Behind the Scenes: The Making of a Conservative or Liberal

(continued)

• Poverty. To most, seeing a starving person or someone otherwise disadvantaged evokes, on some level, an amount of empathy. Sure, you might not actually give a beggar a dollar or take him to dinner, but you do feel sorry for him. Even if you live in a huge city like New York, you might be so habituated to it that you don’t consciously think about it, but deep down, a little voice at the back of your head is happy you’re not in his position; thus, you feel sorry for him.
  
  People in conservative areas don’t get this exposure. Many conservative towns, especially suburbs, actually have ordinances preventing beggars and panhandlers from wandering around asking for money. Moreover, the classier the suburb, the more the ordinances are enforced by police. Therefore, even though the poverty still exists, it’s either in jail or about to be. Being spread out, suburbs also disallow for meaningful face-to-face contact with poverty, so avoiding it is as simple and remorseless as driving through the green light.
  
  This is a problem. Psychologically, it allows anyone with a gas pedal to avoid a serious condition, both metaphorically and literally. Keep in mind, however, this is only poverty by American standards. Poverty in America, at the very least, allows resources that assure that nobody ever starves to death if they're at least smart enough to find a homeless shelter.
  
  According to this logic, it’s no surprise that neither Democrats nor Republicans publicly care about the true poverty present in third world countries; for, nobody this side of the Atlantic ever has to confront it face to face—we can just gas pedal away in our jet aircraft. Thus, both Democrats and Republicans are guilty of ignoring a fairly serious problem of human rights, but Republicans just happen to ignore more of it because they can ignore the American side of it as well.



• Transportation. When a New Yorker who lives downtown goes to work, he walks to a subway station and takes the train elsewhere. When a Parisian wants to go to a nice restaurant, he takes the Metro. Chicagoans take the El, and even someone who lives in downtown Dallas can take the Dart bus anywhere downtown. In all major cities, there are also cabs driven by someone who is most likely bilingual. More or less, every single liberal area possesses a public transportation system in some form, and if they don't, they tend to have a decent handful of cabs. Sure, it’s all cheap and convenient, but why is this so different from their suburban neighbors? The answer is surprisingly simple: the suburbanites drive cars more than they take buses or cabs. In doing so, they avoid interactions with people they might find otherwise undesirable, such as cabbies.
  
  Automobiles present an extremely convenient, readily available, easy-to-use mode of transportation, which, in the most direct fashion, allows an individual to travel a highly customized route to a destination. Its downside is that it’s precisely that—individual. Whereas public transportation systems carry with them a level of humility and marginalization due to the fact you’re just part of the crowd, a car crowns you king of the roadway.
  A driver is metaphorically alone. He sits in a position of relative power that is void of interpersonal interaction outside of talking to his passengers. He doesn't have to trust a cab driver, and he doesn't have to be aware of the faces of other drivers on the roadway. To him, he only sees his destination, and anything else is but a glare from a headlight or the glow of a taillight. Plenty of research has been done on this type of environment’s contribution to the road rage phenomenon, so I won’t expand on it much more than using the very presence of road rage to contribute to the greater picture:
  
  Road rage puts the individual at odds with the world. Seemingly, everyone else in the world is an idiot, and you, being self-appointed one of the best drivers, are the only sane one amongst the sea of mechanical cattle. If you cut in line at the grocery store, you are doomed to see the rightfully wronged faces of those you've cut off; in a car, however, faces of the wronged (and consequently accountability for injustice and justice) go unnoticed. It literally is your way or the highway, and this creates a sense of entitlement.
  
  So, let’s combine this experience with the relative amount of time spent in-commute for most suburbanites with respect to their liberal counterparts. Barring accidents, rush hour pretty much guarantees a 45-90 minute commute for a suburbanite, versus a 5-10 minute walk + 5-15 minute subway ride for a New Yorker. Double that for the return trip, and we have a grand total of 40 minutes (worst case) of commute for a city dweller versus 90 minutes (best case) for a suburb-dweller. But, we’re not finished. Factor in common daily tasks like picking the kids up from school, getting lunch with a coworker, and grabbing groceries, and we can easily see how both figures skyrocket for the suburbanite's king of the roadway time.
  
