shock to disappear, not because I was
a natural anthropologist but because the normal human capacity for
empathy kicked in. I liked these people who were hosting me, helping
me, and teaching me. And once I liked them (remember that first
principle of moral psychology) it was easy to take their perspective
and to consider with an open mind the virtues they thought they were
enacting. Rather than automatically rejecting the men as sexist
oppressors and pitying the women, children, and servants as helpless
victims, I was able to see a moral world in which families, not
individuals, are the basic unit of society, and the members of each
extended family (including its servants) are intensely interdependent.
In this world, equality and personal autonomy were not sacred values.
Honoring elders, gods, and guests, and fulfilling one's role-based
duties, were more important. Looking at America from this vantage
point, what I saw now seemed overly individualistic and self-focused.
For example, when I boarded the plane to fly back to Chicago I heard a
loud voice saying "Look, you tell him that this is the compartment
over MY seat, and I have a RIGHT to use it."

Back in the United States the culture war was going strong, but I had
lost my righteous passion. I could never have empathized with the
Christian Right directly, but once I had stood outside of my home
morality, once I had tried on the moral lenses of my Indian friends
and interview subjects, I was able to think about conservative ideas
with a newfound clinical detachment. They want more prayer and
spanking in schools, and less sex education and access to abortion? I
didn't think those steps would reduce AIDS and teen pregnancy, but I
could see why the religious right wanted to "thicken up" the moral
climate of schools and discourage the view that children should be as
free as possible to act on their desires. Conservatives think that
welfare programs and feminism increase rates of single motherhood and
weaken the traditional social structures that compel men to support
their own children? Hmm, that may be true, even if there are also many
good effects of liberating women from dependence on men. I had escaped
from my prior partisan mindset (reject first, ask rhetorical questions
later), and began to think about liberal and conservative policies as
manifestations of deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of
the good society.

On Turiel's definition of morality ("justice, rights, and welfare"),
Christian and Hindu communities don't look good. They restrict
people's rights (especially sexual rights), encourage hierarchy and
conformity to gender roles, and make people spend extraordinary
amounts of time in prayer and ritual practices that seem to have
nothing to do with "real" morality. But isn't it unfair to impose on
all cultures a definition of morality drawn from the European
Enlightenment tradition? Might we do better with an approach that
defines moral systems by what they do rather than by what they value?

Here's my alternative definition: morality is any system of
interlocking values, practices, institutions, and psychological
mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and
make social life possible. It turns out that human societies have
found several radically different approaches to suppressing
selfishness, two of which are most relevant for understanding what
Democrats don't understand about morality.

First, imagine society as a social contract invented for our mutual
benefit. All individuals are equal, and all should be left as free as
possible to move, develop talents, and form relationships as they
please. The patron saint of a contractual society is John Stuart Mill,
who wrote (in On Liberty) that "the only purpose for which power can
be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community,
against his will, is to prevent harm to others." Mill's vision appeals
to many liberals and libertarians; a Millian society at its best would
be a peaceful, open, and creative place where diverse individuals
respect each other's rights and band together voluntarily (as in
Obama's calls for "unity") to help those in need or to change the laws
for the common good.

Psychologists have done extensive research on the moral mechanisms
that are presupposed in a Millian society, and there are two that
appear to be partly innate. First, people in all cultures are
emotionally responsive to suffering and harm, particularly violent
harm, and so nearly all cultures have norms or laws to protect
individuals and to encourage care for the most vulnerable. Second,
people in all cultures are emotionally responsive to issues of
fairness and reciprocity, which often expand into notions of rights
and justice. Philosophical efforts to justify liberal democracies and
egalitarian social contracts invariably rely heavily on intuitions
about fairness and reciprocity.

But now imagine society not as an agreement among individuals but as
something that emerged organically over time as people found ways of
living together, binding themselves to each other, suppressing each
other's selfishness, and punishing the deviants and free-riders who
eternally threaten to undermine cooperative groups. The basic social
unit is not the individual, it is the hierarchically structured
family, which serves as a model for other institutions. Individuals in
such societies are born into strong and constraining relationships
that profoundly limit their autonomy. The patron saint of this more
binding moral system is the sociologist Emile Durkheim, who warned of
the dangers of anomie (normlessness), and wrote, in 1897, that "Man
cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees
nothing above him to which he belongs. To free himself from all social
pressure is to abandon himself and demoralize him." A Durkheimian
society at its best would be a stable network composed of many nested
and overlapping groups that socialize, reshape, and care for
individuals who, if left to their own devices, would pursue shallow,
carnal, and selfish pleasures. A Durkheimian society would value
self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to
one's groups over concerns for outgroups.

A Durkheimian ethos can't be supported by the two moral foundations
that hold up a Millian society (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity).
My recent research shows that social conservatives do indeed rely upon
those two foundations, but they also value virtues related to three
additional psychological systems: ingroup/loyalty (involving
mechanisms that evolved during the long human history of tribalism),
authority/respect (involving ancient primate mechanisms for managing
social rank, tempered by the obligation of superiors to protect and
provide for subordinates), and purity/sanctity (a relatively new part
of the moral mind, related to the evolution of disgust, that makes us
see carnality as degrading and renunciation as noble). These three
systems support moralities that bind people into intensely
interdependent groups that work together to reach common goals. Such
moralities make it easier for individuals to forget themselves and
coalesce temporarily into hives, a process that is thrilling, as
anyone who has ever "lost" him or herself in a choir, protest march,
or religious ritual can attest.

