Roy and Me

I think that all of the conflicts between liberals and conservatives, covering issues from environmentalism to social programs to taxes to foreign policy, boil down to a disagreement over just one underlying issue. That disagreement is not a rational debate, but rather a moral one. Ideological left and right clash over a particular moral criterion for deciding who is deserving and who is undeserving. What’s more, the moral belief that divides our political landscape has been handed down to us essentially unchanged from at least as far back as the Middle Ages. But we have no consciousness of that belief, nor of its historical origins, at all.

The question of what drives liberal-conservative debates sparked my curiosity because of doubts I developed about the reasons for my own political orientation. Growing up in the Bible Belt of Alabama, the only political opinion I ever had was my teenage opposition to what I saw as the anti-science stance of Baptist fundamentalism. None of my family members ever expressed any other political sentiments either, until my mother married my stepfather, Roy, who was outspokenly conservative. Roy’s political sensibilities were typified by his reaction to a Doonesbury cartoon he once showed me. He laughed, shook his head and snorted, “Those liberal bastards.” I was fifteen then.

But I was twenty-one and a senior in college before I realized I disagreed with Roy. My recognition that I was a liberal came suddenly because, although I’d really had liberal instincts for a long time, I knew nothing of politics. Roy’s characterization of liberals had made them sound silly to me. He told stories (taken straight from talk radio, I suspect) of labor union representatives, welfare recipients, and feminists acting outrageously and expressing absurd beliefs. I only questioned that view when I heard and read liberals speaking for themselves.

That experience suggested to me an explanation of liberal and conservative politics. The reason Roy and other conservatives cherry-picked their stories to make liberals look bad was probably to excuse themselves from any careful study of political issues, I concluded. The liberal-conservative debate must arise simply because conservatives don’t want to do their homework. If I agreed with other liberals, I figured it was simply because people who have the best command of facts and use the best reasoning will of course all get the same answer – the correct answer – on any issue. That explanation made further sense to me because, as an academically-inclined person, by then a Ph.D. student, I had studied economics, climate science, and other politically relevant subjects, whereas Roy seemed downright opposed to studying any subject in depth. He distrusted and disparaged experts, even refusing to visit doctors.

Of course, my dedication to knowledge was quickly turning me into one of those experts, whom Roy bitterly complained “ought to climb down out of their ivory tower and live in the real world.” Outwardly, Roy treated me as the exception to those types, but I noticed that as my knowledge and confidence in challenging conservatism increased, so did the frequency and sarcasm of his spontaneous tirades against liberals. Unable to tell Roy my true views without nasty arguments erupting and unable to avoid the subject of politics with him, I learned to keep the peace by asking him to elaborate on his beliefs, explain them, and explain what mistakes he thought liberals were making. I felt certain he would get twisted around his own illogic in the process.

Listening to Roy explain his political views in detail had a surprising side effect, however. He opened up to me. We had a ritual, repeated on all my visits home from school. After exchanging greetings with my family and dropping my suitcase full of dirty laundry in my old bedroom, I plopped down on the couch and drank beer, while he sipped scotch and launched into animated invective over the day’s political news. I responded with my list of questions. Once I became a sounding board to Roy instead of a critic, he took to elaborating on his views instead of defending them. He surprised me, suddenly abandoning his earlier rational arguments and instead seeking my sympathy for a purely moralistic outrage against liberalism. He always objected when someone got something that he felt they didn’t deserve, or was deprived of something they did deserve. The undeserving were always the familiar cast of liberal suspects: unionists and other worker-rights advocates, feminists, impoverished people, environmentalists, etc.; the deserving were an equally well-worn coterie of conservative opponents to the liberal cast. Although I saw the pattern clearly, I couldn’t make sense of his reasons for judging people as deserving or undeserving. I only knew his judgments seemed offensive to me.

