What They Didn't Tell You About Political Values

Politics isn't quite what you think

Ever since I was young, people told me things that weren’t true. They told me infinity wasn’t a number; they told me red and blue make purple; and they told me there are liberals, conservatives, and (maybe) libertarians.

Lessons like these things aren’t totally off the mark; they can anchor a person and provide some direction as they go about their daily affairs. But there is also something insidious about having a worldview that is almost, but not quite, right.

Outright false beliefs aren’t insidious in the slightest. They can definitely ensnare the unwary, and watching someone struggle to defend something obviously wrong can be a pretty pathetic sight. But once you learn to be even a little bit wary, being totally wrong isn’t too common. For savvy thinkers, it’s the model with a subtle flaw, the map that’s close to reality that clings and cloys and hangs around unchecked for decades, like the five factor model of personality—or the two-factor model of politics.

Don’t tell me you’ve never seen it. The internet is chock full of these things:

They’re so common that everyone makes the tacit assumption that two factors of political values, conservatism and libertarianism, are just what is.

Well, a few of us here at Substack gave out a survey in October. Among other things, the survey contained a number of questions relating to political values. 301 responses were complete and usable on the political sections, and maybe if we take a look at the results, we can get a slightly better sense of what actually is.

A Forgotten Dimension of Political Values

For a long time, Internet quizzes have included two axes—one Left/Right axis, and another Libertarian/Authoritarian axis.

For much longer than this, research has been finding two different axes—the same Left/Right axis that everyone else talks about, but another axis of pragmatism, tough-mindedness, or what I’m here calling “realism.” Here’s an example from fifty years ago:

What you’re looking at is a visual map of the way attitudes related to one another in surveys by Wilson, which he published in 1973.¹

For new readers, the map was generated by a statistical process known as factor analysis, which aggregates the correlations between all of the attitudes together. The closer any two attitudes appear on the map, the greater the correlation between them. For example, look at the right side of the graph—people who agree with royalty were likely to agree with military drill and church authority, but disagree with ideas at the opposite side of the map, like cousin marriage and striptease shows. And the reverse is true for people who agree with cousin marriage and striptease shows. This graph shows only two factors, but factor analysis can reveal spaces of three or more dimensions to give us a map of the territory, clarifying in a wonderfully visual way where abstract ideas live in ideaspace.

So you can probably recognize the right-left axis here as being a familiar conservative vs liberal divide. On the right we have all the familiar attitudes about chastity, patriotism, the death penalty, and so on that conservatives have traditionally supported. The left was maybe a bit less recognizable back then; times change, and what’s new and groovy changes with them. So while we did have some attitudes in 1973 that I find pretty recognizable on the left, like modern art, mixed marriages, and evolution theory; there are also topics like Beatniks and jazz, that newfangled computer music, risque pyjama parties, and nudist camps. (Whatever happened to nudist camps, anyway?)

But now compare the top and bottom halves of the map. What does it look like we’re seeing with this vertical axis? At the bottom we have coeducation, moral training, chastity, self denial, and (nuclear) disarmament, against white superiority, apartheid, empire building, casual living, horoscopes, and evolution theory at the top. Why do these attitudes oppose one another?

We might try to interpret this through a libertarian/authoritarian lens, the way everybody at the political compass wants to. But does that even make any sense? Casual living and colored immigration are at the libertarian and authoritarian positions of the map? And horoscopes and white lies are… what? Libertarian, or authoritarian?

Factor analysis pulls out factors in decreasing importance. The two factors to emerge were conservatism and… this thing, not conservatism and libertarianism. There’s a lot of variance to be explained there that has nothing to do with conservatism, leftism, libertarianism, or authoritarianism.

Maybe the finding was a fluke?

