Insights Into Apparent Callousness Among Conservatives

I suspect a lot of Conservatives reacted to news reports and infographics that more than 46 million Americans now live in poverty about the same way some of their ultra-conservative-faction Tea Party members did during the recent debate by cheering pulling the plug on anyone who is dying but that doesn’t have health insurance.

Even if a subsequent attempt to balance perception of that event is accurate, flippancy and conservatism go back a long way including Lord Tommy Dewar’s famous early 20th century quip that “if we are here to help others, I often wonder what the others are here for.”

While it would be much too easy, even as a politically moderate Independent, I have too many friends of that persuasion, who are compassionate, to brush all Conservatives off as heartless.

My friends may not go as far as one Conservative commentator did while referring to some as having “no sense of moral decency” but even they would agree there is some truth to the perception that many Conservatives seem callous and recently I’ve come across several possible explanations.

One possible insight into those who are truly callous is that a pivotal “switch” may not have been flipped in childhood as described by Dr. Jim Taylor’s excellent new book for parents when he wrote that:

“…even if children are predisposed to compassion, what begins as an egocentric stage can turn into an entrenched attribute if that genetic switch isn’t turned on. And the way parents ensure that the switch is flipped is by sending children messages that discourage selfishness and encourage compassion.”

Another insight may be that Conservatives seem to be far more likely to be “declinists” by nature or more likely to fall under the spell of others who are. According to journalist Alan W. Dowd, who documents that America has been viewed as in “decline” a good portion of the last 300 years.

I’ve primarily been moderate and Independent politically since coming of age, but growing up in an ultra-conservative Republican household, by age 15 the first political books I read were John Birch Society-inspired paranoid-declinest-readers such as A Texan Looks At Lyndon, subtitled “a study of illegitimate power” and A Choice Not An Echo. Books like these probably pushed many of us toward becoming Independent and/or Liberal.

But judging from a recent infographic documenting the economic prosperity from ‘47-‘79, during my first 30 years of age and the economic regression from ‘80 until the present, the past 30 years, a period dominated by conservative politicians including the “Great Communicator” President Ronald Reagan, it seems stagnation, if not relative decline, may actually correlate closely with conservative viewpoints and policies.

It is important to note that correlation is not necessarily causation but after thirty years it is clear that the conservative inclination shows no sign of pay-off, no matter how many times it continues to be rebranded. In fact those who are so ready to preach the politics of “decline” in the Republican presidential primaries may find that their approach has actually led to the stagnation of the past thirty years.

Another insight into why so many Conservatives seem callous can be found in the research findings reviewed in the book American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us when authors Drs. David Campbell and Robert Putnam write:

“Experiencing a loving God is associated with high trust in one’s fellow mortals, whereas experiencing a judgmental God is associated with low trust in other people….Religious liberals…are among the most socially trusting of Americans, whereas religious conservatives more often experience a judgmental God, and they are among the least trusting of Americans, especially if they are not observant.”

Contrasting those believing in a Judgmental God vs. a Loving God may in part also explain why conservative Republicans felt comfortable taking two-thirds of the budget cuts in its recently House-passed “Pathway to Prosperity” budget out of “programs that serve people of limited means” according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities while including the notation below appearing on page 25 that the budget will:

“ensure that America’s safety net does not become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.”

To me that sentence reflects what many would call a lack of “social trust” including Conservative author and columnist David Brooks in his book The Social Animal where he writes:

“Without social trust, the political system devolves into a brutal shoving match…The social fabric is based on the idea that effort leads to reward. But very often, government rewards people who have not put in the effort. It does this with good intentions…[e.g. welfare entitlement] and it does it with venal intentions [e.g. lobbyist-secured earmarks, tax breaks, subsides and corporate welfare]…

These programs weaken social trust and public confidence. By separating effort from reward, they pollute the atmosphere. They send the message that the system is rigged and society is corrupt.”

But from their research, the authors of American Grace further note that ultra-conservative, highly religious Republicans are especially vulnerable when it comes to social trust when they write:

“Fundamentalist religious views are negatively associated with social trust…Social trust increases with religious attendance but decreases with fundamentalism…Religious liberals more often experience a loving God, and they are among the most socially trusting of Americans, whereas religious conservatives more often experience a judgmental God, and they are among the least trusting of Americans, especially if they are not observant.

For highly observant fundamentalist Americans, their theology inclines them toward skepticism about human nature but their frequent attendance somehow move them to a more optimistic view.”

“Social trust” which is defined as a belief in the honesty, integrity and reliability of others - a "faith in people" is regularly benchmarked by the Pew Center and the General Social Survey. Studies also show that “social trust” correlates with quality of life and economic health.

