The Highest Conservative Principle
If there is one thing that must be maintained in a strict father family, it is the authority of the father and his dominant role in family life. When applied to politics, this Maintenance of Authority principle has a crucial correlate that often goes unnoticed by progressives and the news media. The highest conservative political principle is the Maintenance of Conservative Authority—the preservation, support, and extension of conservatism itself.
This principle explains something that progressives don’t understand and consequently don’t complain about. For example, President Obama often proposed policies that were originally conservative policies. A notable example is the Affordable Care Act, in which the taxpayers pay to get more customers for private insurance firms, customers who otherwise couldn’t afford health care. This was originally proposed by a conservative think tank and put into practice in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney, a conservative Republican governor. But instead of thanking the president for accepting a conservative health care plan, conservatives have endlessly attacked “Obamacare” as a form of socialism, government overreach, government intrusion into private life where it does not belong, dictatorship, and even Nazism. Republican presidential candidates say it is the first thing they would get rid of. The conservative-led House of Representatives has voted over forty times to eliminate it. Why? Because, if it is successful, as it appears to be, it would give President Obama a victory and thus hurt the overall conservative cause. It would violate the principle of maintaining conservative authority above all else (see Chapter 9, p. 166).
The Private Depends on the Public
We have just seen in detail that conservative and progressive politics are based on opposed moral worldviews. In Chapter 20, I asked whether my own progressive political views were no more than an inherited ideology. I discussed there the important non-ideological reasons for my moral worldview. More recently, I have noticed another crucial factual reason for maintaining a progressive worldview.
From the beginning, the United States has been based on a nurturant principle:
• Citizens care about other citizens and work, through their government, to provide public resources for all.
Those public resources make both private enterprise and private life possible. From the beginning of the republic, transportation on public roads and bridges made business possible, as did the regulation of interstate commerce, the National Bank and the Patent Office, a judicial system that resolves business disputes, and the Post Office, which carried business mail. Private life was enriched by public education and public hospitals, as well as the roads and bridges and law enforcement. The Founding Fathers understood the importance of public resources for private life.
These days the private depends on the public in thousands of ways. Computer science was developed via grants from the National Science Foundation. The internet began as the Arpanet, developed by the Defense Department. Satellite technology was developed by NASA. Modern medicine and pharmaceuticals came about via NIMH. The GPS system was developed by the U.S. military, and hundreds of millions of Americans, including all cellphone users, now depend on it. The interstate highway system made trucking possible for business and expanded travel for private citizens. The Federal government helps support airports, and our Air Force trains most domestic pilots. The Federal Reserve makes money available for business. Not only do our state universities educate a great many of business’s managerial and technological employees, but our private universities often receive more governmental money than do state universities. Other government agencies prevent disease and help provide the safe food, drinking water, and air required for private health and healthy employees in businesses. All of this is—in addition to huge business subsidies and tax breaks—paid for by the public.
Conservatives deny that the private depends on public resources. Citing Ronald Reagan’s credo that “The Government is the Problem,” conservatives are constantly trying to eliminate public resources and to privatize as much as possible. For example, they have proposed privatizing Social Security, replacing it with private investment in markets. Conservatives want to privatize public schools via vouchers and charter schools. Most charter schools are owned by private corporations, and they are no better than public schools. They use public funds (allotted per pupil) for private profit, generally paying teachers less and pocketing the difference. Conservatives have even proposed eliminating the Department of Education. The same is true for health care. Overturning “Obamacare” would increase the privatization of health care and eliminate government subsidies for those who cannot afford health care. Locally, conservatives have proposed, and sometimes succeeded in, privatizing public water supplies. And in the area of regulation, conservatives tend to favor eliminating government regulations in favor of private companies regulating themselves. For example, they have proposed eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration, leaving environmental, food, and pharmaceutical regulation to private companies. They want to eliminate the Post Office in favor of private mailing services, refusing to let the Post Office extend services to seriously compete with private mail services. And they want to allow private corporations to frack on public lands, extracting oil and gas for their profit not the public’s benefit, and to graze cattle cheaply or for free on public lands.
