What makes someone republican

But the reality is that in America today, how you answer a handful of questions is very likely to determine how you vote. This quiz, based on recent surveys with more than , responses, presents a series of yes-or-no questions to predict whether someone is more likely to identify as a Democrat or a Republican. It captures divisions that should make you worried about the future of American democracy.

Asking whether someone is black, Hispanic or Asian cleaves the electorate into two groups. Among those who are not black, Hispanic or Asian mostly white people , the second most important question is whether the person considers religion important.

Party allegiances are now also tied to education, gender and age. Americans have sorted themselves more completely and rigidly than any time in recent history.

Two questions about race and religion divide the population into distinct categories; others about education, age and sexuality splinter them further. But with the right mix of personal details, people who are separated initially can converge near the bottom of this tree. These groups were initially split by the question about religious importance. But they converged near the middle because of their education, gender and more.

White, religious Protestants lean Republican, but those who are male and live in the South are even more likely to identify with the party. Sorting has occurred on both sides, but the Republican Party has tended more toward homogeneity: whiter, more Christian and more conservative. Democrats are a far more diverse party.

From to , white men who attended church frequently were 6 percentage points more likely to be a Democrat than a Republican. From to , they were 43 points more likely to be Republican. The party identification of young, unmarried women stayed about the same — but the average American became significantly more likely to identify as Republican, magnifying the difference between these two groups. Polarization has also made voters hesitant to support politicians willing to cooperate with the other side, contributing to legislative gridlock.

Worse, the alignment of party preferences with personal identities has fostered ugly, tribal politics. Voters today like their own party less than ever, but are motivated by their even stronger dislike of the other party.

Wronski said. The partisan gap between black and white voters is the most durable and powerful split in modern American politics. Afterward, the Republicans courted racist white voters by opposing school and housing integration.

Among white people, religion is the most stable and important determinant of party choice. But the way religion shapes party attachment has changed. Today, the best way to sort the population of white voters is not by which religion they belong to, but by how religious they are. But I believe the hollowness and cluelessness on which Benen focuses is not purely the product of wanting to win, as he sometimes implies.

Instead, it has roots in conservative ideology that go deeper than partisan expediency. Over the last several decades, the Republican Party has been conquered by the Christian right and the overwhelmingly white Tea Party movement. The former has a theocratic vision for America. The latter militantly opposes economic redistribution.

His heavy if erratic investment in restrictionist immigration policies has always been central to his appeal, and the sudden lurch of the GOP in that direction after George W. Bush and John McCain championed a more diverse future was far from being just another area of Republican electoral opportunism. Indeed, some of what Benen sees as simple cynicism is arguably ideological as well. Benen treats these as a by-product of Republican opportunism.

But for a party existentially committed to restoring or preserving white, Christian supremacy in the face of increasing diversity, they are a direct means of delivering that dominance.

The numbers are stark. Since , Democratic presidents have put forward 39 percent more policy proposals than Republican presidents, and 62 percent more domestic policy proposals.

New policies usually expand the scope of government responsibility, funding, or regulation. There are occasional conservative policy successes as well, but they are less frequent and are usually accompanied by expansion of government responsibility in other areas.

I've often heard liberals wonder why there's no Democratic version of the Tea Party. I've often heard conservatives complain that their party doesn't spend enough time coming up with serious policy solutions for issues like health care. And, to be sure, there are some liberals trying to popularize Tea Party—like tactics and some conservatives trying to come up with sweeping new health reforms. But it's hard for these initiatives to succeed.

There's a tendency to imagine the parties as mirror images of each other, and thus to believe they can easily follow the other's strategies.

But they can't. The parties are good at different things because they really are different. That difference, however, can lead to deep misunderstandings. Democrats tend to project their preference for policymaking onto the Republican Party — and then respond with anger and confusion when Republicans don't seem interested in making a deal. Adult belief systems rest on childhood beliefs instilled by parents mostly and by assorted other authorities.

Republicans do not try to change voter's beliefs. They go with them. Democrats appeal to reason. Big mistake. Edge has latterly published two provocative pieces, Jon Haidt's essay on why people vote Republican and Clay Shirky's ruminations and calculations on the cognitive surplus we have at our disposal. To a historian, these pieces dovetail and underscore a fundamental landslip that's taking place around us.

