All the blogosphere is talking about voters exercising a kind tribal loyalty in the voting booth and the rural v. urban divide demonstrates that. I think it is time to maybe drop the “tribal” term and look more deeply at what motivates conservative personalities and liberal ones. Here is a post I wrote earlier:
The David Brooks column last Friday (The Internal Invasion) explored a broad view of the major divisions in the Trump election. He used gemeinschaft and gesellschaft ideals, a view of society where gemeinschaft (community based, reason based) competes with gesellschaft (society based, social cohesion based). These terms were prominent in the work of Tonnies and Weber and I think Durkheim had a similar broad division. This framing fits well with my most recent read: Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind which sees liberals as motivated by care and equality while conservatives are motivated only moderately by care and fairness and more by loyalty, sanctity, and authority. Fairness is important for the right, but it means parity for their group while fairness for the left means equality. Importantly, the right, or gesellschaft people are motivated by a group loyalty and care of their own, a parochial altruism. The left is less groupish or loyal to a network and more universally altruistic. Problem is, there are always more voters on the right who are highly motivated and highly devoted to an emotional attachment to their social group, whether a religion or ethnicity or national identity. Cold reason, facts, cosmopolitan care just has a hard time competing with flag waving loyalty or devotion to religion.
Two Strikes 