Why Conservatives don't care if the bailout was a success

[tongodeon]

One of the best things I've written in the last year (if I may say so) is this post on John Haidt's Five Moral Dimensions. I keep coming back to that post, mentally at least, because it explains why people have such a hard time seeing eye to eye politically.

Take the TARP "bailout", often inaccurately characterized as a $700 billion giveway to

Comments

[skylion]

Which begs the hypothetical. What would conservatives say if the Government didn't do a thing? How many of them would only be left with crow to eat. The government is required, by law,to protect the interests of the people. That is the excuse for war, the need for war, the excuse for bail out, yadda yadda yadda.

[tongodeon]

The conservatives that I know say that the government's role is to prevent unprovoked violence and enforce contracts, which is not quite "nothing".

[skylion]

Not nothing, indeed. Wonder how far "enforcing contracts" can be extended?

[talldean]

$0.34? I think you misplaced a decimal, maybe. There are 300 millionish of us, not 300 billionish?

[talldean]

If it was liberal math, he would have explained it away, instead of just fixing the post. I'd call it an independent mistake.

[tongodeon]

Whoops. Right you are. I was way off. Fix'd.

[mmcirvin]

I think it's more complicated than that.

First, most of the people who got the money are not, to conservatives, out-group at all. They're Republican bankers.

Second, much of the outrage about TARP I've personally seen is from liberals and leftists, and it's because the recipients absolutely *are* out-group to them. (Which suggests that they're thinking along what Haidt says are conservative lines.)

I think opposition to TARP from *conservatives* is primarily because the President is Barack Obama. Of course, the bailout began under Bush, but conservatives usually blame Bill Clinton for the Ruby Ridge incident too, so that sort of thing never stopped them.

[crisper]

>I think opposition to TARP from *conservatives* is primarily because the President is Barack Obama.

I honestly wonder what would happen if Obama began to push, say, an anti-abortion legislation package or a radical roll-back of gun control. It would not surprise me if there was a hysteria-bomb of FUD from the right because "the liberals are trying to encourage all those illegal immigrants to breed" or "they're putting more guns in the hands of everyone who is going to support their NWO takeover of all our money".

[ctd]

>I think opposition to TARP from *conservatives* is primarily because the President is Barack Obama.

[citation needed]

[talldean]

Locally, PNC took TARP money... and paid it back with nearly 10% interest across 13 months. Other local banks are advertising against them with "we didn't take TARP money!", and I'm curious if they strongly advertise "we took government money and paid it all back, with significant interest on top".

[tensegritydan]

I am also a big fan of your Haidt post. I also find your pragmatism vs. fundamentalism spectrum useful. You seem to imply in your last paragraph that conservatives' Haidt values interfere with their ability to be pragmatic. Well, there are certainly liberals equally in fundamentalist thrall to their values. I wonder overall how liberals vs conservatives score on the pragmatism-fundamentalism scale.

Could it be that pragmatism/fundamentalism is correlated with one or more of Haidt's 5 values, or is it a 6th orthogonal value to be measured?

[tongodeon]

Haidt doesn't necessarily say that conservatives are fundamentalists or that liberals are pragmatists. Conservatives are just committed to purity, rules, tradition, and authority while liberals are concerned about fairness and harm reduction.

It's possible to be a pragmatic, broad-minded conservative. "Let's look at the various sets of Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and other religious laws and leaders to see whether we can come up with a really productive set of traditions and purity standards to observe." It's also possible (as you point out) to get extremely non-pragmatic about making sure everyone avoids your particular definition of harm and gets your particular definition of what's fair. It doesn't seem to usually happen this way, but it can I suppose.