In my opinion, conservatives are very often good people who also often lack fundamental understanding. The four year old thingi has some truth. When we were young we were told to obey without question because we were too young to ask the pertinent questions and digest the complexities of explanation. Unfortunately, a lot of people get frozen there because blind obedience and the fear and punishment with which it is often instilled become a crutch and substitute for real parental education. As you develop you are supposed to question and there a temptation to beat that out and demand continued conformity. So the critical questioning ability needed for self development becomes atrophied. And so at an age when you shouldn't have to love honor and obey mindlessly, that attitude gets frozen and the self respect that should go with being a critical adult gets shifted onto self praise for conformity. But good little children don't make good adults As you grow you are supposed to develop more and more a critical analysis or perception of grays. Things are not black or white but black and white thinking is profoundly appealing. It removes personal responsibility while providing a substitute, obedience to a higher responsibility. Trouble is, there is no higher responsibility than that which you must create as an adult through the application of active questioning.
This attitude carries over to politics and the phenomenon of political conformity. Conservatives tend to flock in a 'save the status quo' mode. They are both authoritarian and aligned with authority because of this parental obedience thing. They are the good children who obey and flatter their parents to get positive attention because they had the kind of parents who demanded it. There are, of course those liberals who are simply in revolution to that very same kind of authority, but there are also liberals and conservatives who are more generally free from this kind of polarity. They see more shades of gray.
Forced conformity, the authoritarian raising of children, the parental attitude that demands obedience and subservience, however in inculcated by force. The child's natural inclination is to question. When this is beaten out of a child, that child learns to hate with the same force as those beatings. Such a child sees those who break rules, liberal relativists, as hateful and evil, because one was beaten for being like them. A liberal is a threat to the parent who rules by authority and to the obedient child. Questioning is not tolerated. Questioning brings punishment, hate and therefore is hate. A liberal hates America because he forces the conservative to feel how he was hated when he questioned authority.
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