Private enterprise and private life depend on nurturant morality, but so does freedom in American life. Freedom is what public resources provide—freedom in a way that we take for granted but that needs to be brought out in the open. The freedom to start a business and to work in one—that is, the freedom to earn a living. The freedom of the body—to breathe air, drink water, and eat food that won’t kill you, freedoms provided by the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Centers for Disease Control. The Affordable Care Act has brought the freedom offered by health to millions of Americans. If you get cancer, or even just break your leg, and you have no health care, you will not be free. If you cannot earn enough to make a reasonable living from the best job you can get, you are not free. This is why increases in the minimum wage and in Social Security are freedom issues.
Although the words “freedom” and “liberty” are used regularly by conservative groups, conservatives mean something very different by these words. In Strict Father Morality applied to politics, “freedom” defined only by personal and not social responsibility means that one should be “free” to seek one’s own profit and advantage without regard to how others—and the environment—might be harmed.
Freedom does not, or should not, mean that you are free to harm others. You may be free to walk down the street, but in doing so, you are not free to knock down others, push someone aside into an oncoming bus, or kick a passerby in the shins. You may be free to start a food business, but you are not free to put poisonous or cancer-causing ingredients in the food you sell.
How the Moral Order Limits Freedom
The Moral Order metaphor (Chapter 5, p. 104–5) links morality to authority: the most moral should rule. The father-knows-best assumption—that the strict father knows right from wrong—gives him authority. His wife is there to support his authority. And his children, who are born to do whatever feels good, need to be made into moral beings through punishment when they do wrong. It is through physical discipline that they learn moral discipline: to avoid punishment, they do what the father says. In this family model, the father’s authority and power appropriately reflects his moral superiority, which comes from supporting and protecting the family while knowing right from wrong.
The Moral Order metaphor maps the authority–morality link onto other domains. The result is a hierarchy that is understood as just; power should rest with the most moral. Extending the hierarchy introduced in the first edition, we have the following:
God over Human Beings; Human Beings over Nature; Adults over Children; The Rich over The Poor (and hence, Employers over Employees); Western Culture over Non-Western Culture; Our Country over Other Countries.
Most conservatives accept this much; others extend the hierarchy further:
Men over Women; Whites over Nonwhites; Straights over Gays; Christians over Non-Christians.
In each case, the hierarchy limits the freedom of those lower on the hierarchy by legitimating the power of those higher on the hierarchy.
As we will see, a large proportion of conservative political policies follow from the conservative Moral Order. Remember, as we proceed, that the conservative Moral Order is a natural facet of Strict Father Morality applied to the full range of human experience. Let’s look at these cases one at a time.
God over Human Beings
In conservative forms of religion, God is a Strict Father who, in effect, says: “Do as I say and you will get to Heaven; otherwise, you will burn in hell—punished painfully forever!” Who decides what God meant? A conservative Christian pastor is given that authority by his church. In progressive forms of religion, God is a Nurturant Parent who offers Grace (metaphorical nurturance: pp. 255–58), love, forgiveness, and fulfillment.
Conservatives have long made “freedom of religion” into a political issue, on the idea that the laws of God trump the laws of man. Traditional issues include school prayer (whether Bible verses should be read, or prayer required, in public schools), whether crosses can be erected, or Christmas scenes displayed using public money in public places, and whether Christian judges can post the Ten Commandments in public courtrooms. Kim Davis became a conservative hero when as a public clerk she cited her reading of the Bible in refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples in defiance of state law. Conservatives have proposed laws allowing owners of publicly licensed pharmacies to refuse to sell contraceptives to customers if their religion disapproves of contraception (e.g., if they are conservative Catholics). Catholic universities have cited freedom of religion in refusing to authorize birth control to women otherwise covered for it on their university health care plans. President George W. Bush’s first executive order was that no foreign aid funds could go to providing birth control in countries where it was not available or affordable. And conservatives have made Planned Parenthood an issue, closing sites down in Texas and other states, based on the right-wing religious view that persons are created upon conception, that fertilized egg cells are “babies,” and that therefore abortion is murder. The result has been that tens of thousands of women are being denied the freedom to control their own bodies and their own lives, even if they want to plan their parenthood, get contraception, and have children later.
Progressives have argued that the Constitution forbids the establishment of a state religion, citing Thomas Jefferson’s invocation of a “solid wall” between religion and the state. But this formulation misses even deeper denials of religious freedom by conservatives—both the freedom to live by one’s own religion, not someone else’s, and the freedom to control your own body and your own life.
