Opinionator: How Did Conservatives Get This Radical?

Tom Edsall on politics inside and outside of Washington.

Whether they did so out of conviction or fear, House Republicans bent to the will of the dominant Tea Party faction of their party and voted 228 to 1 on Sept. 20 to make continued financing of the federal government contingent on defunding the Affordable Care Act.

Whatever you think of this strategy, the tactics are radical. How can Republicans, courting a full-fledged fiscal crisis, claim to be conservative?

Peter Wehner, who held key posts in the last three Republican presidential administrations, declares that they cannot:

This is not conservatism either in terms of disposition or governing philosophy. It is, rather, the product of intemperate minds and fairly radical (and thoroughly unconservative) tendencies.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page, normally a principled advocate of belligerent conservatism, argues that House Republicans are on a path to defeat: "Kamikaze missions rarely turn out well, least of all for the pilots," one editorial pointed out:

We've often supported backbenchers who want to push G.O.P. leaders in a better policy direction, most recently on the farm bill. But it's something else entirely to sabotage any plan with a chance of succeeding and pretend to have "leverage" that exists only in the world of townhall applause lines and fundraising letters.

Wehner and the Journal's editorial writers might gain insight into the collective psyche of their right flank from unexpected sources: the sociologists, psychologists and political scientists who are exploring what they see as the core differences between conservatives and liberals.

Since the emergence of intensified political polarization in the late 1970s, there has been a burst of studies examining linkages between ideology, partisan identification, and moral values.

Much of the more recent research in this vein suggests that Tea Party conservatives and their political leaders in and out of Congress are a special subset within the broader universe of conservatives.

Christopher Parker and Matt Barreto, who teach political science at the University of Washington, recently published "Change They Can't Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America." They contend that there are two major strands of conservatism in America: what they call "non Tea Party," "traditional" or "real" conservatism; and what they describe as "Tea Party," "reactionary" or "pseudo-conservatism."

In response to my inquiry, Parker wrote in an email:

Ultimately, a conservative — in the classical sense — wishes to preserve a stable society. Of course, this includes stable institutions and observing the rule of law. For these reasons (and several more), a conservative prefers evolutionary, more incremental change to revolutionary change: revolutionary change threatens the stability conservatives seek to conserve. Hence, conservatives reluctantly accept change — so long as it isn't revolutionary. They do so for the sake of stability and order. Moreover, for the sake of order and stability, real conservatives are amenable to political compromise with their opponents.

Conversely, according to Parker, reactionary conservatives are

backwards looking, generally fearful of losing their way of life in a wave of social change. To preserve their group's social status, they're willing to undermine long-established norms and institutions — including the law. They see political differences as a war of good versus evil in which their opponents are their enemies. For them, compromise is commensurate with defeat — not political expediency. They believe social change is subversive to the America with which they've become familiar, i.e., white, mainly male, Protestant, native born, straight. "Real Americans," in other words.

Parker and Barreto conducted surveys to see if Tea Party conservatives differ from non-tea Party conservatives. As the graphs in Figures 1-3 show, the two kinds of conservatives diverge significantly on key issues: immigration, civil liberties, and in how they see President Obama.

Support for immigrant equality by type of conservatism

Support for civil liberties among Tea Party and Non-Tea Party conservatives

Attitudes toward President Obama

A newly published book, "Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us," takes a different tack in exploring the contradictory ideological positions of left and right. The author, Avi Tuschman, who earned a doctorate in evolutionary anthropology at Stanford and now works at the Inter-American Development Bank, contends that "the best cross-cultural predictor of left-right voting and party affiliation" is revealed by a 22-item test developed by Robert Altemeyer, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba. You can take the test yourself on pages 11 and 12 of this document.

Altemeyer's questionnaire asks respondents to estimate their agreement or disagreement with statements like these:

The established authorities generally turn out to be right about things, while the radicals and protestors are usually just "loud mouths" showing off their ignorance.

Atheists and others who have rebelled against the established religions are no doubt every bit as good and virtuous as those who attend church regularly.

The only way our country can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our traditional values, put some tough leaders in power, and silence the troublemakers spreading bad ideas.

