Wrap-Up

I want to wrap up my series on Jonathan Haidt for now, although his analysis has been immensely valuable for me, and I hope to return to it on other occasions, and to filter both events and other people's opinions through his analysis. 

What have I gotten out of Haidt?  First and foremost, he has convinced me that the sacred has a legitimate place in public discourse, however uncomfortable the subject may be to most liberals.  Reverence for the sacred is a matter of primary importance to many if not most people.  To dismiss it as illegitimate is to tell countless people that their deepest-held convictions are illegitimate and mere bigotry.  This leads to large numbers of people feeling angry and disenfranchised because public discourse does not allow them even to present what is most important to them.  You want to understand the source of right wing outrage?  This is it.  You want to tamp it down?  Learn to listen.

Second, he has given me a new definition of what it is to be liberal.  To be liberal is to place (or aspire to place) a universal system of values above in-group loyalty. This is a definition broad enough to encompass classical liberalism, social liberalism and a wide range of other forms.  It is also true that by this definition, the United States is a liberal country, ideologically committed to a liberal ideology, although we have often done a poor job of living up to it. There are few Americans, I think, who would reject this form of liberalism, at least in theory.  Things get quite different when it comes down to practice. 

And finally, although Haidt began his research as looking into why the Democratic Party had difficulty attracting the white working class vote, it also goes a long way toward explaining why Republicans do so poorly with minorities.  This is a real source of confusion to many Republicans, who believe that the welfare state creates dependency and is therefore not in minorities' interest, and that affirmative action fosters racism and is therefore also not in minorities' interest.  They are also no doubt right that minorities are more conservative, in the sense of having a stronger sense of in-group loyalty, a greater regard for authority, and more reverence for the sacred, than most white liberals (or black liberals for that matter).  Republicans also point out that black and Hispanic notions of the sacred overlap with Republican ones, at least on the matter of gay marriage and abortion.

Haidt's analysis would suggest that Republican problems with minorities go beyond just economic issues.  If their concepts of the sacred overlap on some things, they differ on others.  Republicans expressly disrespect many of the authorities who matter to minorities, like community organizers or black preachers (many of whom sound a lot like Jeremiah Wright).  Republican emphasize respect for many authorities minorities distrust, most notably the police.  And above all else, Republicans profoundly distrust any sense of minority in-group loyalty.  I have long believed that right wing hatred of Obama was purely partisan and not related to race.  I am now beginning to rethink that.  From the very start, Republicans have closely scrutinized Obama for the slightest display of in-group loyalty as a black person and treated even the faintest hint of such loyalty as evidence that he hates white people.  They reacted similarly toward Sonia Sotomayor's "wise Latina" remark.  Clearly, Republicans do not consider it legitimate for minorities to have any sense of ethnic identity.  This is not going to attract much black or Hispanic vote for Republicans.

 Over at David Frum's blog, Noah Kristula-Green favorably reviews a recent book Haudt has written.  He is pleased to see that Haidt has come to appreciate so many conservative philosophers that he, too, admires.  But he is much demoralized by Haidt's statement that he is praising conservative intellectuals, not the Republican Party.  Kristula-Green does not go into detail as to why this should be so, and I have not read Haidt's book, but I can guess why.

In giving advice to Democrats, Haidt stresses moving away from multiculturalism and toward a sense of national unity.  He urges us to push harder for assimilation of immigrants and for a shared community.  Our national motto, he says, is e pluribus unum, from many one.  It is time to stress the pluribus less and the unum more.  Perhaps he would suggest something like this speech by Barack Obama at the John Kerry nomination:

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us -- the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of "anything goes." Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America -- there’s the United States of America.

The pundits, the pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an "awesome God" in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America. 

Republicans at the same time that the Democrats were holding their convention in Boston while Republicans were holding theirs in America.  They had spent four years incessantly hammering on the distinction between the virtues of the "heartland" and the the implied lack thereof on the coasts.  They endless harped on the distinction between real Americans in the red states and the out of touch liberal elitists in blue states.  In short, Republicans were using in-group loyalties to divide and to make very clear that they were the unum and didn't want anyone else's pluribus.  Haidt urges Democrats to use in-group loyalty to promote for national unity.  Republicans aggressively use in-group loyalty to divide.

Furthermore, while loudly proclaiming who are and are not real Americans, real Virginians, real Christians and so forth, Republicans are notably intolerant of anyone else's in-group loyalty.  I mentioned their distrust of any in-group loyalty by minorities.  Then there is Occupy Wall Street.  Haidt does not believe that their emphasis on the 99% versus the 1% is an expression of in-group loyalty so much as an egalitarian response to perceived dangerous domination.*  Republicans, by contrast, saw it as alarmingly divisive.  ("Believe it or not," Eric Cantor said, "some people in this town have actually condoned the pitting of Americans against Americans.")  In short, the Republican philosophy is one of group loyalty for me but not for thee.  My guess would be that Haidt's criticisms of the Republican Party would be along these lines.

And now I intend to move to lighter topics, though moving back to this one on many occasions.

_________________________________________
*He also comments that group loyalty can take the form of "team-vs.-team tribalism" from sports competitions to gang warfare and "an intense focus on expelling outsiders and punishing traitors."  It should go without saying that such things are not healthy in democratic politics, especially if one starts to see partisan politics are more analogous to gang warfare than to sports competitions.