  Also, the difference is not simply the commute times, but how the commutes take place. That forty minutes spent by a New Yorker is done through continuous face-to-face contact, where every bump or trip is easily communicated as accidental or intentional, leaving very little room for error. The suburban traveler, on the other hand, lacks that interpersonal feedback. Any perceived wrongdoing has no immediate dismissal, and any tension only grows without abatement. Thus, for the 90 minutes spent in the car in rush hour, the car-bound traveler is filled with frustration and rage over seeming ineptitude over inane things that would normally evoke sympathy face to face (e.g., elderly people's lack of coordination). Meanwhile, the 40 minute subway rider is probably filled with boring nothingness, and just to pass the time he might end up talking to a stranger about something random.
  
  I would argue that over the course of 20 years of daily repetition, this directly translates to how a person will view the world, and how he will vote with regard to social issues. The person who constantly feels as though everyone on the road is an idiot and that he knows best will vote for his own self-interest at the cost of others, while the person who actually has the daily reality check with the rest of the world—that is, in realizing that we’re all the same—will vote more selflessly.



• Novelty. So far I’ve detailed both poverty and transportation, but I’ve left out the most important and all-encompassing of them all: differences in perception of novelty. Humans don’t inherently like interruptions to their daily routines. Things seen as novel or new tend to be negatively received and therefore tentatively rejected unless the state of things calls for a radical, desperate idea. In that case, novelty may be applauded. However, for the sake of most Western societies, people in the majority view the state of things as going fairly well, so new things don’t fare particularly well in the public eye. Those who are well off don’t want anything to change their happiness, while those who are miserable are desperate for change. As a result, disenfranchised minorities end up screaming for novelty while the happy majority plugs its ears.
  
  Why, then, is novelty more well-accepted in liberal areas than it is in conservative areas? That is, why would it be easier to pass a radical idea (e.g., worker's rights), in a highly democratic area while it would be seemingly impossible to do so in a conservative area? We simply combine the first two arguments with what they share at their cores: novelty. Being confronted with poverty is just as intrusive and new as having to step onto a bus or train with complete strangers on a daily basis. Similarly, not having to confront poverty is just as comforting as the egocentric feeling of being the master of the roadway in a world full of idiots. The former liberal state is of constant exposure to novelty, while the latter conservative state is a constant underexposure to novelty. In fact, one could even argue that the latter is a conscious objection to novelty in some instances, and we cannot be surprised, because this agrees with human nature.
  
  Following these states of daily living, we also find that not surprisingly those constantly exposed to novelty react far better to future exposures to novelty than those who remain otherwise underexposed to it. As a result, any perceived break in the status quo meets vehement rejection by those underexposed to such breaks, sometimes to the point of violence. Slavery, the New Deal legislation, women’s voting rights, socialism, black civil rights, and most recently gay rights all met with strong opposition in areas most congruent to conservative life experiences, while they were most readily received in areas high in liberal life experiences. Areas that never had to deal with anything different wanted it to remain that way the most, while areas that have to deal with new and daring things on a daily basis may have resisted at first, but they were much more apt to listen and understand in the long run rather than arbitrarily dismissing or actively rejecting new things due to the skills developed by liberal area dwellers in assimilating and accommodating new experiences.
  
  As a side note, anyone who has taken post-civil war history realizes that the labels of “Republican” and “Democrat” don’t apply as they do today prior to FDR, as the ideologies switched around that time. Thus, when someone says that “Lincoln was a Republican,” they’re neglecting to realize that the meaning of Republican was liberal at the time with regard to federal rights versus the Democratic meaning of conservative state’s rights. But, the conditions of liberal and conservative lifestyles remained the same. Liberal (“Republican”) lifestyles translated to areas densely populated with the working class, while conservative (“Democrat”) lifestyles translated to areas sparsely populated with rural farmers. In either time period—present or past—the amount of novelty one was exposed to on a daily basis predicted his voting patterns.


• Religious role. Given the overall disconnectedness of the lifestyle, it’s furthermore not surprising that the density of churches in conservative areas skyrockets. After all, so far we’ve examined how the majority of socially-disconnected people seem to end up becoming conservatives simply due to the environmental influences that surround them. They’re creatures who remain relatively alone in almost every facet of public life (wives/husbands/children are private), with only their close family to support them in times of need. Concordantly, it becomes increasingly reassuring when someone tells them that there’s someone greater than themselves watching their backs in a world that, according to their point of view, is large, chaotic, unforgiving, ruthless, and intimidating. The strength and unity afforded by the image of a large mega-church replaces the insecure feelings of dismal disconnection present in every other aspect of the conservative's life, all the while lacking in as broad of a scope in the liberal counterpart's life.
  
