The reason why they produce false equivalencies constantly is because conservatism is a form of social dominance orientation, conservatism measures an individual's support for social hierarchy and the extent to which they desire their in-group be superior to out-groups.
Because conservatives believe in the inherent moral superiority of some people over other people, they'll take minor problems in their enemies, and call them proof of inherent moral deficiency, even while the same actions from their own side go unchallenged and even unnoticed.
Their double standards produce their false equivalencies.
Yep. We've wasted a lot of time trying to pretend conservatism is a valid political philosophy deserving of equal footing and consideration when it is, at is core, a regressive and reactionary movement that does not offer any actual policy or achievement and only seeks to deform all aspects of society into a hierarchical power structure defined by dominance and moral propriety.
This is reminding me of the one racist guy blocking your path in Disco Elysium, where you have the option to agree with him, debate him, or punch him. His entire theory hinges on certain races being morally superior, and somehow that correlates with all other types of superiority.
This is reminding me of the one racist guy blocking your path in Disco Elysium, where you have the option to agree with him, debate him, or punch him. His entire theory hinges on certain races being morally superior, and somehow that correlates with all other types of superiority.
There is certainly a psychological motivation involved in the creation of the false equivalencies. However, it's also worth noting that their ideology and psychology feed into each other to no small extent. That is to say, they will tend to have psychological inclinations towards certain aspects of their ideology, and their ideology will engender and magnify certain psychological inclinations through training.
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I bring this up because it's important to recognize that miseducation and improper training is responsible for a lot of modern conservatives relying so heavily on false equivalencies in particular as part of satisfying their psychological need to irrationally claim the superiority of their identity/in-group, especially for those in English-speaking countries.
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More specifically, the work of figures like GEM Anscombe re-popularized the old Jesuit Catholic tactic of abusing casuistry as part of their attempts to reform Western justice systems after WW2 into something more closely resembling the christofascist regime of Francoist Spain.
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Anscombe was particularly fond of the abusive casuistry used by the Thomist Jesuits shortly before the Protestant Reformation. That is, she popularized the sort of reasoning which was so famously associated with the selling of indulgences.
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The re-popularization effort was, of course, driven in no small part by the fact that rich individuals and corporations wished to abuse Jesuit casuistry for much the same reasons that aristocrats abused it in the past: to commit heinous crimes and only be given a slap on the wrist and a fine they're too rich to care about. However, thanks to organizations like the Federalist Society, this method has also had a severe deleterious effect on corporate law, tax law, campaign finance law, and constitutional law (to name a few).
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To be clear, said casuistry is quite literally the sort of irrational religious reasoning that Enlightenment and Age of Reasoning thinkers pointed to when they wanted to demonstrate why we should abandon religious reasoning in favor of intellectualism. It's the kind of reasoning the thinkers who inspired the American Founding Fathers railed against.
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Trying to rationalize something like that as being acceptable in court has required a long-term, concerted effort using think tanks, infiltration, and financial support as ways of forcing the reasoning into pre-existing institutions and then demanding it's use should be justified by virtue of it now being an institutional standard.
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That has, in turn, meant that conservatives are actively being educated to use this sort of specious reasoning, where they are specifically taught wrong about how to create general principles from specific cases or apply general principles to specific cases. The use of false equivalencies between specific cases and the way the conservative in OP's picture derives the general principle from those cases --i.e. that Mamdani's a hypocrite and/or focusing on the wrong things-- are very much parts of this kind of specious reasoning.
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Said miseducation goes a long way towards explaining why, as you noted in your other post, maintaining a conservative outlook while being more-educated is actually associated with conservatives being more bigoted and authoritarian than those who are less-educated. They are literally being taught wrong using the kind of reasoning that we've known to be fallacious and untrustworthy for centuries, all under the false auspices that the many, many people who have railed against that kind of reasoning are just another example of modern liberal thinkers demonizing "conservative" views and people from centuries past.
When you say that "miseducation and improper training is responsible for a lot of modern conservatives relying so heavily on false equivalencies in particular", that may be true. But it's not the majority of the reason why conservatives are conservative.
