Hen Peck Season…

As the Republican Convention begins on the heels of the Democratic Convention, I can safely predict that we won’t see any of the kinds of punches pulled that we saw last week. Attacks on Obama will not be introduced with the obligatory hagiography that accompanies McCain attacks. No one is going to be saying “Obama is a good and honorable man” before they explain why he is not.

Josh Marshall at TPM has a theory about partisan attacks, the name of which I can’t repeat if I want to maintain my perfect profanity-free rating. Fortunately I have another way of explaining the idea that comes straight out of behavioral biology.

All of the social vertebrates organize themselves into dominance hierarchies. Among chickens this is called pecking order. It’s determined and reinforced by small altercations, where chickens will “fight” very briefly and for no reason other than establishing winners and losers. This ranking decides who eats first, who get to mate, and who gets to peck on whom. Anyone who has been through high school will recognize that humans are not exempt from dominance hierarchies. We are, after all, social vertebrates.

But we are also cognitive beings – and this is the fundamental difference between liberal and conservative politics. Liberals attack an opponent when they see that they are wrong on an issue, or because they can show that they are inconsistent on principle. They do not, on the whole, attack the person without good reason, or if they do they will readily back down when the ad hominum is pointed out. This is the cognitive, or “enlightened” approach to politics. It’s based on the idea that the best ideas will result in the best policies, so those with the best ideas should rule.

Conservatives, on the other hand, attack only for the purpose of winning. It does not matter if the attack is unfounded – or even an outright lie – provided that the conservative comes out slightly ahead in the end. Rather than demonstrating conformance with reality or measurable data, the goal is to rack up dominance points. Cowing the opponent is a plus; being forced to back down is a minus. At the end of the day they believe that you will vote for them because they are the alpha chicken. That’s how the authoritarian mind works.

Don’t be a chicken.

- jack*

Comments

[gudden]

Huh. You know, I'm a recovering Republican, and a behavioral scientist who tends to see everything in terms of animal behavior, and a reader of TPM familiar with JMM's hypothesis, and I do tend to see the appeal of conservative tribalism in terms of social status.

Yet I never quite put it all together as neatly as you have here. You're absolutely right.