Human Beings over Nature
Conservatives constantly speak of nature as a gift from God to human beings, something for individual people (and corporations) to exploit and use for their own profit. Conservative commitment to individual (not social) responsibility and laissez-faire free markets where profit is maximized with little or no regulation clashes with most attempts to halt and reverse global warming, minimize pollution, protect endangered species, and preserve as much as possible of the natural world. Fish in rivers are being wiped out by the creation of dams for human recreation, the depletion of water for local farming, and the dumping of pollutants into streams by corporations who profit by not having to clean up their own mess. Coal, oil, and gas companies contribute to politicians, especially conservative politicians, to keep reaping profits at the cost of increasing global warming and threatening the future of the planet. Conservatives accordingly vote against subsidies or other legislation that would promote solar and wind energy. For forty years, conservatives have been primarily responsible for the U.S. doing so little to preserve our planet and to protect against ongoing and future weather disasters caused by global warming.
Systemic Causation
The words “caused by global warming” have become fighting words. The reason is that there are two different notions of causation, and most people are working with only one of them.
Direct causation occurs when you use a force that results in an immediate local change, right then and there—like picking up a glass of water and taking a drink. In the strict father family the use of the father’s authority and power is typically direct, say in immediate punishment of children for disobedience.
The world ecology is a system, and so has systemic causes, where it is the structure of the system that causes disasters to occur. There are four types of systemic causation: (1) chains of causation, (2) interacting causes, (3) feedback loops, and (4) probabilistic causes. For example, global warming can cause extreme, cold weather. Warming, for instance, can cause increased evaporation over the Pacific Ocean, which means more high-energy water molecules going into the air. This moisture is then blown north and east, over the North Pole, where the air is locally cold most of the year. There the moisture turns to snow, which is blown down over the East Coast, creating a great snowstorm in Washington, D.C. Conservatives say, “What global warming? This is more snow than we’ve ever seen!” They don’t understand systemic causation. Nor does the average person.
Every language in the world has a way to express direct causation in its grammar. No language in the world has a way to express systemic causation in its grammar. Understanding direct causation comes naturally. Systemic causation must be taught if the effects of global warming are to be seriously understood.
The Rich over The Poor (Special Case: Employers over Employees)
In 1992, I sat in my living room watching Dan Quayle’s acceptance speech for the vice-presidency. In it he gave a one-sentence argument against the progressive income tax—against taxing the rich at a higher rate than the poor. The sentence: “Why should the best people be punished?” There was cheering and a waving of signs!
It is now widely known that most of the wealth in this country has gone and is going to the top 1 percent, if not the top one-tenth of 1 percent. Conservatives have consistently voted to cut taxes on the rich. Current proposals for a “flat tax” would mean cutting taxes on the rich. The arguments are often versions of the Moral Hierarchy principle, that the rich are just better people than the poor: they have earned their money through hard work; the poor just haven’t worked hard enough and so deserve to be poor. Hmmm . . . Corporate CEOs tend to make about two hundred times as much as their average employees—they can’t be working two hundred times as hard. And many of the rich have inherited their money not earned it through work.
Another argument: The rich are job creators. They are helping the poor. If their taxes are cut, they can create more jobs. Ah, facts again. The rich actually tend to keep their money by buying prime real estate, yachts, art, and the like—things that will appreciate in value without giving back much to the economy as a whole. Moreover, the rich don’t just give jobs out of the goodness of their hearts. Look at economics from the perspective of work: Working people are profit-creators. The rich only create jobs when they can get employees who can create profit for them. The poor create profit for the rich.
Conservatives have proposed cutting pension plans and benefits like contributions to health care. Think for a moment what pensions are: Pensions are delayed payments for work already done. If employees’ pensions are cut, the company is stealing their money—money they have already earned. If the corporation says it can no longer pay “generous” benefits, then the company is cutting employees’ salaries. “Benefits” are not gifts; “generosity” is not at issue. Benefits are part of pay for work.
