I’m a big fan of Jonathan Haidt myself, and am familiar with his moral foundations theory, which I find interesting. One question I’ve had for awhile about the difference between liberals and conservatives that Haidt doesn’t really address but that would be a good question for a research psychologist looking into such issues is this: why is it that liberals tend to demonize those who disagree with them to a much greater extent than conservatives?
Think of the way in which people who do not sign on to favored liberal positions on race, gender, sexuality, immigration and abortion get demonized as monsters, called out and banned on Twitter, get their advertisers fleeing their shows (the way Tucker Carlson recently did for expressing a perfectly rational and sane position on immigration), get fired or pressured to resign. I don’t know of any real equivalent where liberals would get demonized and ostracized like this if they didn’t sign on to conservative positions. This is ironic to me because you would think that the in-group/loyalty and sanctity/purity dimensions that Haidt identified would be more correlated with this kind of vilification of heretics (the unholy, impure, out-group, as it were), but those in-group/loyalty and sanctity/purity dimensions are, of course, empirically found by Haidt et al. to be things conservatives rather than liberals care more about. So the explanation lies elsewhere.
Perhaps part of the explanation is that liberals and liberal elites control so much of the organs of mass media and academia that they are more likely to regulate what is known by sociologists as the Overton Window (the range of acceptable political opinion), and so they are simply more able to bring the force of widespread societal condemnation down upon the heads of outliers. But that somehow doesn’t feel like the whole explanation to me. What it actually does feel like to me is that, for reasons Haidt/Lukianoff have described in their most recent book, The Coddling of the American Mind, today’s liberals — especially the younger i-Gen ones are dictating the agenda to a great extent — are very likely to be brittle little narcissists. Narcissists cannot abide disagreement…and the rest follows from that. But, in any event, this is something worth exploring further in my view.