In several large Internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham,
Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly
liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and
fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements
related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity.
People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse
statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You
can test yourself at www.YourMorals.org.) We think of the moral mind
as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for
different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much
smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music
may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and
incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the
1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a
lasting political realignment.

In The Political Brain, Drew Westen points out that the Republicans
have become the party of the sacred, appropriating not just the issues
of God, faith, and religion, but also the sacred symbols of the nation
such as the Flag and the military. The Democrats, in the process, have
become the party of the profane -- of secular life and material
interests. Democrats often seem to think of voters as consumers; they
rely on polls to choose a set of policy positions that will convince
51%% of the electorate to buy. Most Democrats don't understand that
politics is more like religion than it is like shopping.

Religion and political leadership are so intertwined across eras and
cultures because they are about the same thing: performing the miracle
of converting unrelated individuals into a group. Durkheim long ago
said that God is really society projected up into the heavens, a
collective delusion that enables collectives to exist, suppress
selfishness, and endure. The three Durkheimian foundations (ingroup,
authority, and purity) play a crucial role in most religions. When
they are banished entirely from political life, what remains is a
nation of individuals striving to maximize utility while respecting
the rules. What remains is a cold but fair social contract, which can
easily degenerate into a nation of shoppers.

The Democrats must find a way to close the sacredness gap that goes
beyond occasional and strategic uses of the words "God" and "faith."
But if Durkheim is right, then sacredness is really about society and
its collective concerns. God is useful but not necessary. The
Democrats could close much of the gap if they simply learned to see
society not just as a collection of individuals -- each with a panoply
of rights--but as an entity in itself, an entity that needs some
tending and caring. Our national motto is e pluribus unum ("from many,
one"). Whenever Democrats support policies that weaken the integrity
and identity of the collective (such as multiculturalism,
bilingualism, and immigration), they show that they care more about
pluribus than unum. They widen the sacredness gap.

A useful heuristic would be to think about each issue, and about the
Party itself, from the perspective of the three Durkheimian
foundations. Might the Democrats expand their moral range without
betraying their principles? Might they even find ways to improve their
policies by incorporating and publicly praising some conservative
insights?

The ingroup/loyalty foundation supports virtues of patriotism and
self-sacrifice that can lead to dangerous nationalism, but in moderate
doses a sense that "we are all one" is a recipe for high social
capital and civic well-being. A recent study by Robert Putnam (titled
E Pluribus Unum) found that ethnic diversity increases anomie and
social isolation by decreasing people's sense of belonging to a shared
community. Democrats should think carefully, therefore, about why they
celebrate diversity. If the purpose of diversity programs is to fight
racism and discrimination (worthy goals based on fairness concerns),
then these goals might be better served by encouraging assimilation
and a sense of shared identity.

The purity/sanctity foundation is used heavily by the Christian right
to condemn hedonism and sexual "deviance," but it can also be
harnessed for progressive causes. Sanctity does not have to come from
God; the psychology of this system is about overcoming our lower,
grasping, carnal selves in order to live in a way that is higher,
nobler, and more spiritual. Many liberals criticize the crassness and
ugliness that our unrestrained free-market society has created. There
is a long tradition of liberal anti-materialism often linked to a
reverence for nature. Environmental and animal welfare issues are
easily promoted using the language of harm/care, but such appeals
might be more effective when supplemented with hints of
purity/sanctity.

The authority/respect foundation will be the hardest for Democrats to
use. But even as liberal bumper stickers urge us to "question
authority" and assert that "dissent is patriotic," Democrats can ask
what needs this foundation serves, and then look for other ways to
meet them. The authority foundation is all about maintaining social
order, so any candidate seen to be "soft on crime" has disqualified
himself, for many Americans, from being entrusted with the ultimate
authority. Democrats would do well to read Durkheim and think about
the quasi-religious importance of the criminal justice system. The
miracle of turning individuals into groups can only be performed by
groups that impose costs on cheaters and slackers. You can do this the
authoritarian way (with strict rules and harsh penalties) or you can
do it using the fairness/reciprocity foundation by stressing personal
responsibility and the beneficence of the nation towards those who
"work hard and play by the rules." But if you don't do it at all -- if
you seem to tolerate or enable cheaters and slackers -- then you are
committing a kind of sacrilege.

If Democrats want to understand what makes people vote Republican,
they must first understand the full spectrum of American moral
concerns. They should then consider whether they can use more of that
spectrum themselves. The Democrats would lose their souls if they ever
abandoned their commitment to social justice, but social justice is
about getting fair relationships among the parts of the nation. This
often divisive struggle among the parts must be balanced by a clear
and oft-repeated commitment to guarding the precious coherence of the
whole. America lacks the long history, small size, ethnic homogeneity,
and soccer mania that holds many other nations together, so our flag,
our founding fathers, our military, and our common language take on a
moral importance that many liberals find hard to fathom.

Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of
our immigrant nation. The three Durkheimian foundations of ingroup,
authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until
Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the
seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans
primarily because they have been duped into doing so.

Jonathan Haidt is an associate professor in the department of
psychology at the University of Virginia.