At the same time, after countless repetitions of our beer-scotch-politics ritual, doubts about my favorite explanation for the liberal-conservative debate began to creep into my mind. I felt troubled by the consistency and pattern of disagreement Roy and I fell into on many ostensibly unrelated issues. If Roy were really just plain ignorant, as I had been telling myself, he should have gotten some of those issues right by accident. My fellow liberals should have gotten some issues wrong too, unless all liberals are experts on everything. In political disagreements all of the knowledgeable people ought to be on the same side against the ignorant ones. But I knew by then that if Roy had done the right homework he could have cited just as many conservative Nobel-Prize-winning economists and other experts as I could liberal ones. The truth, I realized, is that expert liberals share the same beliefs on the same batch of issues as non-expert liberals, and expert conservatives believe the same things as Roy. The experts just use more sophisticated terms to explain themselves. Put under a microscope, my comfortable assumption that political opinions result solely from facts and reasoning pertaining to each issue individually looked implausible. Of course, Roy and other conservatives might simply be prejudiced. But if so, what connected prejudices about so many disparate issues?

These thoughts left me feeling deeply uneasy. If my explanation for Roy’s conservatism was wrong, then my explanation for my own liberalism was also in doubt. Could my beliefs really be driven by motives I was unaware of? I once mentioned to Roy my misgivings about the reasoning by which he and I explained our differing views to each other, but he redoubled his effort to convince me with the same arguments. So I went looking on my own for the reason he and I disagreed. Besides satisfying my curiosity, I hoped that if I found something concrete to show to Roy then it could lead to better understanding between us. Knowing many of the arguments between Roy and me have divided liberals and conservatives for generations, I figured that if I traced the issues back to their origins I might find some clues. I decided to look backwards, into history.

I started with the issue of poverty, since that is arguably the oldest issue. In the prehistoric world, what separated most starving people from access to productive land (or fisheries) were natural forces. Today, by far the biggest obstacle is competition for land use from other people. The solution we have worked out in the modern world for who gets land-based resources is ownership. The land is owned by someone, and only that owner has the right to use it or decide to let someone else use it. Anyone who wants to contest these fundamental ownership rights must challenge the ownership enforcement authority (the government). Legally opting out of the ownership system to go back to humans’ original relation to nature isn’t possible any more. Even if you own enough land to be truly self-sufficient, you must participate in the money economy to pay the taxes on it, which in turn go up or down based on the highest-bidder market value.

Understanding this simple version of ownership is only slightly helpful though, because the modern liberal-conservative debate over poverty takes place in the context of a more complex economy than simple land-based agriculture. Since economics was one of my main academic interests, I knew a lot about the history of liberal versus conservative debates on the subject. Conservative economists have historically justified their lassez-faire views by harking back to Adam Smith, who gave the first explanation of how the capitalist economy works in his 1776 book The Wealth of Nations. But to get to the real root of those debates I needed to know how capitalism got started, and that occurred long before Smith. The invention of capitalism thus couldn’t have been motivated by the practical economic benefits that Smith illuminated, since no one understood them before him.

Further research showed me that capitalism evolved out of medieval Europe’s system for agricultural production, feudalism. Feudal land owners relied on peasants to work the land, gave them a portion of the harvest, and kept the remainder as a reward for being the owner. When the new phenomenon of industrialization took hold, that feudal concept of ownership was transplanted, slightly modified, to the emerging production processes.

This feudal way of distributing the goods of production spawned capitalism. Other societies divided up the spoils of the hunt or the harvest by family and other social ties, amount of work contributed, position of respect or authority, etc. Capitalism replaced these with the singular principle that all proceeds are the sole right of the owner of the equipment, land, and buildings – i.e., the capital – used for production. Previous conceptions of ownership had merely given owners exclusive use of what they owned; the new way expanded owner rights to include all productive output. This is why an owner can get rich. The incomes of people who lived by the fruits of their own labor were limited by the number of hours one person could work, but owners can have an unlimited number of people working for them. Once encoded in law, this forced other participants in the production process, whatever their contribution, to have a contract with the owner to receive anything. Capitalism, for all its present practical benefits, started as a moral concept based on a new type of entitlement for owners. Perhaps, I thought, such moral ideas still hold sway over views about the economy – including political ideology.