Corporations now tend to think of their employees as being either “assets” or “resources.” The “assets” are seen as special people: top managers or important “creative” people or technical specialists who are hard to find and hence valuable. The “resources” are interchangeable, fitting a job description, and hired through the “human resources” department. They are treated precisely as resources. One makes the most profit by minimizing the use and cost of resources: paying as little as possible to resource-workers, letting as many as possible go, replacing them with technology whenever feasible, and outsourcing whenever it is profitable. Many people are poor because they have lost jobs or have jobs that don’t pay a living wage. Conservatives see them as not trying hard enough to find work or pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Many people are poor because they lack education, or because they have accumulated too much debt getting an education. Conservatives thus want to cut unemployment insurance, not allow an increase in the minimum wage, and cut funds for education. These are all examples of conservatives seeing the rich as more moral than the poor—the rich deserve to be rich; the poor deserve to be poor. It follows from Strict Father Morality.
Conservatives are also against unions and want to legislate them out of existence via what are called “right to work” laws. Such laws see employment through a Strict Father lens: as simply a matter of individual responsibility by the employee. Conservative enmity against unions follows from the moral hierarchy: Rich Over Poor; Employer Over Employee. Unions are actually agents of freedom—freedom from corporate servitude and wage slavery. Without unions, employees have to individually take what is offered, usually far less than they would get with a union: not just pay but worker safety, health care benefits, pensions, reasonable working conditions and hours, reasonable vacation time. What is “reasonable”? What the union members can negotiate. Unions create freedom.
Austerity
The idea that the rich are more moral than the poor extends to nations. The rich European nations of the north are seen as more moral than the poorer European nations to the south, like Greece, Portugal, and Spain. The northern Europeans assume that southern European workers are just lazy, deserve their suffering, and should “tighten their belts.” What is needed instead is wise investment in the south by northern banks and corporations—investments in infrastructure building, education, and business that can gainfully employ unemployed workers who are already educated. In Spain, for example, educated Spaniards are leaving in droves for jobs elsewhere in Europe that fit their educational level.
Adults Over Children
There is a basic fact about children’s brain development that needs to be widely known. By the time a child is about five years old, half of her neural connections have died off—the half that is least used. That has a consequence. If children are to find fulfillment in life, they need to start earlier than five. They need early childhood education—not high-powered stuff, but a wide basic introduction to many areas—some basic math, reading and writing, art, music, a foreign language, movement or sports. Five-year-olds can do more than many people realize.
Conservatives tend not to want to fund early childhood education. First, they see it as a government program to be destroyed. Second, they are concerned about what would be taught—perhaps not the subject matter of what would be taught in a strict father household. They want to be sure that children are taught a conservative way of looking at the world.
Children learn best in nurturant situations, when they are cared for and their needs as individuals are taken seriously. This requires small classroom sizes and teachers’ aides. The best teachers are nurturers. Conservatives believe that strictness is the only way to teach. Nurturant teachers do not provide a version of the strict parent environment. The debate about teaching to the test and punishing “failing schools” leaves out the nurturant dimension of education.
In a strict father family, it not merely allowed for parents to beat children when they don’t do as told or show disrespect; it is required that the child be painfully punished; it is a parental duty. Since the father knows what is moral and the mother must be supportive of the father, a disobedient child is both violating the authority of the father and will not grow up to be a moral being. Corporal punishment for disobedience used to be normal, both at home and in school. In schools, it has now been banned in thirty-one states in the U.S. But corporal punishment—beating, often with sticks or “paddles”—is still allowed in nineteen states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming. These are all states where conservatism is dominant.
Western Culture over Non-Western Culture
This assumption in the Moral Hierarchy has been realized in foreign policy assumptions about the superiority of capitalism and democratic elections. It has been widely assumed that the problems in non-Western countries could be solved by overthrowing foreign dictatorships in poor countries, often by force, and introducing elections and global capitalism dominated by Western corporations. This was the idea behind the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Western support for the Arab Spring revolts in Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The Western ideals of democracy and global capitalism were supposed to quickly show their advantages over non-Western traditions: rule by religion, tribalism (with tribal hatreds and warlords), jihadism, and institutionalized corruption. The fall of communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union was supposed to lead to democracy and Western-style capitalism, even when there were no prior democratic or capitalist institutions in place. In China, the introduction of capitalism was supposed to lead to democracy. It didn’t.