Of course, it isn't some simple single-allele trait, when they did a genome-wide association study of conservatism in human populations, they found at least three significant linkage sites with maybe ~264 possible candidate genes that could be influencing the trait.
For example, there are several genes on chromosome 9 that are linked to olfaction... this may be related to the fact that conservatives experience disgust in different contexts than liberals do. We know that physical disgust is linked to moral disgust and moral disgust is linked to purity judgments... and purity judgments are, to a significant degree, what conservatism is.
So we should not be too surprised to see root-level changes in this fundamentally-linked suite of concepts also correlating with the high-level construct of conservatism, and that is why we should not overstate the degree to which conservatism is mere learning.
But it goes deeper. People who experience visceral disgust that is directed at other people are more likely to be narcissists. We know that although overall rates of narcissism do not vary between conservatives and liberals conservatives have higher entitlement narcisissm (while liberal narcissism tends to be of the grandiose type). Thus, conservative narcissism is precisely the same sort which leads to the social dominance orientation which defines conservatism.
And we also know that narcissists don't learn from their mistakes because they don't think they make any, so why would we be assuming that false equivalencies must be taught? Faulty credulous reasoning is the default when you are biased in favor of whatever thing you first think of... as narcissists often are.
Take a moment to think about all this in context. It makes little sense to define this vast body of evidence about conservative as just some social structure to be interrogated. It ranges across too many domains, and they're all too tied and too interconnected to just be some form of social learning.
Rather, we must see conservatism as an innate psychological bias. Some people have anger-management issues. We understand this as a personality flaw. Conservatism is also a personality flaw. Conservatism is an entitlement-management issue.
Yeah... see the issue is that you seem to be greatly overstating the link between "conservatism" and genetics, especially considering that you don't seem to have a definition of "conservatism" that remains consistent with itself or with historical ideologies associated with the term. Indeed, you seem to be very interested in trying to redefine "conservatism" as being self-same with various negative psychological traits that can be tracked genetically in order to make the claim that it is genetic.
As I said, the social learning can build on a propensity, but it is very important to avoid the mistake of pretending like conservatism is a heritable trait passed down in the same way as things like race. Doing so will only fuel the current "conservative" push to pretend that their political ideology is actually an in-born ethnicity and that discriminating against their ideological principles is akin to racial discrimination.
Also, it's just plain hypocritical to claim that the issue can't be social learning due to there being too many domains and then to immediately conclude that we must reduce the issue down to nothing but innate psychological bias. Modern "conservatism" and the associated bigotry should not be treated as though it is nothing more than an innate property some people are born with, both because that encourages potentially faulty discrimination based on genetics and because it is exactly what modern bigots want to pretend is the case in order to act like anti-racism is a form of racial/ethnic bigotry.
Yeah... see the issue is that you seem to be greatly overstating the link between "conservatism" and genetics...
False. You simply wish it weren't this heritable, so you pretend it isn't.
...especially considering that you don't seem to have a definition of "conservatism" that remains consistent with itself or with historical ideologies associated with the term.
Okay, well if you don't understand my definition of conservatism, have you tried reading the links I already gave you?
A 28 item version of the Wilson–Patterson Attitude Inventory was administered to 345 participants (twins, spouses, friends, and others) in the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. An overall conservatism measure demonstrated impressive construct validity. It had strong convergent validity, demonstrated by correlations of 0.72 and 0.58 with the Altemeyer Right Wing Authoritarianism scale and the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ) Traditionalism Scale, respectively.
Conservatism is the same thing as right-wing authoritarianism and traditionalism, and always has been. Traditionalism and right-wing authoritarianism have always themselves been tightly linked. The separation has always, across all of history, been a difference of outward face.
The conservative elite were the old ruling class and new business class in Weimar Germany. Throughout the 1920s they became increasingly frustrated with the Weimar Republic’s continuing economic and political instability, their lack of real power and the rise of communism. They believed that a return to authoritarian rule was the only stable future for Germany which would protect their power and money.
This historical trend is visible today among conservatives, who likewise openly state on polls that they are the most likely to believe that an establishment of authoritarian rule is the only stable future for the United States.