Everyone should have their own lifestyle, religious beliefs, and sexual preferences, even if it makes them different from everyone else.

God's laws about abortion, pornography and marriage must be strictly followed before it is too late, and those who break them must be strongly punished.

Tuschman makes the case that Altemeyer's questionnaire reveals three clusters of measurable personality traits that correlate with political conservatism or liberalism:

1) Tribalism vs. xenophilia (an attraction to outsider groups); religiosity vs. secularism; and different levels of tolerance of "non-reproductive sexuality";

2) opposing moral worldviews concerning inequality, one based on the principle of egalitarianism, the other based on ordered hierarchy, what people used to call "the great chain of being"; and

3) perceptions of human nature, people who see human nature as more cooperative vs. others who see it as more competitive.

John Jost, a professor of psychology and politics at N.Y.U., uses descriptive language (language other social scientists characterize as unflattering) to describe conservatives and flattering language to describe liberals. In "Political Ideology: Its Structure, Functions, and Elective Affinities," a 2009 paper, Jost and two co-authors write:

Speciﬁcally, death anxiety, system instability, fear of threat and loss, dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity, and personal needs for order, structure, and closure were all positively associated with conservatism. Conversely, openness to new experiences, cognitive complexity, tolerance of uncertainty, and (to a small extent) self-esteem were all positively associated with liberalism.

James Sidanius, a professor of psychology at Harvard, working from a liberal perspective, uses a measure he calls "Social Dominance Orientation" to describe "the extent to which one desires that one's in-group dominate and be superior to out-groups."

An individual's social dominance orientation ranking, according to research Sidanius has conducted, derives from negative or positive responses to 16 statements. A person responding positively to the first eight (1-8) questions and negatively to the second group (9-16) would have a very high SDO rating.

First Group: 1. Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups. 2. In getting what you want, it is sometimes necessary to use force against other groups. 3. It's O.K. if some groups have more of a chance in life than others. 4. To get ahead in life, it is sometimes necessary to step on other groups. 5. If certain groups stayed in their place, we would have fewer problems. 6. It's probably a good thing that certain groups are at the top and other groups are at the bottom. 7. Inferior groups should stay in their place. 8. Sometimes other groups must be kept in their place.

Second Group: 9. It would be good if groups could be equal. 10. Group equality should be our ideal. 11. All groups should be given an equal chance in life. 12. We should do what we can to equalize conditions for different groups. 13. Increased social equality is beneficial to society. 14. We would have fewer problems if we treated people more equally. 15. We should strive to make incomes as equal as possible. 16. No group should dominate in society.

In their book, Parker and Barreto found a strong linkage between higher S.D.O. ranking and Tea Party Conservatives ("True Believers"). They write:

S.D.O. is a reflection of one's "preference for inequality among social groups." Someone who has high levels of S.D.O. is likely to buy into the hierarchy-enhancing ideologies, ones that resulting in the perpetuation of inequality. People who are low on S.D.O. are more likely to promote equality. We contend that people high in S.D.O, people who are intent on keeping subordinate groups down as a means of maintaining group-based prestige, are likely to support right-wing movements and, therefore, the Tea Party.

The following graph (Fig. 2), provided to The Times by Parker, shows that there are more Tea Party conservatives with high measured levels of social dominance orientation (39 percent) compared to non-Tea Party conservatives (30 percent):

Mainstream conservatives trying to figure out how to extract their party from the hole their more extreme colleagues are digging for them face a major hurdle: the dependence of the national Republican Party on the votes of besieged whites, especially white southerners. Another signal of the intransigence of this core Republican constituency was a little noticed development last week: the announcement that two Republican members of the House bipartisan immigration reform group, Representatives John Carter and Sam Johnson, both from Texas, had quit the reform effort. They joined Representative Raúl Labrador of Idaho, who left in June. Representative Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida is the lone, and presumably lonely, Republican on this ad hoc committee, which was once split evenly between the parties.

There may be no way to overcome this hurdle except to wait. Until more white voters come to terms with their status as an emerging American minority, the forces driving voters to support Tea Party candidates and elected officials who adamantly reject compromise will remain strong — and the Republican Party will remain fractured.