Though the moral hierarchy is a natural product of Strict Father Morality and a conservative worldview, this view about the superiority of Western culture has been held by conservative and liberal administrations alike. However, American foreign policy institutions like the CIA, the NSA, and the military share a strong Strict Father culture seen in “realist” foreign policy as opposed to “soft power” foreign policy. Foreign policy has not been looked at from the perspective of the Strict Father moral hierarchy. It is an open question as to whether such a perspective would be helpful. My job here is to raise the issue.
Our Nation over Other Nations
There is a big difference between patriotism and jingoism, which is often mistaken for patriotism. Patriotism is about improving the lives of one’s fellow citizens and improving one’s country’s contribution to the world. In the conservative moral hierarchy, our country is taken as simply better than other countries. This is jingoism, not true patriotism, which rests on progressive values. Democratic candidates in the 2016 election campaign have chosen patriotism over jingoism, focusing on conservative failures for the American people, while bringing up successes for the citizens of other wealthy countries where America has failed: universal healthcare as a right, free college education as a national investment, family leave, higher wage scales, much greater equality of wealth, safer gun laws, and better environmental protections. Each of these is a freedom issue: you are just not free if you lack health care and get seriously injured or ill; if you lack an education; if you have to choose between keeping your job and caring for your child; if you work but don’t make a wage you can live on; if you are threatened by gun violence; if the planet you live on is being destroyed and you are threatened by climate disasters.
Looking at successes that have occurred in other countries and asking why we cannot achieve them here in the U.S. is a patriotic response to the jingoism of assuming that our nation is simply more moral than other nations.
At this point we turn to some of the nastier parts of the moral hierarchy—forms of discrimination: sexism, racism, homophobia, and religious discrimination. It is by no means the case that all conservatives share these forms of discrimination and that they are absent in all liberals. But these parts of the moral hierarchy do show up in conservative politics.
Men over Women
The “war on women” framing by liberal feminists reflects their experience that women are being harmed via purposeful acts by conservatives. But conservatives don’t see themselves as conducting such a war. Instead they see themselves as simply acting morally according to the conservative moral worldview. In the strict father family, it is the father who determines what the women in the family should and should not do, sexually, reproductively, and with their bodies. Accordingly, men are above women in the conservative moral hierarchy. And a great many conservative women share the conservative moral worldview with conservative men and see no “war on women.” Male dominance in the strict father family is real, and it translates into male superiority in conservative politics.
As we have seen, the conservative moral hierarchy contradicts progressive views of freedom. The freedom at issue here is the freedom to control your own body. The decision to engage in sex is one such decision. The decision not to have a child now—or at all, or not with a given sex partner—is also such a decision. To exercise such decisions, a woman needs sex education and the availability of contraception or morning-after pills. These are methods to avoid an unwanted pregnancy by exerting control over your own body.
In a strict father family, it is typically the father who makes decisions as to child-bearing—either by his wife or by a daughter. Hence, conservatives have introduced legislation in a number of states requiring parental notification or spousal notification in case a woman wants to end a pregnancy. Such laws put control in the hands of the father.
An unwanted pregnancy can occur in various stages. A fertilized egg first develops into a group of cells called a blastocyst, which only later can be embedded into a uterus and become an embryo, which does not yet have human form. The embryo begins to develop into a fetus between eight and twelve weeks. These are all parts of a woman’s body and can affect a woman’s health. A pregnancy can be ended by an operation at any of these stages. Such an operation, at any stage from blastocyst on, is called an “abortion.”
The Planned Parenthood organization was founded to allow women to make and follow through on informed decisions on such matters. It provides diagnosis and care for sexually-transmitted diseases, sex education materials and contraceptives, as well as morning-after pills. It also provides abortions, mostly for women who cannot otherwise afford them.
Throughout history women have attempted to control their own bodies by avoiding or ending pregnancies. For many years, abortions were legally banned in many states but were nonetheless performed. Wealthy women could travel to states or other countries to have safe abortions. But women who could not afford such trips had to rely on “back-alley abortions”—unsafe illegal abortions that could leave a woman without a later ability to have a child, or with terrible internal injuries, or even death. The Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe vs. Wade made abortions legal under very general conditions, but this freedom is being slowly eroded by subsequent decisions by Supreme Courts with more conservative majorities.
