``..But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death...''
Pretty funny. I was just working on a post that said more or less the same thing. Except I was using something that Wojtek posted a link to:
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~hannahk/bulletin.pdf
Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, Jost, JT, Glaser J, Kruglanski AW, Sulloway FJ.
Glaser and Sullory are from Berkeley---wouldn't you know it---headquarters of all that multiculturalism, and its related identity problematics. I mean Judith Butler lives here too.
``Analyzing political conservatism as motivated social cognition integrates theories of personality (authoritarianism, dogmatism-intolerance of ambiguity), epistemic and existential needs (for closure, regulatory focus, terror management), and ideological rationalization (social dominance, system justification). A meta-analysis (88 samples, 12 countries, 22,818 cases) confirms that several psychological variables predict political conservatism: death anxiety (weighted mean r .50); system instability (.47); dogmatism-intolerance of ambiguity (.34); openness to experience (-.32); uncertainty tolerance (-.27); needs for order, structure, and closure (.26); integrative complexity (-.20); fear of threat and loss (.18); and self-esteem (-.09). The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat.''
Skipping the empirical world and jumbing straight into the mythological world, we have the classic white male hierarchy, hiding in their castles of power, threatened from the dark milling prolitarian hordes in the cities of night below. The white masters are on constant watch for the torch light mobs heading uphill for the great gates of the Castle that guard the treasure troves of the political economy...
What remains is a social analysis of the institutional systems that produce such people. Certainly the constant neurosis of Capitalism figures big. I've decided out of thin air and many forgotten references that ownership of just about anything, but especially land, even tiny plots, is a fundamental source of such fears and personality types. Also small business, especially because most small businesses I've work for were always about two months away from going broke. The control freak personalities that run these places are in constant state of hyperactive fear which is directly transfered on to me through ever more insane levels of controlling my labor (see Yates).
I really don't believe the psychological level has much fundamental or causal. Beyond a certain ground state, it's too plastic. It's the environment, mostly, which is say the structural features of the political economy at work, constructing these spectres of the psyche, the control freaks noted above.
My focus would be on the study of suburbia and the outland developments beyond, the rings of urban flight that now have several generations who moved first from rental apartments in the urban cores in the 1950s to the now older suburban housing tracks, then from those to the next outter ring of development and then to the rings beyond those. How reminicient these rings are of Dante's mythological system of the universe, where of course the urban centers correspond to the nineth circle and the furtherest rings out correspond to beatitude.
You can trace these evolving ring systems of development from either LA or SFBay. Up here it is more linear, as in following the state and federal highways systems. For example you just drive out 580 toward Tracy and then onto Oakdale, CA. Twenty-five years ago this stretch of highway (route to Yosemite) was dotted with sleepy rural settlements that hadn't changed much since mechanized agriculture hit big in the 1930-40s. Now they look like modern suburbs, repleat with strip malls and franchise retail outlets. There are only a few reminders left of backyard goats and chickens and much diminished beet fields. The huge sugar refinery near the Manteca by-pass has disappeared, while almonds and walnut groves that lined the road to Oakdale get thinner and thinner every year, replaced with wine grapes and their industrial stills, and chemical fertilizer plants. But as far out as Oakdale, here too the string of exurban tracks are surrounding this once entirely rural town.
So goes LA, so goes California. Remember the movie Chinatown? The plot depended on grasping the idea that the LA water district project of the Owens River Dam would supply the water for the development of the San Fernando Valley and the intense land grabs John Huston (Noah Cross) was underwriting. His son-in-law, the LA Water Commissioner drown in the middle of a draught. As the coroner said, Only in LA.
Chinatown. That's the gig. It has never stopped. After seeing Chinatown back in the 70s I began to muse on my own background in a different way. For one thing, my father used to take me trout fishing near the Owens River. The mountains just west, the Sierras, was the location of my first back packing trip, organized and sponsored through our church and the YMCA in downtown LA.
Getting back to my suburban phase. My father's family were the first to move out to the San Fernando Valley, where my half sister was born. My father bought a small track house in Reseda and took over a GI Bill loan. This track was probably built about the time of the sequel, The Two Jakes. Meanwhile I was in Mexico with my mother and stepfather. By the time my mother got a new husband and we moved out to Northridge, I was fourteen, going in the nineth grade and took an instant dislike of the ruling elite kid clique at that school. (I entered that school right after the summer back packing with inner city kids who were great fun to camp with.) Of course my dislike of this new school wasn't an informed political engagement. It was gut teenage anger at what I thought of as phoniness. That is, they pretended to be wholesome, nice, and full of well intentioned, healthy competition, when in fact this particular socialite group were nasty, vicious, and cruel, lying, cheating, and stealing---and they had the habit of telling stupid Mexican jokes. And most of the smart ones were even worse. That kind of shit gets the prizes, I thought? Well, fuck you and all that, then.
You go to schools in these places and discover a rottenness of the spirit that is just as creepy as the political economic foundations upon which these places were built. After experiencing that, the American dream falls away to reveal something like Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, and you go Left or you go Right in a big way. That is to say, I discovered a spirit so ugly, it was a horror to behold and it was (and still is) definitely oppressive to live under. Of course you don't have to become political, you can always just turn off to the world entirely---something that many have done.
The election cycles since Reagan trashed Carter have recalled these and similar thoughts over and over. My reactions to Reagan were also very visceral since Reagan had gone to the same Hollywood church when I was a kid. Reagan was specifically elected governor to restore law and order at Berkeley when I was going there and of course I threw rocks at his limo pulling out of the Center Street UC Systems underground garage. He was a real Dorian Gray type character with a very rotten and mean spirited interior, covered over with a nice boyish face, thought to be just a regular guy.
The other night, watching Sarah Palin instantly flipped just about all my switches. I regressed instantly to my raving fifteen year old self.
CG