Perhaps the most instructive conversation I’ve had as a politician took place with a gang of Occupy protesters in London. They had set out to seize the stock exchange but, being unable to reach it, ended up occupying nearby St. Paul’s Cathedral instead. Finding themselves in the wrong place, they then tried to rationalize their behavior. The church, they started claiming, was patriarchal, oppressive, racist, yada yada. In fact, the Church of England is the most painfully politically correct institution in Britain, and its clergy were tripping over their cassocks in their haste to proclaim their sympathy with the protesters. But the tents remained pitched, testimony to how adept people can be at convincing themselves that even their most random actions were logical. Of which more in a moment.
I happened to be passing St Paul’s while the protest was at its height, and decided to stop off for a chat. Some of the demonstrators recognized me from television, and our subsequent discussion was — for me, at any rate — hugely revealing. Every protester I spoke to, from the tattooed and sunburned anarchists to the well-meaning students, started from the proposition that, as a right-winger, I must have backed the bank bailouts.
Now this is, if you think about it, a remarkably odd assumption. One thing that everyone knows, or ought to know, about right-wingers is that we oppose state subsidies. Britain’s Labour Party, like the U.S. Democrats, had unhesitatingly supported the bank rescues. I had been among the tiny number of free-marketeers who argued against them (tiny, that is, among the commentariat; the general public was far too wise to fall for the scam).
The more we talked, the more I realized what the problem was. My dreadlocked friends assumed that conservatives were automatically “on the side of the rich.” Since the bailouts had involved a transfer of wealth from the general population to wealthy bankers and bondholders, it followed, in their eyes, that free-marketeers must have approved of them. Nothing would shake them from this conviction. When I tried to explain that I would have allowed bondholders and shareholders to suffer the consequences of their own mistakes, they assumed I was lying.
I learned something that day. What people think of as their reasoned opinions are, more often than not, simply an articulation of their instincts. Some people are naturally inclined to see every transaction as a swindle, every contract as a form of exploitation, every tradition as a superstition. To such people, conservatism is a kind of personality defect, an expression of selfishness and bigotry. No amount of empirical data will challenge that prejudice.
The funny thing is that they have things precisely the wrong way round. If you’re on the side of the little guy, you should be a conservative. Every leftist scheme — every subsidy, every tariff, every alternative energy boondoggle, every industrial regulation — ends up privileging some vested interest at the expense of ordinary people.
Capitalism is the only economic model which allows you to prosper by serving the mass market. Under every rival system, you prosper by sucking up to the right people: commissars or kings or ayatollahs. As the economist Joseph Schumpeter observed, the achievement of capitalism was not to provide more silk stockings for princesses, but to bring them within the reach of factory girls.
The trouble is that, when you’re dealing with hunches, with intuitions, facts count for little. You may point to the vast inequalities of status inherent in socialist systems, or to the two-thirds decline in global poverty over the past 25 years caused by the spread of markets. But as far as your socialist friends are concerned, even if these things were true, they would be accidental outcomes of an essentially malevolent philosophy.
We are dealing here with psychology rather than economics. In his seminal book, The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt showed that political convictions are, in large part, a rationalization of personality traits. He demonstrated that, while rightists had no difficulty grasping leftists’ motivations — a desire, above all, to stand up for the underdog — the reverse was not true. Many leftists simply could not understand motivations such as patriotism, religion or reciprocity. Their reasoning therefore went something like this: “I’m a nice person. I care about poor people and minorities and fluffy animals. You are on the opposite side. Therefore you think the opposite of me. Therefore you hate poor people and minorities and fluffy animals.”
What’s the solution? In terms of convincing our leftie friends that we’re nice, I’m not sure there is one. They will continue to see conservatism as a form of moral failing, while making an exception for the people they know personally (“You’re really quite civilized for a Tory, you know”).
But in terms of convincing the general population, there is an important lesson. Don’t worry about motives; focus on outcomes. The most successful right-of-center leaders in the world — New Zealand’s John Key, who has broken every popularity record, is perhaps the best contemporary example in the Anglosphere — win by delivering results rather than by being well-meaning.
For leftists, motives matter a great deal. They’ll happily overlook lack of content provided that, Obama-like, you make them feel good about themselves. But rightists must operate to a different standard. If Republicans are serious about winning in 2016, they need someone who has already shown that he or she can make ordinary people better off than they are now. Is that so difficult?
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative member of the European Parliament.
