A Tale of Two Moralities -
Part One: Regional Inequality and Moral Polarization

The United States is not very united.

Americans have been sorting themselves along ideological lines into like-minded regions of the country, increasing polarization in congressional voting patterns, and creating a striking division in political preference and party loyalty between city-dwellers and the denizens of low-density exurban and rural counties.

Urban/Rural ideological divides and party affiliation:

Americans have been sorting themselves along ideological lines into like-minded regions of the country, increasing polarization in congressional voting patterns, and creating a striking division in political preference and party loyalty between city-dwellers and the denizens of low-density exurban and rural counties.

That’s how Hillary Clinton managed to lose the Electoral College vote to Donald Trump despite beating his overall vote total by nearly three million votes. There are more Democratic voters, but they are densely concentrated in a handful of Democrat-heavy cities and states, while Republicans are spread relatively thinly but evenly across the country’s non-urban expanse.

Who or what is the target of the backlash against the establishment?

I'm taking pains to be clear about who we are and aren’t talking about when we’re talking about “elites” and “the people” for a reason. It has become conventional wisdom in some circles that “the elites” and “the people” are divided by cultural and informational “bubbles” that offer incompatible perspectives on the facts of the world and the nature of a good society, and thus regard each other with mutual distrust and contempt. All this demographic complexity aside, the conventional wisdom that there is a widening cultural gap between “the people” and “the elites,” and that the rise of populist nationalism is due to backlash against “the establishment,” contains more than a grain of truth. But we need to get much clearer about what exactly that truth is.

So far I have just covered the exploratory intro:

And that means it’s important to understand the mechanisms underlying our cultural and moral polarization. That’s what I’m going to begin to do in this (long!) post, in a preliminary, speculative, exploratory spirit.

Now we can begin:

Why Is Our Moral Culture Polarizing?

One place to start is to ask why it is that people, as individuals, gravitate to certain moral and political viewpoints. Jonathan Haidt’s “moral foundations” theory—which shows that conservatives and liberals have different moral sensibilities, sensitive to different moral considerations—is perhaps the best-known account. But there are others.

In a 2012 piece for the Economist, I surveyed some of the research in personality psychology that indicates a correlation between political ideology and a couple of the “Big Five” dimensions of personality—conscientiousness and openness to experience, in particular—and then connected that to evidence that people have self-segregated geographically by personality and ideology. It’s an interesting post and you should read it.

The Economist article

[Which analyzes The Big Five groups of Extroverted People, Agreeable People, Conscientious People, Neurotic People and Open to Experience People]

Back to the story:

Here’s the problem. Knowing that a certain personalities incline to conservative or liberal opinions doesn’t tell us what the content of those opinions will be at any given point in history.

The Freedom Rising and Human Empowerment Theory:

For those interested in digging deeper, the best current overview of the theory is Christian Welzel’s Freedom Rising: Human Empowerment and the Quest for Emancipation. It’s an impressive body of work with a great deal of data and analysis behind it.)

Which suggests:

That suggests that the United States may be dividing into two increasingly polarized cultures: an increasingly secular-rational and self-expression oriented “post-materialist” culture concentrated in big cities and the academic archipelago, and a largely rural and exurban culture that has been tilting in the opposite direction, toward zero-sum survival values, while trying to hold the line on traditional values.

Ok. Rural poverty drives the threat to "traditional values". Back to the basics:

Inequality and Post-materialist Value Polarization

Let’s revisit the fundamental idea behind Inglehart’s theory. When people become more materially secure, they worry more about self-realization and less about survival. In effect, the climb Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If people lose a sense of material security, you’d expect them to shift back a little toward survival-oriented values.

All of which explains very little:

You’ll have to take my word for it when I say that the mere fact of an increasing gap between the lowest and highest percentiles in the income distribution doesn’t tell us anything very useful. Everything depends on the mechanisms that drive inequality.

And I can’t review all the mechanisms driving inequality here. I’ll just say that the combined effects of technology and education are a big part of the story—much bigger than globalization. Declining manufacturing employment, which is without a doubt important to the question at hand, has much more to do with automation than offshoring. (And that’s why Trump’s strategy of punishing firms who move production abroad is more likely to hurt working-class Americans qua consumers more than it will help them qua workers.

Good question. What are the actual mechanisms driving inequality? Second, what policies and programs can reverse inequality?

The Great Divergence: Rich Cities Pulling Away from Everybody Else

. . .

It probably has not escaped you that low-density Trump country is not home to America’s big economic winners.

The Urban Poor and Working Classes Are Probably Liberalizing, Too

First, the non-white urban poor and working classes especially benefit from liberal norms of racial and economic equality, particularly multicultural tolerance and inclusion.

Second, they tend to identify with the Democratic Party, which is the more reliable champion of the rights of immigrants and minorities, and favors public aid for the poor.

(plus three more factors I omitted for brevity)

Obama to Trump voters were devastated by the housing/mortgage ripoff:

The Material Insecurity of Low-Density White America

As Michela Zonta, Sarah Edelman, and Colin McArthur of the Center for American Progress observe, counties that shifted from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016 had unusually high rates of negative equity.

And a problem we are very aware of here at c99p:

But working age men in particular have been dropping out of the workforce at an alarming rate. According to the White House Council for Economic Advisors, the labor force participation rate for prime-age men decreased from 98% in 1954 to 88% last year. This is the second largest decrease among any of the OECD countries.

The explanation for this drop is a contested and extremely complicated story for another day.

The conclusion:

I've kept this post focused on the sort of economic conditions that drive the advance and retreat of liberal cultural attitudes. I haven’t really talked at all about the way cultural and moral polarization affects the way we feel about and treat one another.

But I think the cultural antagonisms generated by the polarizing material consequences of the Great Divergence have their own internal logic, which has led to a sense of winner-take-all culture war hostility that exacerbates the instability of America’s basic economic and political situation. I’ll explore the logic of our quasi-religious culture war dynamic, and some ideas for moderating the toxic ethos of winner-take-all mutual contempt, in a follow-up post.

That's the key goal; "ideas for moderating the toxic ethos of winner-take-all mutual contempt."

The link to
A Tale of Two Moralities

This article raised some interesting points about how economic inequality drives cultural attitudes and the interaction with voting behavior. It also has a couple of links to interesting theories of social behavior.

Bias alert from their "About" pdf: The Nissan Center is a bi-partisan think tank started in 2015 that has "libertarian" roots. Their stated concern:

Policy change is not reliably driven by electoral
outcomes or public opinion. It is instead a product of intense insider activity to overcome profound status quo biases in the political system
—biases that are not easily moved by external political pressure or material resources.