  For example, just by taking the subway to work, the New Yorker is reminded on a daily basis that everyone influences everyone else. The person grabbing the same pole as you might be the construction worker who’s repairing your office building. The girl sitting across from you might be one of the theater performers you saw the other month on stage with your girlfriend. The guy driving your cab or train has your life in his hands. All in all, because so many people are squished into such a small space, the image of interconnectedness remains unavoidably clear, and everyone can’t help but realize that everyone else is in for the long haul together—God or not—and that everyone depends on everyone else in order to truly make their lives work.
  
  So, when it comes down to voting, those who seem to think that God is behind every action done by everyone in the world would be more likely to vote in favor of faith-based initiatives, whereas those who constantly realize that their fellow man is behind every action would be more likely to oppose those very initiatives.
  
  
• Other factors. Most other factors I can think of off hand relate to the aforementioned broad topics. In large cities, for example, people tend to live in high rises or multi-tenant buildings. This increases the amount of time a person is forced to see his neighbors doing normal things. He may even end up talking to his neighbor or getting to know them better. If they’re part of a union, there’s a fairly specific window of commute that tends to happen in following union work hours, thus resulting in fairly congruent arrival and departure times, therein increasing the chance of contact.
  
  In suburbia, however, long commutes at varying times to and from fenced-in houses with private garages, yards, and pools nearly negate the daily experience of neighborly interaction. A waving neighbor is adeptly avoided by waving and driving on. It thus becomes more likely that the high rise inhabitant would be more likely to accept a gay lifestyle than an equally-matched suburban counterpart, because the high rise inhabitant might just end up being best friends with her gay neighbor simply because of the amount of inherent interaction that is required between the two.
  
  The suburban woman, on the other hand, might never even discover that she has a gay neighbor, and consequently she would never develop empathy for the gay plight. She would buy in to whatever her church says on the subject and put it out of sight and out of mind-- never having to face opposing evidence to the postulations of the pulpit. Of course, this draws upon the disconnectedness involved in both transportation and novelty exposure, as well as a reduced or increased need for religious exposure to mitigate disconnectedness.

So what does all of this mean? First, it means that no matter how you’re raised as kid, the above ideas suggest that the end result of either being liberal or conservative relates more to the persistent environment than it does with what your parents or your peers believe you should be. This means that, sadly, those who are raised in a conservative environment and later end up working in that same environment are more likely to remain conservative. Even worse, with the growing popularity of suburbs and self-employment, it looks like conservativism might grow for a small period of time.

On the bright side, because of population growth, transportation density limitations (i.e. traffic), and land availability curves over time, conservative reign as we know it will be short-lived in the grand scheme of things. In fact, we might have seen the worst of it already, but I obviously can't be certain. I would, however, predict that within the next century, there will be an urban flight to inner city areas due to plummeting property values. First, the current rapid growth of suburban lifestyle will die a horrible death, as it will become old, cliché suburbia. Since suburbanite lifestyles are popular, more and more people will pounce on 60 year mortgages that they can't afford, while impoverished inner city areas rock-bottom areas hit all-time lows in value. Thus, as a matter of sheer economics, the aggregate property values of inner city areas drop, so the potential return on development of that area at relatively little cost becomes extremely attractive.

Brand spankin' new houses and apartment skyrises will pop up downtown in increasing numbers, thus becoming the new suburbia. Since the old suburbia houses will be falling apart by then, no doubt stylistically already out of style as well, actual rich people will migrate back to areas previously unwanted. The lustre of the city will once again reign, and the crumbling suburbia will become the new home of the poor, bussed or trained in and out of the city for their labor.

From a developer’s standpoint, one can take a million dollar property block, bulldoze it, and build a New York city-style development for only a few million dollars, but return ten times that through rents and sales in a relatively short period of time. Combine that with developing an adjacent area into retail, restaurant, and business, and within a decade you see massive returns on a relatively small investment.

By the way, this is happening as we speak in Dallas. The market demands it, and the price is right. Happily, as this method of living grows, the traditional barriers to unity that foster disconnection crumble all around. The poor people who will be publicly transported into town get the benefits of public transportation, while the upper middle class turn into liberal New Yorkers.

In the end, conservativism as we know it today is doomed.

Break out the dessert, it's time to celebrate.