I'll comment on Haidt first, then get to Shirky, but no Edge visitor should miss either. Roughly speaking, we are discovering that words don't matter. Or they don't matter as much as we thought. Take the political question. The underlying fiction of electoral bodies is that the electors make rational choices about ideally what is in the best interests of the whole community or realistically what is in the best interests of themselves or some group to which they belong. We know how to accept the results of that kind of thinking, always closing our eyes a bit to the extent to which things don't actually go that way.

Corrupt political machines have been influencing votes wholesale for a long time and it's hard to argue that the dead citizens of Chicago really had their own best interests in mind when they voted.

But I'm reading just now Livy's description of how the Romans chose their first king, Numa Pompilius, when Romulus died, and it's certainly framed as looking about for the best qualified candidate for the job. The cynicism of the last years makes it clear that no one in high electoral politics now needs to, wants to, or should think that way if they want to win an election.

This came home to me in the aftermath of the election when I saw a map of who-voted-how coded at a level that made it clear that the counties of the US that produce the wealth and innovation voted overwhelmingly Democratic and the counties of the US that depend on government subsidy or that simply underperform economically voted overwhelmingly Republican.

That's nuts—and it makes perfect sense at the same time. Perfect sense in that the Republican success of the last generation, since Nixon and Reagan cracked the code, has been to exploit irrelevant to national policy anxieties.

We are at the point where the national maneuvering for office has nothing to do with argument so much for folks who say that "the economy should be Obama's best argument" and everything to do with positioning a message between now and election day so that pulling the lever or pushing the button or punching the chad for one candidate makes you feel morally satisfied, which is to say, less anxious and guilty and ashamed.

McCain's choice of Palin confirms what the Democrats choice of Obama made clear: the candidate's qualifications for some notional job don't matter at all. What matters is the candidate's qualification for getting you to push the button. After that, it's politics as usual. And for a generation or more now, one party has been better at that than the other, and of course they claim that it's because their message is stronger and truer. Truth has nothing to do with it. Shirky's piece gives more context for our transition away from words that matter.

I don't mean we don't speak and write and that words aren't highly functional tools, but the exact framing of sentences and the precise structure of the verbal argument are less and less important. Bullet points on a powerpoint get the conversation going and the group working together gets to the result that matters. The "writer" is less important than he has been since, oh, Herodotus.

Obama's speech on race earlier this summer. Good work, well-written, seen by almost no one, read by a few, and then blown off the screens by his preacher's TV appearances. Net result, the image and the illogic prevail. Shirky is one of many voices confirming that this fading of the power of the specific written word is not all bad news and even has good news to it, but the old classics professor in me at least needs to slow down long enough to observe the the humanistic culture of the orator from Demosthenes to Martin Luther King Jr.

We don't fully understand what's replacing it, but it's happening all around us—you might even call it a third culture The human brain is an engine of belief. Our minds continually consume, produce, and attempt to reconcile propositions about ourselves and the world that purport to be true: Iran is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons; human beings are contributing to global climate change; I actually look better with gray hair.

What must a brain do to believe such propositions? This question marks the intersection of many fields: psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, economics, political science, and even jurisprudence. Understanding belief at the level of the brain is the main focus of my current research, using functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI.

Belief encompasses two domains that have been traditionally divided in our discourse. We believe propositions about facts , and these acts of cognition subsume almost every effort we make to get at the truth—in science, history, journalism, etc.

But we also form beliefs about values : judgments about morality, meaning, personal goals, and life's larger purpose. While they differ in certain respects, these types of belief share some important features. Both types of belief make tacit claims about normativity : claims not merely about how we human beings think and behave, but about how we should think and behave.

Factual beliefs like "water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen" and ethical beliefs like "cruelty is wrong" are not expressions of mere preference. To really believe a proposition whether about facts or values is also to believe that one has accepted it for legitimate reasons. It is, therefore, to believe that one is in compliance with a variety norms i.

