Preface: a reader characterized one of my recent posts as “philosophical musings.” I get that, just as I get the frequent dismissal of philosophy as largely useless in solving real-life problems. But some philosophical musings are more relevant to real life than others. The discussion of “moral foundations” in Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind is an insightful, clarifying guide to the most divisive political dynamics today. It matters to understand the values and motivations of political and cultural adversaries while withholding reflexive judgements. The “Authority/Subversion” foundation—a foundation key in greater or lesser degree to maintaining a stable society—sheds light in particular on the divisions within the Republican Party today.
In an earlier post “Tribal Dynamics 1: Loyalty” I drew upon Jonathan Haight’s hypothesis of Left/Right tribal divisions being rooted in different degrees of adherence to five “moral foundations.” (See bottom of this post for a list of the five foundations as described in Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, and another [if you missed it before] link to a video discussion.) For example, the stronger adherence to loyalty among conservatives (loyalty/betrayal being one of the moral foundations) explains Sarah Huckabee Sanders—who privately knows better—spewing wild partisan accusations against Biden and the Democrats in responding to Biden’s State of the Union speech. Sanders dug deep into the Right Wing pit of grievances to demonstrate her loyalty.
The country is now witness to the roiling of divisions within the Republican Party—of which the widest is between the MAGA mob and true conservatives like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney who have been branded traitors by the MAGA mob.
The distance the current Republican Party has diverged from traditional conservatism illustrates its unmooring from the positive anchor of the “moral foundation” which Jonathan Haight identifies as the “Authority/Subversion” foundation.
In Haidt’s framing, conservatives lean heavily toward respect for, and honoring of, authority. Conservatives are, for example, much more comfortable with an institution such as the military, where lines of authority are clearly defined by rank. (Note that Haidt’s framing does not equate conservatism with the policies of the U.S. Republican party, and certainly not the Trump wing. He is talking about a conservative construct that people are not inherently good, and therefore “need external structures or constraints in order to behave well, cooperate, and thrive. These external restraints include laws, institutions, customs, traditions, nations, and religions.” He cites especially Edmund Burke as a source of this construct.)
(Interestingly, the outcry from the Left that no one is above the law—aimed at Trump and right wing radicals—expresses a conservative view of respect for authority, but liberals turn against conservatism when they value the breaking of laws they deem bad or oppressive. When it comes to scoring political points, partisanship often overrules philosophical consistency on the Left as well as on the Right. One may fairly, as do traditional conservatives, regard this inconsistency as hypocritical.)
Respect for authority runs deeper than politics. Haidt recounts a discussion he had with a cab driver from Jordan who had told him he had just become a father. When asked if he planned on staying in the U.S. or returning to Jordan, the cabbie said “We will return to Jordan because I never want to hear my son say ‘fuck you’ to me.” To Haidt, this expresses a division between cultures at the most basic, personal, intra-familial level, pointing out that “most American children will never say such an awful thing to their parents, but some will, and many more will say it indirectly.”
Haidt connects respect for authority with hierarchical relationships, where those on the lower rungs of the hierarchy submit to those higher on the ladder, on the basis not of power but of respect for the moral legitimacy of the higher-ups. In the political arena, it has always been more likely for Republicans to fall in line behind their leaders than Democrats who tend to squabble among themselves (can you imagine traditional Republicans publicly arguing about whether an incumbent Republican President should seek reelection, as Democrats are doing about Joe Biden?).
This goes a long way to explain the strength of Republicans in national politics, where between 1980 and 2008 there was a Republican in the White House for 20 of the 28 years. (Yes, the Electoral College goes some way to explain it: but John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson [in a landslide], Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama overcame the Electoral College handicap.) It also helps to explains why Senate Republicans have been so much in the thrall of Mitch McConnell, the strength of which Rick Scott found to his sorrow when he ran for the position of Minority Leader. In the Senate, Republicans are still disposed to respect a longstanding hierarchy.
Subversion and the rebel spirit: the price of the “Southern strategy”
There now exists in the U.S. House of Representatives a rogue contingent of the Republican Party—the MAGA wing—acting as the tail that wags the establishment dog. This is clearly subversion, weakening a fundamental pillar of conservative politics of the past represented by Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney.
The success of the current wave of subversion needs a more complete explanation than the political ascendancy of Donald Trump. The detestation of “RINOs”—Republicans in Name Only—goes back to Newt Gingrich’s command of the party in the mid-90s, and was amplified by the Tea Party in 2010. You can go farther back to the candidacy of Ross Perot, whose independent candidacy in 1992 split conservative voters and played a large part in Bill Clinton’s victory over George H.W. Bush. You could argue that Perot was the reason that Republicans didn’t hold the White House for all of the 1980-2008 years. (I actually don’t remember Perot using the term RINO but his populist stance clearly conveyed his rebelliousness against the Republican establishment.)
Social media, Fox News, and the proliferation of conspiracy theories have multiplied the forces of subversion within the Republican Party. But why are there such strong forces to begin with—strong enough to break the yoke of Republican-establishment-brand conservatism? If Jonathan Haidt is right about conservatives—and if you read his book The Righteous Mind you’ll see a pretty persuasive case for it—then you might infer that the hierarchical rigidity of the establishment kept a lid on the forces of subversion for decades. Then Donald Trump with his disregard for norms cracked the lid, and out erupted the subversive elements that had been pent up since 1992 and far earlier.