The possibility that the political differences between Roy and me resulted from his reverence for capital ownership versus my indifference to it seemed to fit at first glance. He idolized business owners and aspired to become one, whereas I regarded them as no better than workers or any other player in the economic game. He viscerally hated labor unions, or any demand that owners concede rights to workers. As a salesman, even his anger at his own employer’s unfair tactic of reducing sales commissions as the sales force increased revenue was tempered by grudging acknowledgment that owners have that right, having done him the favor of providing a job in the first place. I, on the other hand, thought Roy foolish to hold such self-defeating loyalty to his bosses. And I could recognize a similar-sounding thread in the views of economists. Conservative economists praise multinational companies in poor countries because their so-called “sweatshop” workers are actually better off than the peasant farm families they came from; liberal economists see this as needless and cynical exploitation of the workers’ desperate circumstances. The difference between the liberals and conservatives is whether they tilt the moral emphasis towards or away from owners.

Still, testing the idea on Roy directly was difficult because he never explicitly acknowledged any moral superiority of ownership. He seemed downright uncomfortable with the question of why owners were the most economically deserving, and preferred phrases like “hard work,” “inventiveness” or other universally-admired qualities to describe his approval of business owners – even though owners don’t all have such qualities, and he had no particular regard for non-owners who displayed those characteristics. He denigrated the inventors of the electronic spreadsheet, for instance – which enriched companies like Lotus and Microsoft – because they foolishly failed to claim ownership by not patenting their invention.

Maybe, I thought, the moral superiority of ownership is like the notion of racial superiority, which people expressed openly in the past, but now hide to avoid embarrassment. Perhaps those admirable qualities Roy cited are merely code phrases – a dodge, essentially, to avoid acknowledging that ownership is all that really matters. If so, I had little hope of prompting Roy to openly acknowledge the apparent contradiction that bothered me. I had to be careful about what I said. But I also felt tantalized by the power to embarrass him if I found and exposed the thing he was covering up.

“If people earning minimum wage want a better life, they ought to work hard to move up,” Roy told me.

“You mean own their own business?”

“Yes!” He gesticulated quickly with one hand, as I nervously watched his drink slosh nearly out of the glass he held in the other. “That’s the American dream!”

“Do you think that one difference between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives believe the whole purpose of capitalism is so that people can achieve the American dream by owning their own businesses and thus have the freedom to do as they please?”

“Yes! Yes, I do.” He nodded energetically, his eyes wide.

“And liberals believe the purpose of capitalism is to have the most efficient production and distribution of consumer products?”

He fell silent for a long moment. Finally he shrugged. “Maybe. I dunno.”

“To me it seems that’s what liberals believe.”

Interesting, I thought to myself. His strong emotional approval of opportunities for owners, but indifference to benefits for consumers, was precisely the reverse of my feelings.

Besides the difficulty of figuring out what lay behind the liberal-conservative split over economic issues, I realized I had a second problem. Many of the political issues Roy and I disagreed over had nothing to do with economics. I could see how the moral superiority of ownership weighs against labor unions (which cut into the rights and authority of owners), government regulation of business (which limits the autonomy of owners), and taxes and civil liability imposed on capital owners. But what about social programs, education, affirmative action, criminal justice and police power, foreign policy and the military, etc.? Did some indirect relationship, or perhaps a more fundamental idea, link such social issues to capital ownership?