When we really believe that something is factually true or morally good, we also believe that another person, similarly placed, should share our conviction. Despite the remonstrations of people like Jonathan Haidt and Richard Shweder, science has long been in the values business. Scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; it is the result of scientists making their best effort to value principles of reasoning that reliably link their beliefs to reality, through valid chains of evidence and argument.

The answer to the question, "What should I believe, and why should I believe it? This is a norm of cognition as well as the epistemic core of any scientific mission statement.

But what about meaning and morality? Here we appear to move from questions of truth—which have long been in the domain of science if they are to be found anywhere—to questions of goodness. How should we live? Is it wrong to lie? If so, why and in what sense? Which personal habits, uses of attention, modes of discourse, social institutions, economic systems, governments, etc.

It is widely imagined that science cannot even pose, much less answer, questions of this sort. Jonathan Haidt appears to exult in this pessimism. He doubts that anyone can justifiably make strong, realistic claims about right and wrong, or good and evil, because he has observed that human beings tend to make moral judgments on the basis of emotion, justify these judgments with post hoc reasoning, and stick to their guns even when their post hoc reasoning demonstrably fails.

As he says in one of his earlier papers, when asked to justify their emotional reactions to certain moral and pseudo-moral dilemmas, people are often "morally dumbfounded. I think it would be fair to say that the Monty Hall problem leaves many of its victims "logically dumbfounded.

This reliable failure of human reasoning is just that—a failure of reasoning. It does not suggest that there isn't a single correct answer to the Monty Hall problem. While it might seem the height of arrogance to say it, the people who actually understand the Monty Hall problem really do hold the "logical high ground. As a counterpoint to the prevailing liberal opinion that morality is a system of"prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other," Haidt asks us to ponder mysteries of the following sort: "But if morality is about how we treat each other, then why did so many ancient texts devote so much space to rules about menstruation, who can eat what, and who can have sex with whom?

Are these the same ancient texts that view slavery as morally unproblematic? It would seem so. Perhaps slavery has no moral implications after all—could Abolition have been just another instance of liberal bias? Or, following Haidt's initial logic, why not ask, "if physics is just a system of laws which explains the structure of the universe in terms of mass and energy, why do so many ancient texts devote so much space to immaterial influences and miraculous acts of God?

Haidt is, of course, right to worry that liberals may not always "hold the moral high ground. Conservatives proved less biased by race than liberals and, therefore, more even-handed. It turns out that liberals were very eager to sacrifice a white person to save one hundred non-whites, but not the other way around, all the while maintaining that considerations of race had not entered into their thinking. Observations of this sort are useful in revealing the biasing effect of ideology—even the ideology of fairness.

Haidt often writes, however, as if there were no such thing as moral high ground. At the very least, he seems to believe that science will never be able to judge higher from lower. He admonishes us to get it into our thick heads that many of our neighbors "honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. These same people tend to prefer Republican doubts about biological evolution and climate change.

There are names for this type of "preference," one of the more polite being "ignorance. Haidt appears to consider it an intellectual virtue to adopt, uncritically, the moral categories of his subjects. But where is it written that everything that people do or decide in the name of "morality" deserves to be considered part its subject matter? A majority of Americans believe that the Bible provides an accurate account of the ancient world as well as accurate prophecies of the future.

Many millions of Americans also believe that a principal cause of cancer is "repressed anger. Much of humanity is clearly wrong about morality—just as much of humanity is wrong about physics, biology, history, and everything else worth understanding.

If, as I believe, morality is a system of thinking about and maximizing the well being of conscious creatures like ourselves, many people's moral concerns are frankly immoral. Does forcing women and girls to wear burqas make a positive contribution to human well-being?

Does it make happier boys and girls? More compassionate men? More confident and contented women? Does it make for better relationships between men and women, between boys and their mothers, or between girls and their fathers? I would bet my life that the answer to each of these questions is "no. And yet, most scientists have been trained to think that such judgments are mere expressions of cultural bias. Very few of us seem willing to admit that simple, moral truths increasingly fall within the purview of our scientific worldview.

I am confident that this period of reticence will soon come to an end. Unless human well-being is perfectly random, or equally compatible with any events in the world or state of the brain, there will be scientific truths to be known about it.

