Weird. I have a horrible Governor and he's a Republican. I had a corrupt Mayor who committed multiple felonies in office, and he was an Independent/Republican. Hey, did you ever think that it's the politicians themselves that are dirty, not just a certain political party? Actually, that's a stupid question, it's obviously just the Democrats. My bad.
It depends. If you read your average newspaper, when it's a Democrat that gets busted, he's just a dirty politician. That is, one generally has to look hard for a mention of his or her political affiliation. When a Republican gets busted, it's prominently pointed out he's a dirty, corrupt Republican. Sometimes, even when a dirty, corrupt politician is a Democrat, he suddenly becomes a Republican! So you can have corrupt Republicans, and you can have corrupt politicians in general, but you certainly can't have corrupt Democrats
More generally, the article in the initial post, which is fascinating, gives perhaps the most obvious reason for voting Republican without explicitly saying so. Republicans understand the thinking of other Republicans, and Republicans prove capable of understanding the thinking of Democrats. Democrats, on the other hand, aren't capable of understanding the thinking of Republicans. Putting aside partisanship for a minute, it's fairly intuitive that we shouldn't want to be led by people who can't figure out how half the country thinks.
Because the other half thinks the elections are rigged, the president is stupid, the president is selected, the president is invalid, he never gets a chance. Not that Clinton was given any slack, either.
I would say that it's your partisanship that leads you to that belief. I am a Democrat. I understand perfectly well how Republicans think. I would say all Democratic politicians have a perfectly fine handle on how Republicans think, as much of a handle as Republican politicians have on how Democrats think. I think both parties have a difficult time understanding why the other ideology thinks as it does. That leads to rather silly simplifications like Republicans being ignorant or Democrats being naive.
What makes people vote republican? the same thing that makes people vote democratic. They believe that it represents their personal beliefs, or values.
Actually I wasn't stating my own opinion there, I was pointing out what the writer, a psychologist and self-defined Democrat seemed to think. He's arguing Republicans perceive, essentially, a wider set of variables in their "moral universe" than Democrats. This makes it possible for them to understand (though not necessarily agree) with the points Democrats make. Democrats, operating from a narrower moral framework, have a hard time understanding things outside that framework- just like we wouldn't get a reference to a movie we haven't seen. Thus, the wider conclusion was that Republicans understand both themselves and Democrats, but Democrats tend to not understand Republicans. Though there are surely a couple exceptions
Right, I know you were drawing from the posted article, but I thought you were stating it as your opinion (that his "unstated conclusion" is this "fact" that you perceive). In any case, perhaps I misunderstood you on that score. I'm not sure that was the wider conclusion. Whether it was or not, though, I'd say it's dubious. Liberals are usually accused (or lauded, depending on the worldview of the observer) of having the wider moral universe, being too morally relativistic (from a conservative point of view) or being accepting of other customs (from a liberal perspective). It's probably a matter of what you focus on. For example, with terrorism, liberals tend to suggest that rather simply judging, we should understand what would motivate people to such rage, while conservatives tend to suggest that the terrorists are simply criminals, should be destroyed and there's not much more to be said on the issue. However, conservatives are often more willing to pass off racial/gender/sexuality-based remarks as "Let's not be too PC" while liberals tend to be much harsher on such things. (I'm trying to be neutral in my descriptions, but I am obviously approaching this from a left-leaning perspective, so apologies if any of this seems tilted against those who are right-leaning. In addition, I know I'm working from stereotypes on both sides...everything has an implicit "tends to, in my experience, but doesn't go for every individual.") My own belief, again, is that each side (due to so many arguments) is quite cognizant of how the other side thinks and what motivates them, but they are often not sure why the other side thinks that way, what leads them to such a worldview.
There's a school of thought (pun intended) that says the schools are liberally slanted, as well as the media, and hollywood, etc.. So conservatives are much more immersed in the thinking of the left, while the left is immersed in the thinking of the left.