The coalescence of subversive forces in the ranks of Republicans goes back to the adoption of the “Southern Strategy” which Nixon, Kevin Phillips, and other Republican operatives employed to turn the South against Democrats in the 1960s. They exploited the resentment among Southern whites against national Democrats for the Democrats’ advancement of civil rights. Lyndon Johnson’s assistant Bill Moyers recalled that after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Johnson sadly and presciently predicted, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come.”
Politically, the Southern Strategy was a smart move. By the time Reagan was elected, the Republicans could count on more popular votes, more Electoral College votes, and proportionately (i.e. proportionate to population) more representatives in Congress then Democrats coming out of the South. If pure political power was the goal, it was a triumph. Conservatives who might in principle have opposed the moral depravity of the Southern Strategy stayed silent and fell in line.
Symbols of subversion from a toxic tradition
//Photo: Perry McLeod | Dreamstime 95806730//
Thus the self-styled “conservative” party invited subversives into their ranks for the sake of power politics. If, as Jonathan Haidt maintains, the most foundational lines of authority are based not merely on power, but on respect for the moral legitimacy of those higher on the ladder, then adoption of the Southern Strategy fractured those lines.
It was a moral travesty for the “party of Lincoln” to embrace the region of the country most infected with White supremacy and the oppression of the Black population, a region still simmering with bitter animus against the national government over the Civil War.
The rebel spirit that animated the South in the Civil War lives on in subversives within the Republican party in the ranks of the far Right. While racism taints the majority of them, what most unites them is a hatred of government and elites, and it moves beyond populism to border on anarchy. It is about power rather than moral legitimacy.
Anarchy, cult-like submission to a leader, and authoritarianism
Counterbalanced against the anarchic impulses of the radical Right who reject the leadership of establishment figures such as Mitch McConnell is the desire for some authority to relieve themselves of responsibility for actions which common decency judges to be wrong, and which deep inside they must know to be wrong (presupposing that some version of the moral Golden Rule is innate). For many of them, that authority is their conception of God—in the case of the radical Right in the grip of Trumpism, a wrathful and vengeful God. For others, the authority is an ideology, or a tradition embodied in the figure of a glorified dead hero such as Robert E. Lee.
Yet, for all but the most devout, an immaterial God or ideology, or dead hero from the past, is not nearly so galvanizing an influence as a living person. That’s where a charismatic leader comes in, sometimes as a subtly manipulative head of a cult, sometimes one who leads without subtlety and simply by force of personality and open dishonesty. The latter may trade in catchphrases such as “Make America Great Again,” and make promises to fulfill the needs of followers. When the audience wants protection against imagined threats from invading foreigners or uppity minorities or political adversaries or “Deep State” operatives, a leader’s promises to rid them of these threats inspires devotion to the leader, and to no one but the leader—a leader who may declare something along the lines of “I alone can fix it.” Inclinations toward respect for authority can devolve into hero-worship, where any fault or weakness in the leader is ignored, denied, or minimized. If the leader demonizes adversaries as evil traitors and invokes violence as a means to defeat them, then all moral foundations other than those of loyalty and submission to an illegitimate authority crumble, and you get authoritarianism based merely on power.
This is the arrow of Trumpism. It makes it all the more important that the full weight of the law comes down upon his head, whatever the short-term political price may be. Even in the case of prosecuting an allegedly “minor” violation such as Trump breaking campaign finance laws—which even many on the Left now mistakenly view as inconsequential—the exercise of legitimate authority needs to be affirmed. It’s telling that the responses by U.S. senators to the indictment of Trump by Manhattan D.S. Alvin Bragg has been muted, indicative of a greater respect for established institutions than found among MAGA zealots in the House.
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The “Moral Foundations of Politics” discussed in Jonathan Haidt’s THE RIGHTEOUS MIND: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
Moral foundations are presented by Haidt antithetical pairs to imply the kind of tradeoffs made when it comes to balancing the values of one foundation against another. A familiar example is the tradeoff between the loyalty/betrayal foundation and the fairness/cheating foundation. Both loyalty and fairness by themselves are thought to be good in the abstract. But things get more complicated when they collide in real life, such as a case of a friend or family member who has been cheating—let’s say in a minor case of embezzlement. Fairness dictates that you should report that person—after all, they have taken unfair advantage of others. On the other hand, you have been a longtime friend or relative of the cheater and have been supported by them in the past to get you through painful difficulties, such as a divorce or loss of a job. Do you really want to betray this person and subject them to punishment or shaming because of a moral failing in one particular domain of less importance to your personal life?
Things get more subtle when it comes to other moral foundations, but if you want a better understanding of the moral bases of political differences between essentially good people—surely you know of your own political differences with those whom you love or respect—I highly recommend Haidt’s book.
- Care/Harm
- Fairness/Cheating
- Loyalty/Betrayal
- Authority/Subversion
- Sanctity/Degradation