While I was thinking about that problem I happened to be preparing a presentation on the seemingly unrelated topic of IQ testing. I had become interested in the subject during a philosophy of science class because, in contrast to all other sciences I know of, controversies over intelligence testing have stood mired in a stalemate for ninety years. The debates over IQ testing today are the same debates hotly argued in 1916, the decade the tests were invented. As I was making my notes, something occurred to me. Such endless, unresolvable controversy is typical of ideologically-based political conflicts, but completely uncharacteristic of genuine science. Even more curiously, all the prominent scientific critics of IQ tests I know of are political liberals, and the scientific defenders are conservatives (oddly, such a clean ideological split does not seem to exist among lay people). Why would mental testing advocates throughout the history of IQ have tended to be conservative-minded traditionalists, and their scientific critics tended to be progressive reformers? What’s more, being among the critics, I fit into that pattern. Like those other scientists, I cited scientific rationale for my views, ignoring the political pattern. The pattern of experts lining up against one another along political lines, instead of against uninformed people of all political stripes, was exactly what had first led me to doubt that Roy and I really based our political beliefs on the arguments we voiced openly. If something unconscious, possibly irrational, linked IQ testing to politics in the minds of those scientists, that something could be driving my opinions, too. I took a deep breath and looked in the mirror.

Maybe my objections to IQ were not as purely scientific as I had always thought. I began thinking about the hot buttons that triggered my dislike of IQ tests. I needed to remove my scientific opinions from the equation and see what basis remained. Only if the evidence and history were changed, and IQ had turned out to be scientifically valid, would my objections be nullified. So I asked myself: How would I react to that situation? After long thought I realized I would resist until the evidence became overwhelming, fearing conservatives might use the knowledge as an excuse to claim some people don’t deserve a first-class education or other opportunities. Such justifications for who is deserving and undeserving were exactly the uses the inventors of IQ tests wanted. H. H. Goddard, a pioneer of the field, speaking to Princeton students in 1919, said of manual laborers, “To demand for him such a home as you enjoy is … absurd … How can there be such a thing as social equality with this wide range of mental capacity?” I found this and other similar arguments by IQ testers repulsive.

Once I focused on my objections to IQ as a measure of what someone deserves, I realized I attacked the science of IQ instead of its moral values because I thought doing so would carry more rhetorical weight than my personal ethics. And I wondered if that same motive might also explain why Roy preferred to talk about “hard work” instead of ownership.

The inventors of IQ tests also made sure that people who answered their test questions correctly had high career status and income. If not, the testers threw the question out, reflecting their assumption that richer people are smarter. Later, they cited the tests as proof of that. Their persistence in this circular reasoning surely concealed something, I thought. Were they avoiding talking about the real reasons they think people deserve economic success? To me, IQ seemed as irrelevant to what a person deserves as race, sex, religion, nationality…

Or ownership.

IQ, race, sex, religion, nationality, ownership – all are politically divisive and all are putative measures of status. Together, they embody the politics of both economic issues and social issues. Could this be the connection between those two broad categories I was looking for?

I pondered this again one night near the end of 2002 as I guzzled the last of my beer, annoyed at Roy’s increasingly angry rant.

“I’m a moderate,” Roy told me. His portrayal of himself as moderate had always rankled me. To me he seemed staunchly right-wing. “On fiscal matters, I’m conservative. Damn right. But on social issues, whether someone is male or female, gay or straight, or black, white, green or purple makes no difference to me. Government should get out of our lives, period. I’m a libertarian.” I sighed deeply. His depiction of himself as a “fiscal conservative” as opposed to a “traditional-values” conservative was what bugged me. To my mind, Roy had subtle and not-so-subtle double-standards against non-whites, women, gays, etc., so I placed him far right of center on the political spectrum.

Roy stared quizzically at me as I sat frozen in thought. I suddenly realized he had just explained to me the political connection between economic and social issues. The criteria he mentioned – gender, sexual orientation, and race – share with ownership a central moral question: Whose status makes them deserving, and whose makes them undeserving? The original (and enduring) liberal-conservative conflict is over whether or not capital owners are more deserving than workers and consumers. The social issues divide liberals and conservatives over whether or not men are more deserving than women, whites are more deserving than non-whites, etc., defining additional hierarchies that help distinguish the deserving from the undeserving. Roy was economically conservative, in keeping with the ownership hierarchy, but saw himself as opposed to the social hierarchies. That made him moderate in his eyes.

