Abstract
In a lecture included in his Essays, Lectures, and Orations (1848), Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked on a universal pattern of alternation, “The two parties of which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter expands and develops arguments first introduced in America’s Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception (Baker 2005).
- 2.
The national survey was a rider to the June 2009 Reuters/University of Michigan Survey of Consumers, based at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (n = 500).
- 3.
Figure 1 matches one of the hypothetical polarized distributions in Fiorina and Abrams (2008:566). This hypothetical distribution (Figure 2, top) shows a 7-point Likert scale, while Figure 1 here uses a 5-point Likert scale. Nonetheless, they are quite similar in shape. Is this conclusive evidence of polarization? As Fiorina and Abrams (2008:566) point out, the answer is open to interpretation. Advocates of the “polarization narrative” might say yes; other analysts might disagree because “lots of people consider themselves slightly conservative or slightly liberal, but the majority of respondents fall near the center of the scale.”
- 4.
Lakoff (1996, 2004) argues that conservatives are better rhetoricians than liberals, better able to use strict-father reasoning to mobilize support and consolidate political and ideological power. In defense, he wrote the bestselling Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (2004). Called “the essential guide for Progressives,” it tells liberals how to use the duality to promote their interests, turning the tables on the conservatives by employing their own rhetorical devices in reverse. Though Lakoff’s theory of framing has fallen into disfavor as a useful political strategy, his insights as an analyst remain valid.
- 5.
The four views of nature are (1) ‘nature benign’ (or ‘nature robust’), corresponding to individualism (low grid, low group); (2) ‘nature capricious’, corresponding to isolation/fatalism (high grid, low group; (3) ‘nature perverse’ (or ‘nature tolerant’), corresponding to hierarchy (high grid, high group); and, (4) ‘nature ephemeral’, corresponding to egalitarianism (low grid, high group) (e.g. Schwartz and Thompson 1990; Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990).
- 6.
Just as Lipset (1996:267) said with regards to the argument that the widespread perception of a moral crisis is simply the result of ignorance, panic, or media-flamed hyperbole: “The critics [of America] have exaggerated many of the problems in the quest to demonstrate decay. There is, however, no denying that the impression of a change in basic values exists, and to dismiss public perception [of crisis] as somehow wrong or misinformed is to deny the reality of individual experience.”
- 7.
The Bright/Dark Greens duality suggests that alternation can occur at different levels. Moreover, two domains in the same radial category can be connected in patterns of alternation. For example, Conger (2009) argues that the relationship of Conservative Christianity and the Republican Party exhibits cycles of conflict and accommodation.
- 8.
The World Values Surveys were administered in the United States in 1981, 1995, 2000, and 2006. The 2006 survey did not include the item on moral visions.
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Acknowledgment
I thank David Mayer, Stephen Vaisey, and Christopher Winship for helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.
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Baker, W. (2010). The Duality of American Moral Culture. In: Hitlin, S., Vaisey, S. (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of Morality. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6896-8_14
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