Over several years, the Texas legislature gradually placed more and more restrictions on women’s health centers performing safe abortions for impoverished women until hardly any were left. In October 2015, Texas barred Planned Parenthood from receiving state Medicaid money, making it impossible for an impoverished woman to obtain a safe legal operation to end a pregnancy in the entire state of Texas.
Another imposition on the freedom of a woman to control her own body is the forced ultrasound, imposed by conservative legislatures. Thirteen states require that women seeking an abortion must have a (medically unnecessary) ultrasound, a thirty-minute procedure that varies from uncomfortable to painful, especially if you are pregnant. The woman is then forced to view the ultrasound picture before the operation—clearly an attempt to have her change her mind. Similarly when an ultrasound is performed as preparation for an abortion procedure, fifteen other states require that the woman must be offered the opportunity to view the ultrasound picture.
There are of course other issues surrounding this aspect of the conservative moral hierarchy. Conservatives have consistently kept the Equal Rights Amendment from being passed, as well as other laws guaranteeing equal pay for equal work and family leave.
Whites over Nonwhites
The Black Lives Matter movement has arisen for a reason. Innocent black men were being killed, as well as arrested and assaulted, because whites, especially police, assumed that most blacks, especially young black men, are up to no good. Throughout America, police are performing stop-and-frisk operations on young black men and pulling over drivers for the offense of driving while black. Moreover, America is filling its prisons with young black men convicted only of minor drug offenses and not dangerous to others. Conservatives have passed “Stand Your Ground” laws that permit shooting people deemed threatening, and sadly there are whites who seem to find the mere presence of blacks threatening.
This part of the conservative moral hierarchy also arises in the debate over immigration. It boiled over in 2015 when Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump called Mexicans immigrants “murderers and rapists.” Conservatives often call those entering the U.S. without papers but otherwise living normal law-abiding lives “illegals”, as if they were career criminals, or “aliens,” as if they are from another planet. Mostly nonwhite, immigrants are considered by many conservatives to be immoral, and hence as people who should be deported. Conservatives have also been against providing health care and education to children of undocumented immigrants born and raised in the U.S. who have full American citizenship.
Straights over Gays
Previous bans on same-sex marriages were pushed through by conservatives. Conservatives in many states are still trying to find ways to allow country clerks to refuse to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Conservative Christians still consider homosexuality an abomination and want marriage to be legally defined as between a man and a woman.
Christian over Non-Christians
Conservative Christians have provided the principal support in the polls for Ben Carson as President. Carson, in 2015, remarked that he considered it unconstitutional for a Muslim to become President. He sees Christians as morally superior, as do those who continued to support him after that remark. It is commonplace for conservatives to claim that the U.S. is a Christian country and to proclaim their Christianity as a qualification for public office.
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By now you can see that the positions on issues in political campaigns are not a random list. Conservative principles fit together because they follow from Strict Father morality. Conservative positions are logical from this perspective; they make sense, just as progressive positions make sense from the perspective of Nurturant Parent morality.
As we pointed out, the common principles of conservative thought make up a list crying out for an explanation of how they fit together: smaller government; strong defense; lower taxes; traditional family values; personal responsibility; and free markets. As we have seen, these all flow from a strict father morality.
Finally, let me close this edition with responses to two basic questions that perplex liberals.
1. Why should poor conservatives vote against their financial interests?
Because they are voting their moral identities, not their pocketbooks. They are voting for people who believe in what they believe, and they want to see a world in which their moral principles are upheld
2. Why do Tea Party members of Congress obstruct even the workings of an overwhelmingly conservative Congress?
Because they believe that compromising with progressive positions is immoral on the grounds that it weakens and undermines the authority of conservatism. It would be like a strict father giving in and compromising his authority in the family.
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Our deepest moral worldviews are unconscious. That should not be surprising. After all, all thought is physical and works via neural circuitry. We do not, and cannot, have immediate direct access to our deepest modes of thought. It takes serious study in cognitive science to figure out the details of our moral worldviews. But once you see them, you see that they are real and that they explain a lot.
They are also remarkably stable. Despite all that has changed since 1996, the basic worldviews and their logics are still very much present. If you follow politics, you encounter them every day—and often on totally different issues.