by Judith Warner
10:30 pm
Why Voters Like Values
Categories: Politics
Dennis Prager, the Los Angeles talk radio host, recently posted a very interesting article called “Left Behind” on the Web site of Focus on the Family, the conservative Christian group. It explores what Prager sees as the increasing out-of-touchness of American liberals since Sept. 11, a condition he equates with the “left’s incapacity to deal with evil.”
“The left has different values from the rest of us,” Prager writes of the reluctance of some liberal commentators to vilify America’s enemies. “… it is oblivious to the question of good versus evil.”
Think what you will of this, but at least on the level of language, Prager – who is not a Christian rightist but rather, a professional moralist who has written extensively on Judaism – has a good point. And it isn’t just that by disdaining the language of good and evil the left (really, the center) has alienated a big portion of the American electorate. It’s more that, in doing so, the left-inclined center may be going against the grain of human nature.
Prager is not the first to point out that the Christian right is ahead of everyone else in engaging voters’ hearts and minds. The Democrats know it; they’ve been turning themselves inside out trying to strike the right note on matters of faith and family (read: abortion, which is problematic in and of itself). The Christian right is jubilant over this situation. At their massive Values Voters Summit in Washington, D.C., last weekend, they feted it, particularly at a session on “Liberal Sisters of Doom,” which I felt called upon to attend.
It was quite an event. The Regency Ballroom of the Omni Shoreham Hotel was packed, and it resonated with growls, snarls and boos as such embodiments of evil as Katie Couric, Barbara Walters and Diane Feinstein were roasted on a verbal spit. There were gasps as panelist Jennifer Giroux, a mother of nine best known for her “Just Say Merry Christmas” wristband campaign, shared tales of coed dorms in Christian colleges, sperm banks (“The ultimate child abuse is putting a child in a gay household”), and women destroying troop morale on the front lines of Iraq.
You won’t hear these voices in the mainstream media, various speakers exulted. That is true. And as much as people like me may rejoice in the fact, we perhaps also need to see that it may be the reason we’re losing the communications war.
You can argue until you’re blue in the face about the nature of the “values” conveyed at the values conference. You can argue about the faithfulness to the Christian spirit of a summit imbued with so much intolerance and hate. But I would suggest that the main element of the Christian right’s winning formula for stirring up the Republican base isn’t really “values” at all. It’s psychology.
Reading Prager this week, visiting with the helmet-haired defenders of virtue on Rosh Hashana eve, I was reminded of a conversation I once had with Jerome Kagan, a professor emeritus of psychology at Harvard, who is best known for his work on temperament and his writings on psychology and culture. We were ostensibly talking for my new (still unwritten) book on kids with “issues.” But it was the day after the 2004 presidential election, and our conversation drifted to the Republicans’ “values” agenda, and Kagan’s belief that values sell because they’re an antidote to the endemic mental health problem of our time: depression.
“Humans demand that there be a clear right and wrong,” he said. “You’ve got to believe that the track you’ve taken is the right track. You get depressed if you’re not certain as to what it is you’re supposed to be doing or what’s right and wrong in the world.”
People need to divide the world into good and evil, us and them, Kagan continued. To do otherwise – to entertain the possibility that life is not black and white, but variously shaded in gray – is perhaps more honest, rational and decent. But it’s also, psychically, a recipe for disaster, as are the psychic pressures of life in our multicultural, tolerant, globalist, egalitarian, post-1960’s era. “It all leads to great uncertainty as to what is right and what is wrong,” he said. “That is very conducive to depression.”
Kagan added, parenthetically, that the Republican Party wins elections because the Democrats – with their perceived agenda of tolerance, multiculturalism and equality – are inherently depressing.
Call me naïve: I do not believe that religious faith, however fervent, need translate into witch-hunting, puritanical intolerance and hatred. But profound insecurity and anxiety often do. People will engage in all kinds of mental acrobatics to stave off depression, will sacrifice no small number of scapegoats to avoid cognitive dissonance. And the religious right has – consciously or not – been nothing less than brilliant at meeting the psychological needs of an electorate knocked off-center by modernity.
Centrists now face a choice: join in the hate fest, or give people something solid with which to combat their angst.
