Jonathan Haidt is a left-of-center social psychologist I’ve referenced a number of times before because he has done some amazing work on the moral differences between conservatives and liberals.
Basically, Haidt would say that you can break morality down into six areas:
1) Care/Harm
2) Fairness/Cheating
3) Liberty/Oppression
4) Loyalty/Betrayal
5) Authority/Subversion
6) Sanctity/Degradation
According to Haidt, the liberal sense of morality (ahem, such as it is) revolves around the first three areas in that list – care/harm, fairness/cheating, and liberty/oppression, while conservatives tend to weigh all six factors.
Because conservatives get all six factors, while liberals only really care about three of them, this leads to conservatives understanding liberals much better than liberals understand conservatives, who struggle to understand the importance of loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.
Haidt would not refer to liberals as morally stunted because of their shortcomings, but I think many of the rest of us, me included, certainly would.
That came to mind because of a brilliant post I ran across on X:
What he refers to as liberals playing the “How much pain can I tolerate” game, Haidt might describe as liberals not caring much about authority/subversion, while I would simply say that liberals place very little importance on order.
This is very easy to see if you look at a lot of the policies liberals support and the way they live in many places.
They care so little about punishing criminals that they could fairly be described as “pro-crime.” As we speak, Tim Walz is in the news for bemoaning the fact that an illegal alien who molested a child was deported by the Trump administration despite his attempts to prevent it:
This fits right in with district attorneys in liberal cities refusing to prosecute criminals, their no-bail laws, lenient punishment for crimes and sanctuary cities. Their attitude is, “If people want to tear down a statue of some Founding Father and we don’t care about that statue, who cares?” Similarly, “If the people who vote for us want to riot for a few days, smash up a few store fronts and loot a few stores, why shouldn’t they be allowed to do it? That’s what insurance is for, right?”
They also like the idea of open borders: What does it matter if people came here the right way or not? Why shouldn’t they be able to come here illegally if they want to do it? Why should they be deported FOR ANY REASON? Who needs to be sure that the vote is secure or that illegals can’t vote if we think we’re going to win? Heck, why shouldn’t they be able to vote, collect welfare, or work at whatever job they want just because they aren’t here legally? For that matter, why do we have to bring in immigrants who “fit in?” Why shouldn’t we have radical Islamists, Somalian immigrants on welfare, or people who hate the United States coming to live here?
Why shouldn’t homeless people be able to set up their tents anywhere they want, crap in the streets, and leave used hypodermic needles lying around? Who are we to say that they shouldn’t do that if they want to do it?
Why should we be constrained by gender? If someone says they’re male in the morning, female in the afternoon, and have no gender at night, what’s the problem with that? Why can’t every human just choose their own pronouns, even moment-by-moment if they want?
Granted, liberals will pretend to be interested in order to the extent that it furthers their agenda, you know, sort of like they pretend to be Christian when they’re telling Christians they have a religious duty to do whatever furthers the liberal agenda, but it’s not real. Having one set of standards that apply across the board is critical to having order, and liberals don’t believe in that.
We can go on and on and on with this, but what it comes down to is that liberals simply don’t think order is very important, and because of that, they have a lot of trouble understanding the ramifications of what they do.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of bad things that naturally spring up from a lack of order. Conservatives get this, which is why we spend a lot of time worrying about slippery slopes and how policies will play out over a long period of time.
Meanwhile, liberals don’t think about or understand the long-term consequences of their actions. Everything that happens is a single, unconnected event probably caused by racism, and solved by a government program.
On the other hand, order requires you to think in chains of events to understand what will happen. If we allow A, then we will get B, then that will lead to C.
When you abandon that, then you get mob rule, people who think they should be able to run over ICE agents because they’re deporting illegals, and people in NYC just walking around homeless guys screaming and punching in the air all day long without anyone in charge ever DOING ANYTHING ABOUT IT.
When you abandon order, you get men calling themselves females raping real women in prisons, stealing women’s scholarships, and endless lawsuits, chaos, and angry debates about bathrooms, locker rooms, and how old children need to be before it’s okay to surgically mutilate them.
When you abandon order, you get tens of millions of people who no longer trust election results, 78% of New Yorkers being afraid to ride the subways despite voting for the politicians who allow their subways to be unsafe, and liberals who refuse to do anything about shoplifting bitterly complaining as their stores close down because of shoplifting.
Granted, you absolutely can go too far with order and create a stifling surveillance state where draconian punishments are handed out for trivial crimes, and that’s a bad thing. But without order, you can’t have a functional society at all, which is also bad.
Order means your government makes an effort to tell the truth and do a good job instead of taking bribes and saying whatever sounds good at the moment. It means you trust your neighbors and don’t need bars on your windows or all the products in the local stores behind plastic cases. Order is what it takes to live in a high-trust society, to have predictable laws, and for people to feel safe in their society.
Order means you don’t have to worry if your kids are playing in the yard. It means you spend less mental energy dealing with dysfunctional people. Order reduces societal stress, conflict, and uncertainty. It keeps everything from degenerating into a free-for-all or disintegrating entirely. It just plain old means that things work better across the board.
That’s good for people; it’s good for countries, and a lot more order would be good for America, too.
Another good article, Bro. But I think ya missed the mark. It’s not that the Left is anti-order. They are just anti-OUR order. Their Machiavellian ‘categorical imperative’is:
Destroy the “old world” order in order to create a “new world” order.
…And this new world order will then ruthlessly eliminate detractors, so that it will be almost impossible to be challenged. It’s called Totalitarianism, and it comes in many religious and political flavors –all distasteful.
Let’s defend OUR present world order at all costs!
Managing the silence of the lambs is still a form of order. But I think we're both right. So, what's left?! :)