“Right!” I said with excitement. “I see what you mean!”

Roy nodded earnestly. He seemed to think I agreed with him, but I was afraid to tell him otherwise. I knew that he took insult at any suggestion that his beliefs were grounded in something unconscious. My realization that my beliefs were would have to be satisfaction enough for me.

We both were silent for a few moments. Then he said, “So, what do you think of the Falcons so far this year?”

Roy saw the ownership-based economy as divvying wealth in the fairest possible way, rewarding the deserving and punishing the undeserving. Reversing that through taxes and social programs (unless they benefit owners) is unfair in his eyes. I, on the other hand, believe non-owners deserve to be compensated for what I see as arbitrary, unfair entitlements given to capital owners. Moderates want varying degrees of limitation on the entitlements of ownership. Likewise, the race, gender, and other social hierarchies each has its extremists, moderates, and non-believers that make up its own spectrum. Different combinations of beliefs lying at various points along each of these spectra give rise to the different varieties of liberals and conservatives.

I suspect that hierarchies of the deserving are unconscious beliefs. Roy said that opposition to government formed the basis of his political views. But just as I was wrong in believing that facts and logic about each individual issue motivated my political opinions, I think he got this one wrong. I noticed glaring exceptions to his claim to hate government: He defended the military, police, prisons, plus federal subsidies and support programs for the airline, agriculture, timber, freight, cattle and oil industries. Even absent the issue of such obvious government programs, Roy seemed to deny that the capitalist economy requires government intervention just to remain in place. One reason was that he, like virtually all Americans, suffered from historical amnesia about the government policies that drove farmers off the land and into wage-based factory work to get capitalism started; the farmers did not leave their self-sufficient lifestyle willingly. This amnesia has conspired, along with the claim that certain government actions “don’t count,” to throw a veil of invisibility over the role of government power in setting the rules for private economic relationships. A new test of supposed opposition to “big government” is in the making. Digital computer technologies are threatening copyrights of the music and movie industries. (Free markets don’t result in any ownership of creative works; copyright and patent laws reverse that. Thomas Jefferson, among others, opposed patents for this reason.) In the future, will conservatives want to increase government intervention to protect copyrights for the owners, or will they follow an anti-government program of minimizing such intervention? I predict they will follow the former course, because conservatives aren’t truly concerned about government intervention. They simply see owners as more deserving than non-owners.

As far as I can tell, up until the 1960s liberals and conservatives were distinguished solely by their degree of belief in the moral superiority of ownership. Although race, gender, and other social hierarchies of the deserving were sometimes political issues before then, they didn’t divide people along liberal vs. conservative lines. But starting with the civil rights movement, liberals have extended their egalitarian moral logic to embrace abolition of the social hierarchies along with the ownership hierarchy. This change – the emergence of a New Left – triggered a reaction by the right. Ronald Reagan reacted to the opportunity the New Left gave him by expanding conservatives’ political defense of moral hierarchies from that of ownership alone to include those of race, gender, and religion as well. Reagan’s anti-regulation, anti-tax message had obvious appeal for traditional business advocates, who saw regulation and taxation as impinging on the rights of owners. But Reagan’s language also reached out to social-hierarchy advocates who saw regulation in terms of the Feds imposing anti-discrimination laws and affirmative action, and obstructing state and local government establishment of religion, and saw taxes as funding poverty programs for undeserving people. In fact, those who subscribe to both the ownership and social hierarchies (especially on foreign policy) earned their own moniker in the years leading up to Reagan’s tenure: “neoconservative.” The dual appeal of Reagan’s anti-government language was not a rhetorical coincidence. Both the economic and social hierarchies need protection from the equalizing effect of populist forces. A government steered by democratic processes often qualifies as such.

