GOLDBERG, CONSERVATIVES, AND BERKELEY RESEARCHERS

Jonah Goldberg rips into a paper (pdf file) from UC Berkeley. Sound exciting?

As often happens when academic commentary ruffles feathers among the professional punditry, Goldberg gets pissed off and rants for a while. Much of what he says is interesting. On the other hand, despite his protestations that he has read the report in order to head off "silly liberal" critics of his attack, methinks he doth protest too much. I'll admit that I haven't read the whole thing, either, but I also don't have a stake in going after what I perceive to be the excesses of "the Left" (or of "the Right," as tempting as it is in this political climate), perceived by Goldberg to be pulling the strings of the American culture marionette from places such as UC Berkeley.

Going after easy political targets may be satisfying, but it certainly won't get at the core of what the research into the social-psychological foundations of political ideology is trying to accomplish. (The usual caveat: I'm not an expert in this literature, so my views are subject to correction by people who are.) The serious and politically useful point of such research is to try to figure out what produces the success of "conservatives" at the polls, perhaps with the intent of predicting, roughly, when conservative successes are likely. The earlier "authoritarian personality" strand of research, which the authors also use, had an equally important political point: trying to figure out why fascism triumphed in the 1930s and how to head it off in the future. Think what you like about the concepts and results, but that's the main point of the research here, and it seems to me that the research should stand or fall according to its predictive value along these lines. I'm not sure about the track record of this research tradition, but my gut tells me it's probably not too much better than any other research tradition that tries to predict the political future.

It is important to differentiate between different kinds of conservatives for this exercise, and from my reading of the paper I'm not sure that the research tradition in which the authors are working does a great job at that. Fascism is not conservatism although it has been a likely political ally of some forms of conservatism, in Germany for example. And fascism in the U.S. is not really "conservative," either; they're just cranks, for the most part. People who identify themselves as "conservatives" fall into different and mutually incompatible camps, from people who support Pat Buchanan to people who support Pat Robertson to people who support both George Bush I and II. The authors of the study are dealing with the term "conservatism" as it exists in the social-psychological literature, and this term may not mean what it means in popular language. The authors even note that there is no a priori overlap between "conservative" and "right-wing":

In any case, we are not denying that liberals can be rigid defenders of the status quo or that conservatives can support change. We assume that historical and cultural variation in political systems affects both the meaning of conservatism and the strength of empirical associations between the psychological and ideological variables we investigate. To take one fairly obvious example, it seems likely that many left-wingers in totalitarian communist regimes would exhibit mental rigidity and other psychological characteristics that are often thought to be associated with right-wingers in other contexts. To be sure, social scientists in the West have undersampled these populations in developing and assessing their theories. (p. 343)

(To be fair to Goldberg, the authors then go on to use "conservative" and "right-wing" interchangeably in at least one point, which is odd, but it seems to be a function of the literature they're reviewing. See p. 344) So, what the authors do in order to get a handle on the literature is to create a more or less stipulative definition of conservatism, which for the authors means "resistance to change" and "acceptance of inequality." Much of Goldberg's piece comes down to trying to show that self-identified conservatives actually like change because they don't like what they perceive to be the liberal excesses of the 1990s (or, if you were to cast a wider net, the political excesses of the New Deal). As Goldberg says:

conservatives are the ones demanding change.

It's hard to take this view "straight up," though, since self-identified conservatives don't cast the 1990s as a period of mere experimentation that followed an earlier period of mere experimentation that followed an earlier period. . .and so on. They're interested in some kind of "good old days," whether it was the 1950s (before the Beatles and the anti-Vietnam protests), the 1920s (before the New Deal and the rise of Supreme Court activism on non-economic rights but deference on economic regulation), the 1820s (before there was much of a national government to speak of), or what have you. Contemporary conservative political rhetoric has decried the fact that liberals have been in charge since the 1960s, or 1930s, or 1860s, or whatever, and say that we should reject their unfortunate experimentation. Painting a stylized picture of the past makes current political positions appear less threatening. One thing that is interesting about the differences between contemporary U.S. liberals and contemporary U.S. conservatives, however, is their willingness to employ these rhetorical tropes. So even if it is true that contemporary conservatives say that they want to change (stipulated) liberal excesses of the last thirty, eighty, one hundred thirty, or one hundred seventy years, they are attempting to appeal to visions of the past that they believe the electorate holds. And since we're concerned not with the private, internal psychological dynamics of individual conservatives alone, but with the question of conservative success at the polls, identifying conservatives as "resisting change" makes sense.

As for acceptance of inequality, the second prong of the authors' definition of conservatism, Goldberg doesn't touch it, probably because it's simply true, if you define the domain of inequality appropriately.

One other important point. Goldberg doesn't even bother to try to account for some stunning statements at the end of the article, where the authors argue against what Goldberg claims is an excessively "psychiatric-therapeutic " approach to conservatism (and which Goldberg claims is prevalent on college campuses, although his evidence is pretty thin, but that's for another day). Here's the key passage from the paper in question:

Because conservatism often takes the form of a social movement that is shared by large groups of people in particular historical periods [. . .], it may be thought of as a social norm that emerges under certain social and political circumstances. Our review indicates that too many psychological accounts of conservatism in the past have treated it solely as a dispositional orientation and not as a situational reaction, although it is true that the disposition is often hypothesized to develop in response to certain social and family situations in childhood [. . .](p.366)

In other words, according to the authors, political conservatism isn't simply an attitude that is unrelated to political experiences. In fact, for the authors, political ideology is related to things that happen in the world, or at least to things that happen in the world as they are mediated through how we understand the world. It's hard to make a claim that the authors are arguing that conservatism is "abnormal," or that it should be treated medically, as Goldberg seems to imply. Instead, the authors are attempting to develop a comprehensive account of the sources of conservative ideology, one that corrects for a narrow focus on "disposition."

Well, hopefully the authors will now produce a review of literature on the roots of "liberalism," whatever that word means. . .

See also the Angry Clam's even more intemperate reaction here. (via California Insider)

MORE: See also the comments at riting on the wall, which point out the crucial difference between the press release and the actual study. I won't defend the press release since I pretty much agree with JB's criticisms even though I can't reprint them here because this is a G-rated blog. Oh well. To be fair to Goldberg, he tries to limit his attack to the press release, but since he claimed to have read the article as well, he opens himself up to broader criticisms. And for a learned take on the study (from someone who can speak in the terms of art), read this post at Dormouse Dreaming (and scroll up for a related thread).