In a column a couple of weeks ago entitled The Vigorous Virtues Brooks further comments on the importance of social trust but chastises the current Conservative and ergo Republican positions as inadequate:

“Finally, there is the problem of the social fabric. Segmented societies do not thrive, nor do ones, like ours, with diminishing social trust…government may have helped undermine personal responsibility and the social fabric, but that doesn’t mean the older habits and arrangements will magically regrow simply by reducing government’s role.”

It does appear that Brooks, as a compassionate Conservative, is in the minority both in his ideology and in the Republican Party. It is not at all clear from everything I’ve read that compassion as a value can be learned by an adult if “the switch wasn’t flipped” in childhood or that there is room for compassion in a worldview based on a Judgmental God.

Nor is there any evidence that empathy and compassion can come from reading first-hand accounts of poverty like Joe Queenan’s article this month entitled The Inconvenient Truths About Poverty.

As you’ll note in one of the first reader comments at the bottom of the article

At 12:05PM on 6 September 2011, jr wrote:

“this article is 100% bunk. the tv producer was correct. do you expect to live in a world that there is no differentiation between rich and poor? if so you are living in fantasy land. why would anyone strive to be successful if laziness would suffice? this is just more of the distribution of wealth bs as touted by the liberal democrats in power. it results in buying elections by paying the poor to stay unemployed and receive govt. assistance.”

As for me, I’m far more persuaded by a comment posted by Jay Zenner, a friend who blogs at Springtree Territory, when I first blogged about Queenan’s article:

“I guess there's more than one type of poverty. Besides financial poverty there's intellectual poverty and spiritual poverty. None of them are ennobling and all major religions and Rotary preach providing help to break the ‘vicious circle’ Queenan mentions...for all types of poverty”.

The Infrastructure of Poverty

While poverty is a deep concern to me, I may often fit Joe Queenan’s description below whenever I try to blog about it:

“This is compassion by anecdote, as if warm feelings or righteous indignation ever helped anybody. The professionally compassionate, the industriously empathetic, never, ever get things right; the textures of poverty forever elude them.”

But Queenan, a humorist and critic, actually did grow up in poverty.  It is part of the most recent book of his that I’ve read entitled Closing Time, a memoir published last year.

The article he published this month in The Rotarian magazine, entitled The Inconvenient Truths About Poverty, is truly a must-read for everyone along the entire ideological spectrum.

Queenan is an equal opportunity critic and his brief article isn’t really just about the “industriously empathetic” such as myself.  His article is also about those who have hardened their hearts, to use a religious reference,” to those in poverty.

I haven’t been able to get the following description of poverty out of my head (don’t be tempted to skim it, please read the entire quote, then go back up, open the link and read his entire article):

“The philosophical infrastructure of poverty is rooted in an interlocking series of self-fulfilling prophecies. Poor people eat bad food, drink bad beverages, and ceaselessly make bad decisions, and these counterproductive activities are then used as an indictment of their moral character. Thus, the poor become the architects of their own destruction. Poverty is a dunce school where the old teach the young how to make bad decisions. Adults who have bad eating habits, adults who smoke, adults who have substance abuse problems teach young people how to acquire these bad habits. They lead by example. The acquired bad habits are then used as an indictment of the poor children when they themselves come of age.”

It’s primary campaign season and we can all identify with Queenan’s comment that “every time you think you have heard the dumbest thing you are ever going to hear in your lifetime, somebody steps right up to the plate and hits the next pitch 400 feet farther than you’ve ever seen anyone hit it before. A lot of these people work in television.”

Conservative, moderate or liberal, you’ll be well-served to open the link to this article and read it.  For the most part, it seems that the vast majority of elected decision-makers and policy-makers have little or no first-hand experience with poverty.

Many on the right seem blind and insensitive and even idiotic when it comes to solutions to poverty.  Many on the left, ironically, seem much too conservative and wedded to solutions that no longer seem to be working.

As an Independent, I listen carefully to thoughtful voices on the left and many on the right such as David Brooks who wrote last week that solutions “cannot be done by government alone, but they can’t be done without leadership from government.”  He further noted that the “current Republican policy of negativism, cut, cut, cut is not enough.”

To me, the American way is to once again embrace, with vigor, F.D.R.’s vow of “bold, persistent experimentation…to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another but above all, try something.”

Everyone concerned about poverty would be well served to seek out the perspective of people such as Joe Queenan who have actually been poor even if the truths are inconvenient and run counter to many commonly-held beliefs.

Sleazy Marketing Is Polarizing America

I was always proud of my now-concluded four-decade career in marketing but it is disgraceful now to witness marketing techniques being perverted to tear our nation apart.

Granted, I was sheltered by my specialty in community/destination marketing which is bound by a strict code of ethics.

But isn’t it ironic that the process for selecting or influencing our nation’s civic leadership is one of the few remaining, if not the last sector, of our society that is not compelled to be transparent, honest and ethical?