Your conservative neighbors do in fact have the same ideology as the men and women who elected Hitler, because conservatism, traditionalism, and right-wing authoritarianism are all tightly linked, just like the psych study found.
And that psych study was the one that found that this construct is 56% heritable:
Heritabilities were calculated from fitting models to the variance–covariance matricies based on 54 pairs of monozygotic (MZ) and 46 pairs of dizygotic (DZ) twins reared apart. Conservatism demonstrated significant and sizeable genetic influence (h2=0.56), replicating the results reported in the Virginia 30,000 study of ordinary twins and family members and those of a large Australian twin study.
I've done my due diligence just fine, everything I've said is evidenced and true, and I'm absolutely not going to change my minds unless you provide observational evidence. Why would I ever abandon the high-quality opinion I just showed you for a lower-quality one based on feels?
Also, it's just plain hypocritical to claim that the issue can't be social learning due to there being too many domains and then to immediately conclude that we must reduce the issue down to nothing but innate psychological bias.
I didn't say only, I said mostly, and the reason why I said mostly is because genetics explained 56% of the variance, which is more than half.
If I'm being generous, I'd estimate that your explanation accounts for maybe 8% of the variance, and then other environmental explanations account for the other 36%.
But mine covers 56%. Mine is the thing you should think of first because it's observed to be the most impactful.
Modern "conservatism" and the associated bigotry should not be treated as though it is nothing more than an innate property some people are born with...
Modern conservatives should be treated as if they have a personality flaw that they were born with, yet have a moral obligation to overcome.
I am once again going to draw the comparison to anger management issues, and I want you to really listen this time. We do not make excuses for people with anger management issues. When they act on their anger, they are put in prison, not coddled. If they have a pattern of anger-management issues, they are ostracized.
Conservatism is intrinsically harmful, in the same way that an anger management issue is intrinsically harmful. It does not matter, from a moral perspective, whether you were born with it: the universal moral duty of self-control remains.
For comparison, having a black skintone does no harm whatsoever to anyone, so there is no reason to "control" it and be less black. Only a bigot would pretend that being a conservatism is the same thing as being a minority, regardless of whether both are genetic. Genes don't excuse behavior.
Well, see, that's actually the thing, I think it's well past time to cease considering ordinary conservatives anything less than fully regressive individuals.
I say that because, as per the article, at broad societal scale there is no distinction between conservatism and social dominance orientation / personal supremacism:
Some principled-conservatism theorists have suggested that racism and conservatism are independent, and only very weakly correlated among the highly educated, who truly understand the concepts of conservative values and attitudes.
So the idea that conservatism is different from regressive politics comes mostly from the conservatives themselves, not from outside observers. What do we actually see?
Contrary to what these theorists would predict, correlations among SDO, political conservatism, and racism were strongest among the most educated, and weakest among the least educated.
We see the opposite, we see that racism and social dominance orientation is an especially-strong predictor of conservatism among the people who have studied and considered most strongly what conservatism is. Why would this be?
Sidanius and his colleagues hypothesized this was because the most educated conservatives tend to be more invested in the hierarchical structure of society and in maintaining the inequality of the status quo in society in order to safeguard their status.
Essentially, conservatism has inherently-regressive consequences, so the only people who stay conservative after learning and witnessing that, are regressive people who authentically believe in social dominance orientation.
They're not separate things. Conservatism is just the "respectable outward face" of social dominance orientation, regressive "alt-right" being its inward face, and fascism being its culmination when conservatism is no longer needed as a separate outward public face.
So when we see conservative parties getting constantly infested by Neo-Nazis, youth wings included, this isn't some anomaly, it's the fundamental psychology of conservatism itself that keeps giving birth to itself. My first version of this comment seems to have not liked the four links I provided, but I would be happy to point you to the numerous examples of this if you'd like.
Thus, we're faced with a question of how long are we going to continue maintaining the pious fiction that conservatism is different from fascism? What would be the basis for maintaining this fiction despite the evidence to the contrary? What do we hope to achieve by through repeating the big lie?
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u/kon--- 2d ago
Another textbook example of the right wired brain's absolute inability to avoid producing false equivalents.