A short take on liberals and conservatives

This article was forwarded to me by Scarz the other day. It's an amusing piece on a (not-very-significant-but-interesting) study done a group of children that a social scientist had been following for several decades.

His conclusion was that children who had a hard time dealing with obstacles in their childhood and would cry and/or run to an authority figure when they had issues (the article calls them "whiny" but I am not sure if the meaning of the word whiny is fixed enough in our language to have it be clear enough, hence my more wordy description) ended up later in life being much more rigid in their world views and leaned towards the conservative end of the spectrum.

That made sense to me, as progressive thinking requires being able to think "outside the box" to a certain extent.

What I could not get over was that one of the studies harshest critics (another social psychologist: the University of Arizona's Jeff Greenberg) chose to provide the following example of why the study was wrong:

He thinks insecure, defensive, rigid people can as easily gravitate to left-wing ideologies as right-wing ones.

Makes sense so far, being conservative or progressive really has nothing to do with whether you end up on the right or the left of the spectrum when it comes to the realpolitik of party affiliation in whatever country you hail from. You can be a conservative leftist unwilling to budge on your stance on issues just as easily as you can be a conservative right-winger who does the same. Or you can be progressive member of your party, one that's willing to be flexible and bend and consider opinions from other sources and how they fit into your objectives. Examples of these types of progressives are John McCain from the Republican corner, and Barak Obama from the Democratic party. (A good description of McCain's progressive pedigree can be found in this dated, but still accurate editorial from FORWARD. Obama's pedigree is well laid out in this Wikipedia entry)

But then he goes on to say this:

He suspects that in Communist China, those kinds of people would likely become fervid party members.

And loses me just a little bit. He loses me because if he means by "those kinds of people" the ones who leaned left, then he's really confused about the correlation between one's conservative or progressive world view and one's party affiliations. Those who would more likely find the Communist Party a comforting place to call home are likely made of the same stuff that social conservatives in this country are made of. Yes, they are diametrically opposed in name and world view of their political parties, but in terms of hewing to the notion that "things are just fine just they way they are, thank you very much", they are twins separated at birth.

Maybe it's just bad paraphrasing on the part of the Star's writer. So I'll give Mr. Greenberg the benefit of the doubt and presume he was trying to get the point across that a conservative here in our capitalist democracy would likely end up a conservative in Communist China.