That may be true to some extent. However, the media being left-leaning I'm skeptical of. I know that reporters tend to be more left-leaning, as a group, but the owners of media tend to be more right-leaning as a group. I think the owners of media are the biggest arbitors of what hits the airwaves. For one thing, all news media is universally pro-Capitalism and anti-third party candidates (which I, personally, find to be a more conservative viewpoint, as in status quo). Any hint of socialism tends to be villified on any any US network and any third party candidate who talks about trying to break the hold big corporations or lobbies have on politics gets universally panned as a nutcase and extremist. That, off the bat, I think is a tilt to the right. How it plays against reporter bias on smaller issues like social security or war or universal health care is more complicated but doesn't intuitively lead me to believe media is biased to the left.
In practice the news and media sure seem tilted to the left to me. Most of the big newspapers have editorial staffs that are indisputably left leaning, and the NYT front page is often dedicated to pushing left wing agenda or bashing conservative ideas, and when writers from these papers appear as talking heads on TV, their slant is obvious in what they say. I see an awful lot of commercials for 501c3 type organizations that are left leaning on all the news networks. I see entire hour long documentaries on the news about how evil Wal-Mart is, or how everything is broken in the country. The absolute media lust for Al Gore propelled him to an academy award and nobel prize for a badly presented and error filled power point presentation. CNN's main business news guy is constantly spewing anti-capitalist rants. They partnered with Al Jazeera in the middle of a bloody war in the middle east. As for 3rd parties, one of the top guys at ABC News (as talking head) said that the news tends to follow the candidates who raise big money, and Ron Paul got a lot of press when he was raising money. The 2 party system has simply gamed the system to make it VERY tough on 3rd parties to get any traction. And then there's the universities where professors and other faculty are widely reputed to be left leaning. They make big money or control big money from the govt. after all, and they're the ones in line to be picked for top jobs in Democratic administrations. As far as big business owning the media, the only cases anyone has been able to point out to me where the corporation directed any kind of news coverage (or squashed it) was in cases where there was a lawsuit against the corporation pending.
Republicans think that the government has no business in your wallet, but a world of business in your pants. Democrats think we should tax unequally to make all things equal. Deep thoughts with mook and Chewy.
Maybe unintentional, but I like the reference to "vote republican" over "be republican". To be honest, I don't like either party. My reason? There is no more important right for any of us than the right to live. Without the right to live, nothing else matters. I'm a Ph.D. life scientist and believe any baby that could be taken out of a woman and live has a right to be alive--whether it happens to be inside or outside of that woman at the time. Decades ago 6 months was the limit. Technolgoy improved. Ten years ago 4.5 months was the lower end. Technology has improved. I don't know what the limit is now, but I'm pretty sure it's lower than it was ten years ago. So, any baby that is at least four months old (in utero) should have the right to live. I also don't believe that the lower limit should be arbitrarily determined by where the technology is. Accordingly, I believe babies should be allowed to live. This is not based on emotion, but on science. I also hate big government, but I would vote for a pro-life, big governmen, tax and spend democrat over any pro-abortion republican. People may not agree with me on abortion for emotional reasons, but I hope that most would agree that the right for us all to be alive is more important than what our tax rate, or how strict we are on immigration. Sex is the choice--pregnancy is the consequence. There are all kinds of consequences we don't like, but they are part of life. And ending an innocent party's life is not the answer for any consequence. I need a good pro-life liberatarian. Okay, I'm done. I need a beer.
This is a great post, because it articulates that each party is just made up of a coalition of voters with significantly different interests. As coalitions, most members of the party will be in favor of some positions and be against some others. For some people abortion is the primary issue; for others it is the right to bear arms or protection of the environment or the traditional big government/small government breakdown. I think that one mistake a lot of people make is that if someone is a republican or a democrat, they inherently support all the actions, beliefs, and positions of their party. And I don't think it is true at all. For most people, it is just "as good as I can do," and they vote accordingly.
I'm pro-choice and anti-death penalty. Of course, I believe that the question isn't when life begins but rather when can that life be sustained outside of the womb. At that point, you lose your shot at aborting the child. On a personal note, I don't think I could ever make the choice to abort a child. However, that doesn't mean I don't want others to have a choice I couldn't make.