Nope. This pattern seen by Wilson in 1973 has actually been seen again,² and again,³ and again.⁴ In fact, you can go back all the way to 1939, when Rorschach tests and operant conditioning were cutting edge, to find a researcher named Ferguson stumbled upon these two dimensions of political values with an early factor analysis. He chose to rotate the map 45° from the above, and named the factors “religionism” and “humanitarianism.”⁵ At the time Ferguson only had half a dozen attitudes to fill out the space, but you can see that he was onto something just by applying those labels to Wilson’s map above, like this:

I love these labels. Unfortunately that rotation doesn’t square with the way most of the variation is left-right. There aren’t really even that many items in the humanitarian religionist or the anti-humanitarian anti-religionist quadrants. And… well let’s face facts, these labels are a bit of a mouthful. If you had to say “Religious anti-humanitarianists” every time you meant “conservatives,” you’d probably just give up.

So instead take the map as it is, with the left on the left and the right on the right. What do we call the vertical axis? Chris lightfoot described it as “pragmatism:”

This axis… represents a combination of philosophies you could call "pragmatism", "utilitarianism" and so forth, mixing social, religious and economic issues. We have chosen to give an atheist, utilitarian perspective positive values on this axis.

Hans Eysenck described it as “tough-mindedness,” with “tender mindedness” underneath, harkening back to William James’ Pragmatism:⁶

The Tender-Minded

Rationalistic (going by ’principles’), Intellectualistic, Idealistic, Optimistic, Religious, Free-willist, Monistic, Dogmatical.

The Tough-Minded

Empiricist (going by ’facts’), Sensationalistic, Materialistic, Pessimistic, Irreligious, Fatalistic, Pluralistic, Sceptical.

Pray postpone for a moment the question whether the two contrasted mixtures which I have written down are each inwardly coherent and self-consistent or not… tender-minded and tough-minded people, characterized as I have written them down, do both exist… Their antagonism, whenever as individuals their temperaments have been intense, has formed in all ages a part of the philosophic atmosphere of the time. It forms a part of the philosophic atmosphere to-day. The tough think of the tender as sentimentalists and soft-heads. The tender feel the tough to be unrefined, callous, or brutal. Their mutual reaction is very much like that that takes place when Bostonian tourists mingle with a population like that of Cripple Creek. Each type believes the other to be inferior to itself; but disdain in the one case is mingled with amusement, in the other it has a dash of fear.

So there are different names we might give. And though I think both pragmatism and tough-mindedness are reasonably accurate names for the vertical axis, they also leave something to be desired; pragmatism implies practicality or matter-of-factness, which implies conservatism rather than most of the contents of the upper half of the political graph. In the end I decided, for the sake of having a name to use on this blog post, to call this vertical axis realism at the top vs idealism at the lower end.

And I had to name it clearly, because my survey was indeed able to replicate all three dimensions—conservatism, realism, and libertarianism. Using green for paternalistic (i.e. anti-libertarian, or authoritarian) items, and purple for items loading significantly in the direction of libertarianism, the results I obtained for our survey look like this:

Three Factors of Political Values

Purple and green are for items loading more than ± .3 on Libertarianism

These are the factors I hypothesized would appear under factor analysis. Are they really what I think they are, though? As a check on the accuracy of this map, I had a single question that asked people to identify their poitical values as

• far left

• center left

• moderate

• center right

• far right

• libertarian, or

• other.

(Ideally I’d have had at least two separate questions with more options, but I was pressed for space.) Self-described conservatism correlated r = 0.77 with my conservatism factor, which is about as strong a correlation as you see in the soft sciences. My way of checking libertarianism was basically just to code people who answered “libertarian” instead of left-right as 1, and everyone else as 0; it was a very rough measure, but still correlated with my libertarian factor (r = 0.36, p < 0.00000001) and not with anything else.

So long story made short: This is indeed the map I was looking for. If you take a moment to check it over carefully, though, I can imagine you might wonder about some things, like…

Free speech is a realist conservative value?

Nowadays, sure. How often is the speech of the powerful threatened? Censorship is always a tool of those in power, and small surprise that realistic conservatives are against it. The ACLU used to defend even Nazis’ right to speak, but I was pretty young back then.

