Provoked Musings: Conservatism in Science

I ran into an interesting argument yesterday in my public opinion class. Our professor stated that "social conservatism is an elite construct built to manipulate the lower class". The argument was that prior to the Reagan administration, your place on the liberal/conservative spectrum was based almost solely on your economic stance. Reagan "invented" social conservatism to win the votes of people who would have no economic interest in voting for him, which is an assumption.

This is not science, and I have a hard time believing it as a result. Social conservatism is much maligned for being based in protestant christian moral precepts, which predate Reagan by something to the tune of 300 years. The US was well established as a largely protestant nation fairly early on, even to the point where immigrating Catholics were discriminated against. It's not valid in any way to suggest that people did not use these values to determine how they would vote prior to Reagan, or that they were manipulated into suddenly and against all reason obeying their moral compass. Which brings up an interesting question.

Why are political scientists so comfortable judging conservatism so harshly? This is not scientific neutrality. Conservatism is in very many ways like a sort of tribalism. Religion features heavily in both day-to-day activity and large decisions; kinship bonds (read: family values) are regarded as of critical importance, social roles are very important, they have a separate economic system they believe strongly in, and a great deal more value is often placed on working hard than obtaining education. Explained this way, American conservatism reminds me of a wide variety of stateless and indigenous societies all over the world, every one of which gets far more respect from both liberals and political scientists practicing neutrality.

In all honesty, it appears to me that all the old complaints that indigenous peoples had about colonialism are many of the same complaints now harbored by conservative cultures against the left. In turn, the left appears very much to harbor the same culturally damaging imperialist impulses that it condemns so harshly throughout history.

Scientific neutrality would mean speaking about conservatism too as a different culture and respecting it as such, but that's not what we did.

I tried to point out this blind spot, and it didn't go well. It turned into an argument about left versus right and who was morally correct, which - if you're familiar with scientific detachment - was completely pointless and absolutely not my intent. The point was to explain that we were not being scientific and we were letting our biases creep into our work. That I was the only one who saw this bothers me quite a bit.

I'd really hate for all that talk about the liberal elitist professors biasing our education to be true.