Blogging about politics makes me miserable

I just had to put that out there. There's a certain "ignorance is bliss" factor involved in all this. I'm just having a hard time keeping my head in the sand.

Years ago on Bravenet I published a post comparing political ideologies with various developmental theories.

One of the things I looked at was Piaget's developmental stages:

The other was Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs:



It was no surprise to me that conservatives function on the lower level of both Maslow's and Piaget's models: they focus on personal property and it's acquisition, safety, individuality, and concrete items... Liberals deal in abstractions, community, and growth/development. It seemed to me that Liberals are more complex and mature humans than conservatives.

While I'd love to appear more tolerant, accepting, and generally softer on the conservatives, I can't see myself denying any of this. I would have liked to find more common ground between the two political sides, but instead am finding greater and greater rifts.

As I delve deeper and deeper into the conservative mind, I find more and more evidence that there is a fundamental difference in the thought processes of liberals and conservatives, and while liberals can understand and choose to reject the ideology of conservatives, conservatives can't understand at all the liberal ideology, rather they live Peter Pan lives, terrified of losing their individuality in a grown up, complex, and at times abstract world.

One example of this involves the very idea of liberty.

in Liberty and Tyranny: a Conservative Manifesto, Levin writes:

In the civil society, private property and liberty are inseperable. The individual's right to live freely and safely and to pursue happiness includes the right to acquire and possess property, which represents the fruits of his own intellectual and/or physical labor. As the individual's time on earth is finite, so, too, is his labor. An illegitimate denial or diminution of his private property enslaves him to another and denies him his liberty.

Conservatives I've spoken to this past week so strongly equate freedom with private property, that it was impossible for them to even argue about things like self expression. The closest I got to a discussion of self expression was a situation where a conservative felt he was being censored by a local newspaper who did not publish his endless letters damning various government officials for usurping the constitution and trying to develop either a socialist government or a monarchy (depending on the issue).

This same individual later expounded on the personal property = liberty issue with the example of light bulbs. Global warming and the need for energy conservation, he reasoned, was the lie GE told to the public. Since Democrats are in bed with General Electric, they're going to line both their pockets with increased profits and taxes from the sale of "these new light bulbs"... meaning, of course, compressed florescent lights. This was a way to deny the individual their God given right to freedom... their God Given right to buy and use any light bulb they see fit. So strongly did he feel about this issue that he pointed out that when a government official comes to his door to take away his incandescent light bulbs, he has a 16 gauge shotgun at the ready to "remind them of his second amendment rights" and to defend his rights under the constitution.

One of the interesting things about the whole discussion is that while the conservative often argues that there are laws and that one must obey them, he also believes that some laws are not "legal" or infringe on his Constitutional Rights, and that these laws are determined not by the "Liberal Court" but by his own interpretation of the Constitution.

Again, when you look at the interpretations of individuals who equate "property" with "freedom" for example, you get a pretty skewed and simplistic political ideology, rather the type of egocentric rules you'd see from a child.