Thus, the reaction to the civil rights movement by both liberals and conservatives represents an expansion of the basic moral logic of both ideologies – egalitarianism vs hierarchy – to larger spheres. I wonder if this may explain the fact that American national politics has become more polarized over the last twenty-five years, since that expansion left fewer issues open to compromise.

I now understand why conservatives concentrate so strongly on property rights in their conception of liberty. Although non-conservatives often imagine property rights as conferring merely exclusive use of one’s property, in practice the defense of property rights is of the feudal-capitalist type that contains within it a distaste for rewarding equally the efforts of everyone involved in a cooperative enterprise, replacing that instead with the moral superiority of ownership.

The political predilections of IQ testers and their critics now seem understandable as well. By codifying the moral principle that some people are just plain better than others into a systematic measurement, IQ advocates tossed an incendiary directly onto America’s liberal vs conservative battle front. To examine why the split over IQ correlates with politics among testing experts but not lay people, I have tried an informal test. As my test, I explain the history of IQ and the evidence against it, and take note of the subject’s reaction as well as his or her political leanings. So far, conservatives who believe in the merits of IQ (or the SAT, which is a type of IQ test) have never changed their minds in response to my explanations; the liberals have all changed theirs. I suspect that when liberals are made aware of the situation, they recognize that the agenda behind IQ conflicts with their values.

On further thought, I realized that my disagreements with Roy about environmentalism can be explained as a manifestation of our differences over ownership. The reason stems from the fact that any profit from pollution stays with the owner, but its costs fall on the public. Normally owners like to improve efficiency because doing so lowers their costs. But when someone else pays those costs, the owner’s incentive to lower them is gone and efficiency suffers (economists call such inefficiencies “externalities” – producers pass their costs off to external parties). If economic efficiency were the goal, we would therefore obviously want to impose the cost of pollution on the producer. But political ideology springs from morality first, with pragmatism a distant second. Proponents of the moral superiority of ownership believe owners deserve to be freed from the onerous costs of pollution (which represent not just money, but also the burden of moral responsibility); opponents believe owners ought to pay them. A test of the real reason for liberal environmentalism comes from cars. Many liberals drive SUVs and other high-emission cars. Therefore, fear of despoiling the Earth doesn’t fully explain the liberal motivation for environmentalism. I suspect that environmentalism stems from liberals’ desire to limit pollution by businesses, not average citizens. As evidence, in the voting booth liberals overwhelmingly support legal pollution controls for those same polluting vehicles they choose to drive. The responsibility for pollution control in that case falls on the owners of car companies, not consumers.

I asked Roy directly about the issue of political campaign financing. “Do you think lobbyists need the ability to finance political campaigns to protect businesses from labor and consumer advocates?” I asked. He answered with an enthusiastic “Yes.” I take this as an obvious nod to the ownership hierarchy.

The issues of criminal justice and police power, probably more than any others, raised my suspicions against the pro-government vs anti-government explanation that Roy presented for the liberal-conservative debate. Given the enormous concern America’s founders expressed over the potential threat to freedom posed by police powers and the Constitutional space they devoted to putting limits on those powers, it’s puzzling that the “limit-government-for-the-sake-of-freedom” faction would make police power one of the primary exceptions to its supposed anti-government stance. My impression is that conservatives don’t just carve out space for police leeway; they seem downright enthusiastic about it. An intersection between economic and social hierarchies strikes me as a saner explanation for the ideological split over those issues. When the accused perpetrator was a business owner and the victim was one of its workers or consumers, Roy’s supposed conservative dictum of harsh punishment for the accused and the primacy of victim’s rights evaporated, as did my “liberal” concern for protecting the rights of the accused. Based on the true-crime anecdotes he was fond of telling me, the crimes Roy was angry about also seemed to be those he viewed as a working class and lower class phenomenon, and a largely non-white-people phenomenon.