These truths will, inevitably, force us to draw clear distinctions between ways of thinking and living, judging some to better or worse, more or less true to the facts, and more or less moral. Of course, questions of human well-being run deeper than any explicit code of morality. Morality—in terms of consciously held precepts, social-contracts, notions of justice, etc.

Such conventions require, at a minimum, language and a willingness to cooperate with strangers, and this takes us a stride or two beyond the Hobbesian "state of nature. Whatever behaviors served to mitigate the internecine misery of our ancestors would fall within the scope of this analysis.

To simplify matters enormously: 1 genetic changes in the brain gave rise to social emotions, moral intuitions, and language… 2 which produced increasingly complex cooperative behavior, the keeping of promises, concern about one's reputation, etc… 3 which became the basis for cultural norms, laws, and social institutions whose purpose has been to render this growing system of cooperation durable in the face of countervailing forces.

Some version of this progression has occurred in our case, and each step represents an undeniable enhancement of our personal and collective well-being.

Of course, catastrophic regressions are always possible. We could, either by design or negligence, employ the hard-won fruits of civilization, and the emotional and social leverage of millennia of biological and cultural evolution, to immiserate ourselves more fully than unaided Nature ever could.

Imagine a global North Korea, where the better part of a starving humanity serves as slaves to a lunatic with bouffant hair: this might, in fact, be worse than a world filled merely with warring Australopithecines. What would "worse" mean in this context?

Just what our liberal? While it will never be feasible to compare such counterfactual states of the world, that does not mean that there are no experiential facts of the matter to be compared.

Haidt is, of course, right to notice that emotions have primacy in many respects—and the way in which feeling drives judgment is surely worthy of study. It does not follow, however, that there are no right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

Just as people are often less than rational when claiming to be rational, they are often less than moral when claiming to be moral. We know from many lines of converging research that our feeling of reasoning objectively, in concordance with compelling evidence, is often an illusion.

This is especially obvious in split-brain research, when the left hemisphere's "interpreter" finds itself sequestered, and can be enticed to simply confabulate by way of accounting for right-hemisphere behavior. This does not mean, however, that dispassionate reasoning, scrupulous attention to evidence, and awareness of the ever-present possibility of self-deception are not cognitive skills that human beings can acquire.

And there is no reason to expect that all cultures and sub-cultures value these skills equally. If there are objective truths about human well-being—if kindness, for instance, is generally more conducive to happiness than cruelty is—then there seems little doubt that science will one day be able to make strong and precise claims about which of our behaviors and uses of attention are morally good, which are neutral, and which are bad.

At time when only 28 percent of Americans will admit the truth of evolution, while 58 percent imagine that a belief in God is necessary for morality, it is truism to say that our culture is not prepared to think critically about the changes to come.

I agree with Jonathan Haidt that philosophy and politics take off from everyday moral intuitions. And I agree there are real and valuable moral intuitions that liberalism doesn't capture, and that motivate many working-class Republican voters. But the moral intuitions I have in mind aren't in Haidt's moral taxonomy either. They are the special moral intuitions that we all have about raising children. This has become particularly vivid with the Republican enthusiasm for Sarah Palin.

For most of us, our children are the source of our gravest moral obligations, deepest moral dilemmas and greatest moral triumphs. But the moral intuitions of childrearing aren't well articulated by the liberal scheme, or any other philosophical scheme for that matter. There is an obvious reason for this, childrearing has been women's work, philosophy, psychology, theology and politics have belonged to men. The liberal Enlightenment philosophy that underpins Democratic politics is rooted in intuitions about good and harm, autonomy and reciprocity, individuality and universality.

Each individual person deserves to pursue happiness and avert harm, and by cooperating reciprocally we can maximize the good of everyone—the basic idea of the social contract.

But individualist, universalist and contractual moral systems, whether they are libertarian or socialist, utilitarian or Kantian, just don't get it about raising kids. Childrearing isn't individualistic. It doesn't feel like just another moral relation to another person—a neighbor, a fellow citizen, even a friend.