Why Voters Like Values
Categories: Politics
Dennis Prager, the Los Angeles talk radio host, recently posted a very interesting article called “Left Behind” on the Web site of Focus on the Family, the conservative Christian group. It explores what Prager sees as the increasing out-of-touchness of American liberals since Sept. 11, a condition he equates with the “left’s incapacity to deal with evil.”
“The left has different values from the rest of us,” Prager writes of the reluctance of some liberal commentators to vilify America’s enemies. “… it is oblivious to the question of good versus evil.”
Think what you will of this, but at least on the level of language, Prager – who is not a Christian rightist but rather, a professional moralist who has written extensively on Judaism – has a good point. And it isn’t just that by disdaining the language of good and evil the left (really, the center) has alienated a big portion of the American electorate. It’s more that, in doing so, the left-inclined center may be going against the grain of human nature.
Prager is not the first to point out that the Christian right is ahead of everyone else in engaging voters’ hearts and minds. The Democrats know it; they’ve been turning themselves inside out trying to strike the right note on matters of faith and family (read: abortion, which is problematic in and of itself). The Christian right is jubilant over this situation. At their massive Values Voters Summit in Washington, D.C., last weekend, they feted it, particularly at a session on “Liberal Sisters of Doom,” which I felt called upon to attend.
It was quite an event. The Regency Ballroom of the Omni Shoreham Hotel was packed, and it resonated with growls, snarls and boos as such embodiments of evil as Katie Couric, Barbara Walters and Diane Feinstein were roasted on a verbal spit. There were gasps as panelist Jennifer Giroux, a mother of nine best known for her “Just Say Merry Christmas” wristband campaign, shared tales of coed dorms in Christian colleges, sperm banks (“The ultimate child abuse is putting a child in a gay household”), and women destroying troop morale on the front lines of Iraq.
You won’t hear these voices in the mainstream media, various speakers exulted. That is true. And as much as people like me may rejoice in the fact, we perhaps also need to see that it may be the reason we’re losing the communications war.
You can argue until you’re blue in the face about the nature of the “values” conveyed at the values conference. You can argue about the faithfulness to the Christian spirit of a summit imbued with so much intolerance and hate. But I would suggest that the main element of the Christian right’s winning formula for stirring up the Republican base isn’t really “values” at all. It’s psychology.
Reading Prager this week, visiting with the helmet-haired defenders of virtue on Rosh Hashana eve, I was reminded of a conversation I once had with Jerome Kagan, a professor emeritus of psychology at Harvard, who is best known for his work on temperament and his writings on psychology and culture. We were ostensibly talking for my new (still unwritten) book on kids with “issues.” But it was the day after the 2004 presidential election, and our conversation drifted to the Republicans’ “values” agenda, and Kagan’s belief that values sell because they’re an antidote to the endemic mental health problem of our time: depression.
“Humans demand that there be a clear right and wrong,” he said. “You’ve got to believe that the track you’ve taken is the right track. You get depressed if you’re not certain as to what it is you’re supposed to be doing or what’s right and wrong in the world.”
People need to divide the world into good and evil, us and them, Kagan continued. To do otherwise – to entertain the possibility that life is not black and white, but variously shaded in gray – is perhaps more honest, rational and decent. But it’s also, psychically, a recipe for disaster, as are the psychic pressures of life in our multicultural, tolerant, globalist, egalitarian, post-1960’s era. “It all leads to great uncertainty as to what is right and what is wrong,” he said. “That is very conducive to depression.”
Kagan added, parenthetically, that the Republican Party wins elections because the Democrats – with their perceived agenda of tolerance, multiculturalism and equality – are inherently depressing.
Call me naïve: I do not believe that religious faith, however fervent, need translate into witch-hunting, puritanical intolerance and hatred. But profound insecurity and anxiety often do. People will engage in all kinds of mental acrobatics to stave off depression, will sacrifice no small number of scapegoats to avoid cognitive dissonance. And the religious right has – consciously or not – been nothing less than brilliant at meeting the psychological needs of an electorate knocked off-center by modernity.
Centrists now face a choice: join in the hate fest, or give people something solid with which to combat their angst.
posted by ~~whileuwait @ 1:00 PM
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