The truth about a good society is conservative

Conservative values - ideas like loving where you live, working hard, valuing marriage, and relating positively to traditions - are much closer to the features of successful places than liberal values

The intellectual left and especially the progressive liberal American left do not want to engage with the arguments and values of conservatives. This makes for a very stilted public debate because these very intelligent left wing people prefer to simply dismiss conservatism as stupid or cruel. We see this tendency in this comment from academia adjacent writer David Roberts who considers that people like him shouldn’t engage with conservative values and beliefs because they are “...mean and wrong.”

The thread that followed this comment is filled with people validating Roberts’ view of conservatives. Indeed many add the even more common liberal academia trope declaring conservatives to be thick - accompanied with affirming ‘evidence’ from the research of liberal academics. The ‘truth is liberal’ (in the bastardised American sense of that word) proclaim these folk as they endorse Roberts’ view that conservatives are nasty and bad.

A certain group of left wing academics spend a surprising amount of time constructing research showing conservatives to be thick and cruel:

“New research indicates that social conservatism can help explain the negative correlation between religiosity and cognitive abilities. There exists a cluster of psychological traits and attitudes that have been described as the “conservative syndrome.” The term isn’t meant to describe conservatism as a disease.”

“Lead researcher Gordon Hodson told LiveScience that the results of the study indicate a vicious cycle, in which people with low intelligence are drawn to socially conservative ideologies. In turn, those ideologies can contribute to prejudices.

"Socially conservative ideologies tend to offer structure and order," he said, explaining why those with lower intelligence may gravitate toward the right. "Unfortunately, many of these features can contribute to prejudice."”

To arrive at these conclusions our liberal academics have to position conservatism as closer to a personality disorder than a political ideology. The conservative - someone with that ‘conservative syndrome’ referenced in that first quote - is defined by a set of psychological traits and these traits lead to support for what the researchers call conservative ideologies. This ‘conservative syndrome’ idea was constructed by Lazar Stankov from the University of Sydney:

“The syndrome describes people who want to preserve the current social order value, score low on the personality trait of openness, and who value authority, obedience, family, self-discipline, and conventional religious beliefs. Such people also display more hostility toward people from outside groups”

What Stankow has done here is to create a sort of caricature ‘grumpy old right winger at the bar’ that, unsurprisingly, exists across countries. And Stankov by using this caricature as definitional of a conservative then discovers that, obviously, such people are not as clever as him:

“It is interesting that the average IQ of conservative individuals and countries tends to be lower than the average of the population at large,” Stankov added. “In other words, conservative people tend to be less knowledgeable about the world they live in and are afraid of the unknown. They also seem to be more ready to fight the intruders into their environment.”

What is important in these caricatures of conservatism is that they all focus on social conservatism. Stankov notes this by cavilling a bit as he asks why people vote for conservative political parties: “...in Western countries a sizeable proportion of people may do so for fiscal rather than social reasons. Their main concern is with the preservation of the free market and less so with social and psychological aspects of life.” Here our left liberal academic has drawn into his circle the classical liberal outlook so as to leave socially conservative ideas isolated.

As conservatives we face a challenge brought on by the unwillingness of liberals and other left-wing people to engage with socially conservative ideas about family, community and society. This is despite so much evidence about what makes for strong communities and safer places pointing towards socially conservative ideas. Here’s some examples:

Going to church regularly is good for your mental and physical health:

“Those reporting weekly religious attendance in 1965 were more likely to both improve poor health behaviors and maintain good ones by 1994 than were those whose attendance was less or none. Weekly attendance was also associated with improving and maintaining good mental health, increased social relationships, and marital stability.”

Marriage is the best environment to raise children:

“...research suggests that the best parenting outcomes come from children born to married couples (Waite & Gallagher, 2000), rather than cohabitating couples (Schmeer, 2011), or any other family formation. While not all marriages are healthy and children from high-conflict marriages could be potentially relieved by divorce, most children benefit from being in the stable and safe environment that marriage provides (Van Epp, 2007). Research indicates that children born and raised by married couples have higher educational levels, lower juvenile detention rates, fewer out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and fewer mental health issues when compared to children in other family circumstances (Waite & Gallagher, 2000).”

Marriage reduces crime:

“...being married is associated with an average reduction of approximately 35 percent in the odds of crime compared to non-married states for the same man. These results are robust, supporting the inference that states of marriage causally inhibit crime over the life course.”

Mothers returning to work early is negative for children:

“...negative findings associated with employment during the child’s first year are compatible with calls for more generous maternal leave policies. Results highlight the importance of social context for identifying under which conditions and for which subgroups early maternal employment is associated with positive or negative child outcomes.”

Stable family life leads to higher economic growth

“...for every 13-percentage-point increase in the proportion of adults who are married, there was an 8 percent increase in per capita GDP, net of controls for a range of sociodemographic factors. Likewise, every 13 percentage point increase in the proportion of children living in two-parent families is associated with a 16 percent increase in per capita GDP, after controlling for education, urbanization, age, population size, and other factors.”

There is a lot more evidence about the positive impact of stable, two-parent families, about the value of strong communities, and about the value of hierarchy, authority and social stability. All of this evidence is, quite rightly, contested but it remains the case that much of the evidence from practical sociology supports many socially conservative tenets. Places with stable families have stronger communities with more social capital. And, as the Knight Foundation shows us, places with stronger social capital where people care for their neighbourhood are nearly always more economically successful.

Today a combination of the selfish but guilty rich and an elite class committed to pushing extreme hyperliberalism (even when much of that class lead essentially conservative  and conventional lives) is eroding the capacity of our economies to deliver the growth necessary to ensure better lives for all. Even when hyperliberals aren’t promoting far left ideas of economic order and accept the benefits of liberal economics, they are choosing at the same time to promote identity politics that reject the value of family and community in preference for an unalloyed, licentious individualism that is bad for society.

We opened with a common liberal trope about conservative values being ‘mean and wrong’. This trope was presented without evidence and the writer refused to provide any indication as to which conservative values or beliefs he felt fitted his definition of ‘mean and wrong’. Yet the actual liberal elite behave conservatively while promoting anti-natalist and anti-family ideas in general society.

“Liberal, tolerant attitudes towards sex and marriage are associated with high-status individuals, but those same people usually live quite conventional lives. The same is true in England, where Bobo areas of London are full of part-time working mothers helping out with the school and doing the bulk of childcare while their husbands work long hours in the office.”

Since conservative values are, in large part, those embraced by the elites that dominate our society and culture especially in areas like family and community, we should perhaps take the view that those, like David Roberts, who claim otherwise are the people who have got this wrong. Conservative values and beliefs - ideas like loving where you live, working hard, valuing marriage, and relating positively to traditions - are much closer to the features of successful places than is the case with hyperliberal ideas and beliefs such as rejecting traditional family structures, encouragement of single parenthood and the elevation of individual identity over family and community identity.