Likewise, our dissonance over foreign policy and the military were part social issues (cultural and racial hierarchies) and part ownership. The last American war liberals supported was WWII. Every other one has drawn their suspicions as supporting some anti-egalitarian purpose, such as ousting pro-labor, anti-capitalist regimes, or acquiring economic resources for use by capitalists. During the Cold War America even opted to overthrow democracies in favor of dictatorships to protect or promote capitalism. Roy acknowledged and was an apologist for these policy actions. I recoiled in horror at them. Our different reactions reflected the different reasons liberals and conservatives opposed Soviet communism: Conservatives opposed its non-capitalist economy, whereas liberals disliked its non-democratic government.

The Religious Right may be the only issue Roy and I agreed about. Once, after listening to a prim and proper fundamentalist defend sodomy laws, Roy said to me, “I wish a seven-foot gay guy would sodomize him!” Christian fundamentalism is not related to the entitlements of ownership, and thus has not been a longstanding conservative belief. The connection between Christian fundamentalists and political conservatism is a new phenomenon. During the 19th and early 20th centuries Christian fundamentalism was left-wing. The most famous example was William Jennings Bryan, three-time liberal Democratic Presidential candidate and prosecuting attorney at the Scopes Monkey Trial. In his arguments against evolution he bitterly condemned Social Darwinism, which conservative business magnates of the time often used to justify their treatment of workers, as being a consequence of Darwin’s theory. Many conservatives of the time argued that too, but unlike Bryan, they presented it as a good thing. These competing points of view are consistent with the liberal-conservative split over the owner-worker hierarchy.

My take on the reason fundamentalists switched from liberal to conservative is that fundamentalism was an overwhelmingly Southern phenomenon until recently (and still carries the Southern “humiliation” gene). The timing of the switch suggests that when the South answered Republicans’ call to conservatism in the wake of the civil rights and women’s movements, fundamentalism simply followed as part of the Southern landscape. The Religious Right is a coincidence of political history.

Looking to the future, that coincidence means Christian fundamentalism might not remain conservative. If the political potency of the race and gender hierarchies continues to weaken, as they seem to have been slowly doing, I predict Reagan’s coalition will eventually break and fundamentalism will again be politically up for grabs. The recent growth of evangelical groups emphasizing environmental stewardship as a Biblical mandate may be early evidence of this. The passing of the Reagan coalition might also allow the Southern working class to wake up to the fact that they got pounded economically for twenty-five years by abandoning liberalism’s vigilance against the ownership hierarchy. But I’ll be surprised if they put the blame in the right place.

What is not a coincidence, however, is the fact that the Religious Right shares with all of modern conservatism a strong belief in a status hierarchy of some kind – status in the eyes of God (or the eyes of the church authorities, to outsiders), in their case. Theirs is an extreme form, to be sure, and this may explain their intolerance: If others don’t agree with the ideas of status upon which they desperately hang their respectability, that respectability evaporates (their God appears to require human allies for His reassurance to stick). They thus go to great lengths to enforce it. That need for status and respectability also explains the personally troubled types of people whom fundamentalists are most successful recruiting; why they are often drawn to military service (it’s a source of respect for them); why they are often bullies; and why they compete with one another in ostentatious expressions of piety (again, respect).

Opposition to abortion is also not a longstanding conservative belief. (Roy called himself a “retired Catholic.”) As with Christian fundamentalism, its modern connection to conservatism is contingent on recent history. Abortion was common in Colonial America; religious opposition grew in coincidence with the rise of the women’s suffrage movement. Roy and I both suspected that the Religious Right’s position on abortion had nothing in reality to do with valuing the life of a child, because pro-life conservatives don’t agitate against America’s high infant mortality, poor pre-natal and children's health care, or child poverty. My experience of growing up in Alabama among Baptist fundamentalists led me to believe that they opposed women’s right to abortion for same reason the Religious Right was traditionally opposed to birth control: the gender hierarchy. The Baptists insisted that God put in place the consequences of sex to restrain women’s engagement in sinful acts, and to tie their sexuality to a man whose children they bore. Both birth control and abortion allow a woman to dodge those consequences.