The same thing is true about many values; I’ve given enough surveys to watch “Democracy overrated” wander from the upper center in the Obama years, to the upper left after 2016. It’s swung pretty far to the right nowadays, but watch it swerve leftward again when Trump wins in 2024. (No that’s not a prediction. Or well… not a strong one, anyway.)

Abortion freedom isn’t a libertarian value?

Interesting, isn’t it! Yet lots of libertarians are uncomfortable with abortion. Before I met my wife, I was a very religious guy, and while I was pretty hard core in terms of libertarianism, I balked at supporting abortion rights. And before Mrs. Apple Pie met me, she was exactly the same way. Staunch Christian, proud libertarian, not so much of a supporter of abortion.

It’s the same with euthanasia. Check the map, way up at (-.60, -.60) and you find support for euthanasia with a nice blue dot—no sizable libertarian leaning.⁷ Why isn’t the right to choose a safe, humane death at the hands of a trusted doctor something libertarians all agree with? With abortion and euthanasia we’re talking about something besides just freedom—we’re talking very directly about life, about the value of life, and about whether there are circumstances where it might be permissible to end a human life. How people think about this evidently doesn’t just boil down to the way they think about school, or drugs, or free speech.

Ultimately these surveys seem to tap into something primordial, something prerational that resonates differently with different people. Politics is often studied alongside personality, and in many ways, political values are just an expression of or an extension of personality. When you get to know a person’s politics, you get to know a lot about how they tick.

Pro tip for an interesting post-Thanksgiving conversation: Ask one of your relatives how they feel about euthanasia. Don’t give any lead-up. Just, “Say, do you think people should have the right to have their doctor end their life?” (S-tier: introduce the topic with two other people in the room. Surreptitiously disengage as they start to argue)

Are Conservatives Better Hunter Gatherers?

So I mentioned last time that I wanted to check a few specific hypotheses about political values.

Firstly, one of the other bloggers involved in designing the survey proposed that physique might have something to do with political values, politicarly conservatism and an interest in hierarchy. There’s much more to the idea—you can read about Windsor Swan’s hunter-gatherer fitness model on his site:

The Hunter-Gatherer Fitness model proposes that an individual's political ideology is largely determined by their relative level of fitness in a hunter-gatherer environment. One’s ability to survive and thrive in a hunter-gatherer society is a leading factor behind their political preferences. This link is an adaptation to group survival in a resource scarce world, and is an unconscious motivator in voting decisions and political activism.

So what of it, then? Are conservatives better hunter-gatherers?

The short answer is no. I looked at the relationship physical variables had to conservatism and realism, and I don’t find support for that claim. Neither weight vs height, nor the total of self-rated coordination, muscularity, speed, or facial attractiveness related to political values.

Checking the individual questions, self-reported coordination and self-rated muscularity did give barely significant relationships (r ~0.1, p ~0.04), but but even these disappeared when controlling for gender—males reported better coordination, more muscularity, and more conservatism. (I also checked realism and libertarianism; the correlations were nonsignificant in random directions.)

Arguably, these measures of physical prowess are poor; we didn’t exactly line our respondents up with a stop watch and barbells. Still, if there’s any relationship between physical prowess and political ideology, it wasn’t strong enough to show up under this methodology.

Are realistic, libertarian leftists into more kinky stuff?

It’s a mouthful, but that was my hypothesis. Libertarians are permissive about this kind of thing, leftists are notorious, and realists have, well… an earthy way of looking at people. To test whether this might be the case, I summed everybody’s z-scores on leftism, realism, and libertarianism to get a clean measure of realistic, libertarian leftism, and then I ran a simple correlation against how taboo each respondent’s most extreme kink was. Nothing more here than just a hunch, really, but did it pan out?

The short answer is yes. The more taboo a person’s most extreme kink was, the further left, realistic, and libertarian they were, if only modestly: r = 0.16, p = 0.005.

Are idealistic conservatives more dogmatic?

