Shermer critiques academics who think conservatism is a mental disorder

Rod Dreher points out an annoying article from Edge titled "What Makes People Vote Republican?" (Edge is a good website to read, if only because it hosts the philosophizing of some prominent public scientists) The responses solicited by Edge are more interesting than the article itself. In my opinion, the highlight piece comes from Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic magazine and a free-market thinker.

Two cheers for Jonathan Haidt's essay. At long last a liberal academic social scientist has recognized (and had the courage to put into print) the inherent bias built into the study of political behavior—that because Democrats are so indisputably right and Republicans so unquestionably wrong, conservatism must be a mental disease, a flaw in the brain, a personality disorder that leads to cognitive malfunctioning. Thus, Haidt is mostly right when he asks us to move beyond such "diagnoses" and remember "the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats 'just don't get it,' this is the 'it' to which they refer."

I allocate two (instead of three) cheers for Haidt's commentary because I think he does not go far enough. The liberal bias in academia is so entrenched that it becomes the political water through which the liberal fish swim—they don't even notice it. Even the question "What makes people vote Republican?" hints at something amiss in the mind of the conservative, along the lines of "Why do people believe weird things?" As Haidt notes, the standard liberal line is that people vote Republican because they are "cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death." A typical example of this characterization can be found in a famous 2003 paper published in the prestigious journal Psychological Bulletin by the New York University social psychologist John Jost and his colleagues, entitled "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," in which they argue that conservatives suffer from "uncertainty avoidance," "need for order, structure, closure," and "dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity," all of which leads to "resistance to change" and "endorsement of inequality."

While I generally find Shermer annoying, his response to this piece is priceless. The whole response is well worth reading. For that matter, Dreher's comments, too.