Almost every major conservative journalist and politician in the s defended him. William F. And indeed, Buckley never abandoned his defense of McCarthy and repeatedly attempted to rehabilitate the senator in the eyes of the broader public. Because liberals resisted efforts to purge communists and their sympathizers from schools and universities, and insisted on pesky legal technicalities like the Fifth Amendment.
And indeed, at its peak in the early s the John Birch Society claimed around , members, more than the Communist Party USA at its height in the s, easily making it the largest and best-organized group on the right. Board of Education for poisoning race relations in America. Of all of the supposedly communistic liberal front groups, none drew conservative scorn more fiercely than the civil rights movement. King was far more radical than his sanitized popular memory today—he spoke out against American imperialism in Vietnam, called for a guaranteed basic income, and was murdered while visiting Memphis to support a strike by public-sector sanitation workers—but he was no doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist.
By painting civil rights activists as communists, or at the minimum dupes of an international communist conspiracy, segregationist southerners were making a bid for the support of conservative anticommunists elsewhere in the country. They got it. Barry Goldwater, whose anti-liberal and anticommunist political bona fides were so secure he could get away with criticizing the John Birch Society without losing the support of its members, voted against the Civil Rights Act in George Wallace, the hyper-segregationist governor of Alabama, recognized the potency of this conspiratorial rhetoric during his third-party run for president in The evangelicals and their allies in other denominations were united in their opposition to abortion, gay rights, and feminism—the tangible realities of the nefarious left-liberal agenda.
Increasingly, the communist fingerprints to be found on these cultural changes were not to be found in an overarching conspiracy directed from Moscow—after all, the sexual politics of radical American feminists were hardly those of Leonid Brezhnev—but from a more nebulous grouping of student radicals, intellectuals, and activists.
T he collapse of the Soviet Union accelerated these trends. It just took more creativity. She was the worst of all possible worlds: an elitist big-government liberal with degrees from Wellesley and Yale Law, a feminist who initially refused to change her name after marrying Bill, declined to embrace the image of a mother and housewife in the White House, and was rumored to be the real powerhouse next to her husband.
Clinton embraced financial deregulation, effectively abolished the existing welfare program, and even signaled his openness to partially privatizing Social Security and Medicare. Gingrich was a veteran partisan bruiser—as House minority whip he led the successful effort to oust Texas Democrat Jim Wright as speaker for minor ethics infractions in , suggesting for good measure that Wright and other Democrats harbored socialist sympathies given their willingness to negotiate with the Sandinista government to end the Nicaraguan civil war.
But in another sense, the fervid anti-Clinton paranoia may have been a psychic and political necessity for Republicans who yearned to regain power. With Clinton offering real policy conciliations to conservatives, the easiest way to maintain energetic opposition was to construct a narrative of criminality and anti-American perfidy that must be countered at all costs.
Bill Clinton weathered the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but Clinton hatred never went away. It reappeared with a vengeance in In the study, conservative students seemed to correctly answer the color questions faster than their liberal peers.
The researchers think that's because the conservatives were more likely to believe in the concept of self-control. But the conservatives didn't always out-perform the liberals. When they were told that their free will might undermine their own self-control, they performed worse than their liberal peers. New research finds that conservatives tend to express compassion to smaller social circles than liberals. For example, conservative voters were found to be more likely to agree with statements like: "I often have tender, concerned feelings for my family members who are less fortunate than me.
Liberals, on the other hand, were more likely to feel that same level of compassion for people around the world, and even to non-human and imaginary subjects like animals and aliens. Researchers at the University of Southern California conducted a study in hinging on the theory that conservatives tend to be more satisfied in life than liberals.
The study complied data on thousands of people in 16 different countries around the world over four decades, and found that conservatives, overall, reported feeling greater meaning and purpose in life. The study also found greater satisfaction in life was related more closely to social conservatism, rather than economically conservative views.
For example, Trump supporters may share more in common with the president's personal and professional values than his policies. A survey of 1, people conducted on the internet in March revealed that Trump supporters were more likely to connect with his overall personality and outlook on money than they were to support his politics.
The survey respondents tended to agree with statements like "people who are poor just need to work harder" and "vacations are for weaklings," while disagreeing with statements like "I try to stay out of the spotlight" and "I don't like to gamble. The study authors said these kinds of personal values were better predictors of support for then-candidate Trump than party affiliations or political ideologies.
The researchers think these perceptions of shared values between candidates and constituents probably play into everyone's voting behavior, not just that of Trump's supporters. A longitudinal study of more than 16, people in the UK found that those who were more aggressive as youngsters when they were years old became more economically liberal and mistrusting of the government as adults in their early 30s.
