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I'd love to believe that my fellow travelers are amazing at tolerance, but I honestly believe it's the second one. For educated people, progressivism is the default. If you're going to be educated and not progressive, you need to develop your ideas and hone your beliefs, because everything and everyone around you is going to try and push you into being a progressive. If you're a young, educated conservative -- or even a moderate -- it means you're already not the kind of person who allows the Overton window to set your political beliefs. You arrived, or maintained, your conclusions in spite of the social consensus. You're a maverick.
There are definitely circles where the polarity is reversed, but for the most part you have to seek them out.
But also political liberals are more likely to report mental health problems like depression and I can't help but believe that part of it is just that political conservatives are more comfortable in their skin than progressives. And that progressives have a lot of intense fear about what conservatives might do that is shaped by an overall negative impression of the world. Which is food for thought -- progressives are often described as the bright cheery optimistic idealists, and conservatives the dark brooding fearful X-phobes... but I think the reality is much more complicated.
I think at least some of the differences in mental health are caused by the nature of the movements. Liberals tend to move further left and tear down anyone who doesn’t go along completely on everything they believe. If you take the liberal positions of 2004, you are on the far right to most social liberals. And the same group is not shy about using their power over institutions to massively punish people for pretty small transgressions. The bleeding edge of social liberalism wants Harris gone for daring to say that what Hamas did on October 7 was bad. It’s a massive purity spiral that’s easy to fall off of requiring adherents to live in a 1984 world where you have to change your views on a dime and pretend that Oceana has always been at war with Eastasia.
Conservatives are much more chill about the whole thing. If you’re conservative, you are allowed to have beliefs outside of that. As long as you’re generally conservative on most things, they don’t really care. If I’m in favor of gay marriage and my more conservative friends are not, my friends will not scream at me, nor will the more conservative kids decide that my political beliefs warrent ruining thanksgiving dinner when they throw a fit and leave. If I work for a conservative, my job isn’t in jeopardy if he finds out I’m not super conservative. There’s not really a purity spiral either. If I stand still, I’m not going to find that the party as a whole finds my views abhorrent.
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Eh, there’s a quintile on both sides where most people hold outside the Overton window political beliefs. There are very definitely filter bubbles situated in the rightmost quintile which you can just wind up in. I live in one.
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Indeed (progressive thought is designed by and for these people). It's worth noting that this also applies to conservatives, but the tension comes from most of the problems they solve not being fake [in the sense that their usefulness/worth/meal ticket doesn't tend to come from artificial structures (regulatory compliance, education, management, bureaucracy)].
It takes a rather unusual kind of person to notice that and reject it, though I think the rejection comes first and the noticing second (I think educated conservatives are most likely to believe their underlying skills will allow them to succeed even if the number of bullshit jobs fell by 90%, and it's more common for men to think this than women). And fixing it is not going to make you money anyway.
If I had the sense that my entire sociopolitical salary was built on a house of cards that specifically depends on the welfare of not-my-political class to sustain (and when my meal ticket comes from taxing them, and when new positions open up for my talents it's funded by/in the service of yet another new tax) I'd be utterly terrified too. I think progressives have an innate sense of this (hence the need for the hostility and the suppression); though the capacity for resistance ironically might be conservative propaganda that progressives are buying into.
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