When you take on the care of children, you create a moral unit that is larger than you are. As a result there is nothing morally or rationally incoherent in the fact that caregivers regularly, indeed necessarily, sacrifice their own happiness and autonomy for the happiness and autonomy of their children. The good of the baby simply becomes your own good. Childrearing is particular, not universalist.

One of the everyday but astonishing facts of life is that while we choose our friends and our mates, we don't choose our children. Even when we adopt a baby, we don't know how that baby will turn out. And even the most basic features of what a baby is like are beyond our control, a situation that becomes vivid for the parents of children with disabilities.

And yet, with some tragic exceptions, when we care for a child we love that child , not other children or children in general. And we have a moral relation to that child that we don't have to other children.

Sometimes we love the neediest babies most of all. Sarah Palin's baby is such a powerful image for many women because caring for a Down syndrome child exemplifies the paradox of all childrearing—I love my children in particular, it doesn't matter what they're like or what they do, I'd sacrifice my own happiness for theirs.

Childrearing also isn't contractual or reciprocal. We may vaguely expect that our children may one day take care of us. But every sane parent appreciates the fundamental and necessary asymmetry of caregiving. Even with mates, and certainly with friends, we expect a certain reciprocity. The neediest of our intimates give us something in return.

But every child is needier than the most intolerably demanding friend or lover. These moral intuitions have their roots in our evolutionary history.

Human beings have a longer period of protected immaturity, a longer childhood, than any other species, and human children demand an exceptional amount of parental investment. As a species, we reap great benefits from this arrangement—in fact, it's the secret of our evolutionary success. The period of protected immaturity allows us to learn flexibly about a wide range of environments, before we actually have to act on them. It depends on the especially profound and protracted commitments of human caregiving.

But I'd argue that our moral intuitions about childrearing are right independently of their evolutionary origins. It really is a good thing that we care for children in the way we do. Empirically, there is sociological evidence that childrearing is especially problematic and challenging for working—class Americans, particularly in the areas that are most likely to vote Republican.

Economic insecurity, divorce, the mobility that puts grandmothers and aunts on the other side of the country, all make it difficult for families to thrive. That itself is a reason why "family values" loom so large for these voters. But middle and upper-class blue state voters also share the intuition that childrearing is special, although they can afford to treat the morality of caregiving as a private matter separate from politics. Of course, subsidies to new parents, family leave, good early childhood education, fewer working hours with higher pay and more flexibility, are much more likely to actually help parents than abstinence education, abortion restrictions, or gay marriage bans.

Some politicians have started to realize this—red states like Georgia and Arkansas have been leaders in creating early childhood programs.

It's particularly ironic that contraception and abortion which look inimical to childrearing, may empirically actually allow for more thriving, caring and intimate families, and that the drive for gay marriage is motivated in part by the desire of many gay couples to raise children. But politics is about articulating ideals as much as about formulating policies. The philosophical framework of liberalism makes it hard for Democrats to articulate the intuitions that most people share. Caring for a particular, individual baby, even a "special needs" baby, and being part of a particular, individual family, even a complex, messy family, are intrinsic human goods.

Politics should help people achieve them successfully. All human babies are specially needy and all human families are complex and messy, and nobody could ever make a good argument that you love your kids and your relatives because they maximize your utilities.

Democrats use the language of universal entitlement, when they talk about state-supported preschool or childcare, or the language of individual autonomy, when they talk about choice or contraception, or the language of investment, when they talk about the long-term benefits of healthy and well-educated children.

But none of these ways of talking about children really capture our everyday intuitions. Of course, there isn't a good alternative conservative language for these intuitions either. The Republican language of traditional religion also doesn't get it, which is why the celebration of Sarah Palin's unwed daughter's pregnancy seemed so paradoxical. One way we might try to bridge this gap between intuition, philosophy and policy is by appealing to the fact that human childrearing extends far beyond biological mothers.

Psychologically, there is strong evidence that we love the children we care for, not just the ones we bear. As the ethologist Sarah Hrdy points out, when animals make big parental investments they spread the load.

In socially monogamous species, including many birds and a few mammals, fathers as well as mothers invest in caregiving, and fathers make this investment even when babies aren't their genetic offspring.