Instead of marketers showing leadership in this regard, most seem conspicuously silent while a few are instead perverting marketing to make politics even more sleazy.

I always felt marketing was honorable not only because in my profession I used it to better communities but because I came up in the school that taught that:

marketing at its core, like good parenting, is about helping other people make distinctions and good decisions, decisions that are best for them even if in the end your product or service or community or world-view is not selected.

Okay, that may be a little "Kumbayah" but believe me, it works much better than the old-school sales or product-driven approach of hoodwinking customers into buying what you have to sell rather than what they need, often involving unethical subsidies and kick-backs.

Here are two ways I see marketing being perverted in politics not just by some secular Americans but by a group to which this would seem anathema: a small sliver of the 1 in 10 Americans who score highest on the religiosity index and form the core of the so-called Religious or Christian Right now “rebranded” as the Tea Party.

The popular media misuses the term “rebranded” because it is also misused by so many newly-appointed corporate executives eager to stamp their ego on a company or product or to attempt to outrun bad publicity and low public opinion with what in reality is a simple a “renaming” or “refreshing” of the most superficial elements of a brand.

The classic example of the power of renaming is when in 1947, after being known as the as the U.S. War Department for 160 years, the name was changed to The Department of Defense, in part, to make lobbying more palatable.

The news media didn’t miss it when AIG was renamed Chartis after it was caught up at the center of the financial scam that created and deepened the Great Recession and in turn generated the deficit/debt controversy, most of which occurred much earlier. The media didn’t miss it, primarily, because the company publicized the change to comply in part, I suspect, with securities regulations and truth in advertising etc.

But the popular media has failed to see through the crafty story marketers created for the origin of the Tea Party even after revelations a year ago by prize-winning investigative reporter Jane Meyer in an article entitled Covert Operations. I was amused and taken back in time when I read the connection with the John Birch Society, a similarly ultra-conservative movement that opposed the Civil Rights movement.

That the Tea Party is a simple but highly effective “rebranding” of older movements that had fallen out of favor in public opinion and particularly with generations that came of age during the 1990s and 2000s was given even more credibility in an Op-Ed piece earlier this month published in the New York Times.

The authors of the op-ed, David Campbell now at Notre Dame and Robert D. Putnam at Harvard, also collaborated an incredible book, I just finished reading, entitled American Grace – How Religion Divides and United Us based on many surveys including the two-year Faith Matters Survey.

Their op-ed is a preview to a follow-up study that will be detailed in a new edition due out early next year. The book is incredibly easy to read and highly recommended for both the 83% of Americans who belong to a religion and the 17% who do not identify with a religion but 80% of whom believe in God.

The book is also a reminder that, while the current involvement of religion in politics is fueled around a relatively small sliver of the 1 in 10 Americans who are conservative ultra-traditionalists, both socially and economically, religionists were also at the heart of many liberal movements such as the American Revolution, antislavery, the social gospel and both the Progressive and Civil Rights movements.

The divide is so extreme today simply because marketers helped political operatives identify, exploit and exaggerate differences using premarital sex, homosexuality and abortion. They have also used demographic and psychographic projections to panic extremes because the generations coming of age, including those who profess to be religious, are less concerned about the first two issues and are moving to the center on the third.

Marketing is being perverted not to help people understand distinctions and see solutions but to blind them through fear, exaggeration and misinformation.

One last example occurred to me after reading this quarter’s issue of Good Magazine featuring an article by William Wheeler entitled The Information Arms Race.

It summarizers the perversion in politics of a marketing best practice called predictive analytics or micro-targeting. When I worked there before my recent retirement, our community/destination marketing organization for Durham became one of the first to use micro-targeting so I have a modest understanding.

We used it nationwide to identify households that mirrored the characteristics of visitors who had already visited and liked Durham as a destination and shared a predisposition for activities and interests this community can deliver. This informed the decisions on which marketing tactics were most efficient and effective to reach such prospects.

The ultimate goal was to not only to find people we could help in making distinctions and good decisions but to more closely identify the people for whom Durham would be distinctive, appealing, fulfilling and a good fit overall as a destination.

As you will read if you click on the link to the Good magazine article, marketers are instead helping political operatives identify and exploit areas of ambivalence in people predisposed to favor opposing views. Their goal isn’t helping people make distinctions and good decisions but to muddy their thoughts and further widen the partisan divide.

Politics, thanks in part to a polarized Supreme Court decision last year, is probably now even more “no-holds-barred” and vulnerable to sleazy marketers than at any time in the last 100 years.

To me, to be ethical is a particularly American value. Now is the time to infuse the same ethical behavior that is required of other elements of our society into the process of selecting civic leadership for our cities, towns, counties, states and the nation that is required of other elements of our society.

Ethics and politics should not be mutually exclusive.