Anyway, I'm curious what others think.
What is the biggest difference between White Republicans and White Democrats?
I’ve been mulling this over for a couple of days. Thought of a half dozen things that I discarded for being either trite, snide, or obvious.
I feel like I should be able to give some insight on this; my family and a lot of the people I grew up with in North Carolina are mostly white Republicans, and most of my friends in New York and from college are Democrats.
But after all that, here’s the best I’ve come up with. And, yes, “not all”. This is a generalization, and there are plenty of exceptions on both sides. And I’m going to try very hard not to make this a value judgment. Please don’t take this as me saying that Republicans are “wrong” because of these observations; they’re different, and it’s not that Democrats don’t have our own flaws, we just have different ones. And a lot of these traits are bad things sometimes, and good things at other times.
1. Shades of gray
2. Direct effect
3. Person vs. action
The people from “back home” I interact with are just like they were when I was growing up there. They like things in black and white (not a racial comment). That’s not to say that they’re simple, or stupid. They just want certainty. They want to think that the world follows a set of rules and things can be judged by those rules. And the rules don’t change, or at least don’t change quickly. Faulkner said of the South — and this is largely true because the area is so conservative — that the past isn’t dead; it’s not even past. Change happens among Republicans at a generational pace. I look at my parents, my siblings, my nieces and nephews and I see change across generations, but not much within a generation. And when there is change, it often seems to be because of personal effect. If a Republican’s attitudes toward, say, gay or trans people changes, it’s likely to be because someone they know personally has come out as gay or trans. Which leads into #3; in my experience, Republicans tend to decide that someone is good or bad, and interpret their actions from then on in that light. That’s why someone they know (and have already decided is “good”) coming out to them changes their attitude. Having decided that that person was “good”, they are willing to consider that being gay is at least not all bad because a “good” person is gay. It shows up in the alternative in the crusade against Hillary Clinton. They’ve decided that she is “bad”, so everything she does must be “bad”. But at the same time, they can be extremely loyal (which is often, but not always, a good thing). There is value to maintaining traditions.
Most of the Democrats I know are much more comfortable with uncertainty, with the idea that there simply aren’t rules that define life and morality in a clear way. They’re willing to live with shades of gray. They’re more open to change, more likely to have moved away from the place where they grew up, to be open to a variety of new experiences. When they travel, they’re more likely to try to “go native” because their sense of who they are isn’t as bound up with a set of rules (expectations). They look at other people differently, and realize that good people sometimes do bad things (and vice versa). We can take this to extremes, and find reasons to be offended that are sometimes pretty ridiculous. But at our best, we have a strong empathy for other people even if we haven’t personally experienced their pains. We do sometimes lead with our feelings instead of our brains, and can get a brutal comeuppance from the law of unintended consequences. We’re generally more prone to the “We must do something! This is something, therefore we must do it!” syndrome. We’re much more willing to throw our own under the bus (Al Franken, anyone?).
An example of the difference hit me after Elizabeth Warren proposed student loan forgiveness and I saw several conservatives criticizing the proposal on Twitter; they were all similar, and the one I remember best said that the program was a “slap in the face to people who have already paid off their loans.” I spent ten years paying off loans back in the 80s/90s, and I know it’s worse now for a lot of people. And my thought was the exact opposite. And it struck me that the Republican attitude to this kind of situation is “If I had to go through this misery, by God everybody else should have to,” while the Democratic attitude is “I had to go through this misery, and I think we should keep as many other people as possible from having to go through it.”
That's a record in that section. I'm getting a little concerned about you. 