A study by researchers at Stanford University found liberals and conservatives both think they judge people of all political backgrounds equally for their actions, based on their moral codes. However, the findings suggested that while liberals and conversations may both think they are applying their judgment equally, they each tend to judge members of their own ideology more favorably than others.
Jan Voelkel and Dr. Mark Brandt told PsyPost. Update: This story was originally published in It has been updated with new research. For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
It often indicates a user profile. Log out. US Markets Loading H M S In the news. Liberals and conservatives don't just differ politically. According to scientific research, people on different ends of the political spectrum differ psychologically too. Fear is linked more often to leaning conservative, whereas feeling safer can lead people to lean more liberal.
But seeing liberalism as a product of a particular cultural tradition is a mistake. As Amartya Sen argued in a brilliant essay , many of the core principles we identify with liberalism today — religious toleration, popular sovereignty, equal freedom for all citizens — can be found in writings from pre-modern Europe, the ancient Buddhist tradition, and a 16th-century Indian king, among a range of sources.
Liberalism has taken root in diverse societies across the globe today, from Japan to Uruguay to Namibia. Of these components, at least four political principles are common to the various species of liberalism all of which relate to its core moral premise about freedom. They are familiar to most citizens in liberal regimes: democracy, the rule of law, individual rights, and equality.
To challenge liberalism is thus to not merely engage in ordinary political argumentation. It is, by its nature, a radical claim. But these are radical times. Several trends and shock events have combined to create a sense of rolling crisis. By one count, illiberal right-wing populists controlled the governments of least 11 different countries in ; in , they controlled none.
Trump is the most famous example, but he has peers in countries as influential as Brazil and India. The rise of such a challenge to liberalism has highlighted how the liberal status quo has failed to deliver, particularly in the wealthy West. Across the OECD , the top 10 percent makes over nine times per year as much as the bottom 10 percent.
Metrics of trust in a range of governmental institutions — legislatures, courts, civil service — are falling across advanced democracies. In the United States specifically, deaths from alcohol abuse, drug overdose, and suicide have reached all-time highs. If life under liberalism is getting worse for a lot of people, is it possible that the idea really has outlasted its usefulness?
Modern anti-liberals, both on the right and the left, take the notion that the status quo is broken as their starting point. Liberal capitalism was supposed to foster a universal middle class and encourage bourgeois values of sobriety and prudence and democratic virtues of accountability. It achieved the opposite: the creation of a precariat with no clear long-term prospects, dangerously vulnerable to demagogues promising them the moon.
Uncontrolled liberalism, in other words, prepares the grounds for its own demise. The current crisis of liberalism, according to this narrative, dates to roughly the s. Around then, governments across the Western world began deregulating their economies, selling off state-owned industries, and privatizing core government services. Neoliberalism, in this line of thinking, became dominant on both sides of the political aisle.
The critique of neoliberalism is not new, but it has gained currency in the last decade or so. The Great Recession can be blamed on neoliberal financial deregulation , the Eurozone crisis on neoliberal austerity , and the rise of Trump and right-wing extremists as a backlash to neoliberal free trade agreements and neoliberal indifference to rising inequality.
The Brexit campaign spoke to that pain. So do all of the rising far-right parties in Europe. Liberals support democracy as a matter of principle, believing that individuals have a right to shape decisions that affect their lives in deep and important ways.
But liberals curiously excludes parts of economic life from this zone of collective self-determination, seeing the market as a place where people have individual but not collective rights. Liberalism sees nothing wrong with the heads of Amazon and Facebook making decisions that have implications for the entire economy. So long as capitalists are free from democratic constraint, leftists argue, liberal democracy is on dangerous footing.
The super-rich use the power their accumulated wealth provides to influence political life, rearranging policy to protect and expand their fortunes. They believe in liberal rights like freedom of expression, and pursue their revolutionary agenda through social organizing and democratic elections. They champion Sen. Many of the sharpest left-wing critics of liberalism do not frame themselves as opponents of liberal democratic ideals. Conservative anti-liberals question not only freedom in the economic sphere, but the value of pluralistic democracy itself — arguing that core liberal ideals about tolerance and equality actually produce an insidious form of tyranny that destroys communities and deadens the human spirit.
They have a small presence in the academy — Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen and Harvard legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, for example — but are much less visible in the professoriate than socialists. The right-leaning anti-liberals are more often found in the punditry, conservative think tanks, and even in the ranks of actual political parties particularly in Europe. The Christian publication First Things is a particular hub of media activity for these anti-liberals, as is the American Conservative magazine.
The economic split has produced more than a little infighting in conservative ranks. But conservative anti-liberals are not content with rubbishing libertarianism and other liberal economic doctrines.
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