Roy and I often agreed about gay rights. The issue of sexual orientation strikes me as an offshoot of the gender hierarchy. Most Americans see gay men as feminized versions of straight men, and lesbians as masculinized women. (Criticism of feminists as “unfeminine” often carries the unspoken accusation of lesbianism.) This perceived crossing of gender lines threatens traditional ideas of gender roles and sexual power. Roy stopped short of accepting domestic partnership benefits for les/bi/gay couples, consistent with his traditional ideas of gender roles. He also seemed uncomfortable with the sign I carried in a gay rights march that read, “Another Molecular Physicist for Gay Rights,” but I never figured out why.

I now understand why the liberal-conservative debate has never been resolved, even among the most competent and well-informed people. Our political opinions have little to do with the rational arguments by which we typically explain them to others and to ourselves. Political beliefs derive from the moral question of who is more deserving and who is less so. We rarely express the real motives for our beliefs, however. Roy preferred to speak in terms of hard work and I preferred the language of hard data and rigorous analysis, but we were both really trying to justify our feelings about ownership and other hierarchies of the deserving. To justify hierarchy, one needs to emphasize the differences between people; to justify egalitarianism, one needs to ignore them. These are the polar opposites of the American political spectrum.

If we want to judge people by differences in economic status, those differences are easy to find, if only because the system imposes them: Although anyone can become an owner, not everyone can simultaneously. The system breaks down without workers. Of course, who ends up becoming workers or owners (or whatever type status we see as important; many moderate liberals, for instance, support an educational/intellectual hierarchy) might reflect some real difference in personal worthiness. Just as for the IQ controversy, the evidence for the causes of such differences is currently not good enough to resolve the debate over them, and won’t be for a long time to come.

But even if someone uncovers definitive evidence for the causes of differences among people, the question of who is deserving – and thus the liberal-conservative debate – won’t be resolved. Just as those who defend their favorite politicians against corruption charges still defend them after the corruption is proven (e.g., Iran-Contra, Monica Lewinski), people respond to new information by changing their arguments, not their minds. We do this because we stand steadfastly in denial of the real motivations behind the beliefs we defend. Our real goal in political arguments is to persuade others to accept our moral values. But that’s not what we say. We pretend that universally-approved-of morals, like the work ethic or protection of children for instance, underlie the argument at hand, and accuse those who disagree with us of either opposing morally sensible goals or committing a reasoning error in how to achieve them. Opponents then conveniently come out looking immoral, stupid, or both. This habit of arguing the logic of our political beliefs never works because the pretense that objective logic or universal morality underlies those beliefs is wrong. Because the morality that political judgments rest upon is a feeling, not a piece of knowledge, those judgments are inherently subjective. No force of will or argument can make them otherwise. However, this doesn’t mean liberals and conservatives are entirely equal; compared to liberals, modern conservatives are less comfortable acknowledging, and therefore more vulnerable to embarrassment about, the true source of their political sentiments. Fortunately for them, so far no one has brought it up.

Thus, ironically, by arguing as if logic alone drove our opinions, Roy and I allowed our emotions to rule us. For my part, I erroneously bought into our culture’s exclusive respect for rational argument. By seeing that that respect is really irrational denial, we rediscover the emotional basis of political belief and can rebalance logic and emotion more honestly. I can now think of a long list of passionate arguments that bog down in endless disagreement because of the same failure to seek that balance.

Just before going to bed, I asked Roy, “Do you think politics might really be an argument over who is deserving and who is undeserving?”

He looked off to one side, staring pensively into a far corner, then after a moment snapped into focus. “Yes, I think that’s right,” he answered.

Finally, I thought, we agreed! But now I realize my question didn’t clarify that I meant who was deserving because of status, not behavior. I never did. In the months after that visit Roy’s health deteriorated, and we hardly spoke about political issues. Although he eventually saw a doctor, he refused to let anyone look inside of him. He died about a year later, never having believed much in the power of the unconscious mind. But I believe in it, thanks to my relationship with him.