Dogmatism is extremely interesting to me—a characteristic of some people who will stubbornly persist in belief despite evidence to the contrary. Sometimes, having too little dogmatism might be a problem as a person gets perpetually windblown, but the general problem people have seems to be too little flexibility, not too much.

There are reports of atheists being dogmatic,⁸⁹ but overall it’s the fundamentalist believers who seem to show the most dogmatism—at least, according to the psychologists who study dogmatism.¹⁰¹¹ But psychologists are ubiquitously on the left, they often study groups of religious people, rather than just the underlying values themselves. (And even though I like some of his work, I’m frankly not sure how much I trust the things Bob Altemeyer reports.¹²) There have also been claims¹³ that realistic rather than idealistic people are more dogmatic, or at least, more rigid. So who’s right?

I was right. And this was one I was really hoping for—I’d never seen it before, but I strongly expected it, and I’ve been waiting to test it for years. Comparing the combination of conservatism and idealism against dogmatism returns a modest but clear relationship, r = 0.20, p = 0.0006.¹⁴ According to the way they describe themselves, idealistic conservatives are slower to change their minds, being more likely to say things like “There are no discoveries or facts that could possibly make me change my mind about the things that matter most in life.” Or perhaps more accurately, realistic leftists are quicker to change their minds—most people in this sample were pretty un-dogmatic, at least by self-description. The minimum possible score for dogmatism was -4, and lots of people rated themselves there; the maximum possible score was 4, and nobody scored that.

Do conservatives live in the country and liberals in the city?

Well, yeah (r = -0.14, p = 0.012), but everybody knows that. I mostly just checked to see that my data was good, people were answering clearly, etc. One possibly interesting hint that city folk are more politically realistic (r = 0.10), but there was no significant correlation, and nothing I expected anyway.

The woke are idealistic, not realistic, and not libertarian

I talk a lot about the woke phenomenon on this blog. Although the actual meaning of the word “woke” depends somewhat on whom you talk to, wokeness is generally understood to entail antiracism and transgenderism, as part of a broad concern for fairness and equality over free speech.¹⁵

Well, last time I predicted that woke attitudes would cluster together, not only on the left, but on the idealistic, paternalistic (that is, non-libertarian) side. Scroll up and see that this is the case for:

• Antiracism (yes, found in the idealistic leftist region)

• Support for transgenderism (yes, found in the idealistic leftist region)

• Support for treating people more equally, (yes, found in the idealistic leftist region)

• Free speech, an anti-woke attitude, (yes found in the realist conservative area)

And, though it’s not nearly so striking or central to wokeness, I can also verify that all of the woke items are on the paternalistic or authoritarian side, just as the anti-woke free speech item is on the libertarian side.

The chance for this to happen randomly is p = 1/8⁴ ≈ 0.0002. I would have found this much more exciting if I didn’t already know the woke were basically authoritarian idealists before my first post about how This Blog is Not Woke.

Instead of finding it existing to see, I find it exhilarating to declare. For up until now, I’ve had to use “woke” and “wokeness” to describe this ideology, which, IDK, sounds pretty inarticulate. But now—now I don’t have to call them by this vague label. Now I can tell you that these people are idealistic leftists. I’ve complained before that idealistic leftists drive the left off a cliff; I really do feel that there is great value in leftism pursued realistically. That’s what Apple Pie is: a blogger on the realistic left.

You may find this useful to bear in mind as you read my posts. When I mock rationalists and utilitarians, I’m ribbing guys who’re basically like my cousins. It’s different when I poke and prod religious people. There I try to be gentle, because let’s face it, under other circumstances those guys on the idealistic right would be my political opponents—I stress that they would be, if not for all the lunatics on the idealistic left, who have, lately, been devouring the entire world with a hunger that can never be appeased.

