It’s well-documented across various research areas
that, from the perspective of an average leftist and an average conservative,
the latter consistently demonstrates a better understanding of the former's
viewpoint than vice versa. In social experiments, conservatives were more
accurate in predicting how leftists would respond to moral and political
questions, whereas leftists were less accurate in predicting conservative
responses (I have a blog post from 2016 discussing this discordance, focusing
on the Ideological Turing Test).
The evidence suggests that conservatives are better
at taking the perspective of leftists, because they tend to emphasise and
balance a broader range of moral foundations, including loyalty, authority,
sanctity, in addition to care and fairness. Because conservatives are more
cognisant of all five foundations, they should be better equipped to understand
the perspectives and the consequences of political theory better than the
narrow range of considerations upheld by the left.
I’m also fairly confident that the average
conservative is more intelligent than the average leftist. And I should imagine
that the evidence that shows conservatives tend to balance more moral
dimensions in their reasoning is because, on average, conservatives display
higher cognitive abilities, particularly in conservative values in economics
and the foundations for a stable society. But that said, as I laid out in my Blog
on three dimensional left and right wing politics, while conservatives often
display a preference for order, structure, and stability, leftists are often
more open to novelty, complexity, and change – which means a thorough political
analysis from any UK citizen must involve reflecting these different ways of
processing information.
All that said, I’m fairly confident that the fact
that leftists tend to balance fewer moral dimensions in their reasoning, and
exhibit a narrower set of perspectives on how the world really works, sheds
light on certain political dynamics in the UK, particularly when considering
the left’s approach to socialist policies, climate alarmism, and woke ideology.
Most leftist commentary on wealth redistribution, extreme climate activism, and
identity politics is undermined by the same defects as demonstrated in the Ideological Turing
Test. And a lot of this is driven by misguided views about care and fairness –
both of which are noble qualities (and, of course, key tenets of conservatism
too – something many leftists miss, which is a further part of their moral
dimension problem) – but they are frequently abused by being taken into excess
at the expense of other important values, or often just simply used as
virtue-signalling shibboleths as markers of ideological identity without deeper
engagement or consideration of the broader picture.
One of the problems in the UK right now is that, as
the Conservative Party has become a centre-left party, it now mirrors many of
the same errors that undermine the political left, gradually destroying its own
core values in the process, and diluting its own ideological foundation as the
party of small government, free market values, personal responsibility, and
individual liberty.
And the excessive leftist influence on UK society
extends way beyond the woes of the Conservative Party. We have a state that’s
far too large for the size of the economy (which, alongside Gammon’s Law, is
the main reason why public services are in crisis), an overly-regulated,
bureaucratic society, economic stagnation and increased welfare dependency, a
sickness and mental health crisis, the continued erosion of free speech and
open debate, a widespread identity crisis, a cost of living crisis (exacerbated
by bad government policies), an immigration crisis (remember to heed Comte’s famous
warning that ‘demographics is destiny”), a decline in educational standards,
half-witted environmental policies that result in significant economic burdens
for businesses and households alike, and waning trust in institutions and
political leadership.
A continuation of this will inevitably lead to
collapse, as it did in the 1970s. The seeds of economic stagnation and societal
disintegration have been planted, the current public services will buckle under
these unsustainable costs, businesses will continue to be choked by perverse
over-regulation, and myopic environmental measures will sow the seeds of their
own destruction. Things will get worse before they get better – and years
henceforward, we’ll look back on this period with lament.
If we ever do wake up, it must be to the reality that the only societal forces that have consistently fostered human progression,
liberty, and stability are the free-market principles of trade and competition,
personal responsibility, a smaller state, fewer regulations, equality before
the law*, egalitarianism, meritocracy, and the protection of individual freedoms.
*Equality before the law has
historically been the cornerstone of justice – it is literally the only kind of
equality that a society needs as its bedrock. With equality before the law, the
natural concomitant is equality of opportunity; because with equality before
the law, it should mean there are no artificial barriers to equality of
opportunity. Unfortunately, equality before the law
is increasingly being undermined by laws tailored to
favour certain minority groups through mechanisms like positive discrimination
and identity-based policies. These approaches create new forms of inequality before
the law, where the majority is unfairly discriminated against, unjustly (and artificially)
elevating group identity over individual merit and fairness.