And just in case even I started to think I’d found the limits of the idealistic left’s craziness, did you notice that innocuous little blue dot labelled “Defend Ukraine” hanging around (-.35, -.10)? Yeah the full text of that was “The US should fight alongside Ukraine, even if it risks a nuclear conflict with Russia.” Supporters of this item are the spiritual successors to idealistic leftists from the seventies, who were (sensibly, I really think) supporting nuclear disarmament. But that was then. Now what? Now whatever, let the bombs fall, I guess? Better to scorch the Earth than let something sad or unfair happen to anyone, ever? We’re not concerned about fallout or risks to the environment? What about all the pollution you’re trying to control right next door at (-.35, -.20)??

Conclusions

1. My political map is totally rad.

2. The more urban the area, the more liberal people are. (But you already knew that.)

3. Realistic libertarian leftists seem to have more bizarre kinks than idealistic authoritarian conservatives.

4. People in the realistic left are generally more flexible and less dogmatic than people in the idealistic right.

5. The woke are idealistic leftists. Apple Pie is not that. Apple Pie is a pragmatic or realistic leftist who has no problems being friends with conservatives, because, among other things, they don’t seem to want to wreck absolutely everything they can possibly get their hands on as quickly as possible, while insisting that it’s the right thing to do. (Or at least, they don’t have the political clout to do it lately? IDK it’s after 3:00 AM, I need to sleep now, the end)

[Day-After Edit: Deleted a bunch of disconnected, illegible rambling that I never intended to be in the post and I’m not sure I even believe]

[Next-Year Edit: Substack is terrible at suggesting related posts, but if you liked this one you might also like Politika]

1. Wilson, G. D. (1973). The Psychology of Conservatism, edited by Glenn D. Wilson, Academic Press.

2. H. J. Eysenck & Thelma T. Coulter (1972) The Personality and Attitudes of Working-Class British Communists and Fascists, The Journal of Social Psychology, 87:1, 59-73, DOI: 10.1080/00224545.1972.9918648

3. Stone, W. F., & Russ, R. C. (1976). Machiavellianism as tough-mindedness. The Journal of Social Psychology, 98(2), 213-220.

4. Lightfoot, Chris (2003) “Political Survey: an open, honest version of politicalcompass.org.” http://politics.beasts.org/ accessed Nov 24, 2023.

5. Ferguson, L. W. (1939). “Primary social attitudes.” Journal of Psychology, 8, 217-223

6. William James. "The Present Dilemma in Philosophy". Lecture I in Pragmatism: A new name for some old ways of thinking. New York: Longman Green and Co (1907): 1 - 16.

7. Support for euthanasia actually loads on libertarianism at -0.02—so, there’s really not much there relating to libertarianism.

8. Kossowska, M., Czernatowicz‐Kukuczka, A., & Sekerdej, M. (2017). Many faces of dogmatism: Prejudice as a way of protecting certainty against value violators among dogmatic believers and atheists. British Journal of Psychology, 108(1), 127-147.

9. Gurney, D. J., McKeown, S., Churchyard, J., & Howlett, N. (2013). Believe it or not: Exploring the relationship between dogmatism and openness within non-religious samples. Personality and Individual Differences, 55(8), 936-940.

10. Jelen, T. G., & Wilcox, C. (1991). Religious dogmatism among white Christians: Causes and effects. Review of Religious Research, 32-46.

11. Saroglou, V. (2002). Beyond dogmatism: The need for closure as related to religion. Mental health, religion & culture, 5(2), 183-194.

12. Altemeyer, B. (2002). Dogmatic behavior among students: Testing a new measure of dogmatism. The Journal of social psychology, 142(6), 713-721.

13. Eysenck, H. J. (2018). The psychology of politics. Routledge. Chapter 7.

14. It was mostly conservatism that was responsible for the relationship, though—realism alone correlated only nonsignificantly with dogmatism in this sample (r = -0.08, p = 0.16).

15. Wokeness: A Guide for Advocates. (2023, April 4). Navigator Research. Retrieved November 16, 2023, from https://navigatorresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Navigator-Update-04.04.2023.pdf