A few things about conservatives us liberals just don't get.

Liberals don't understand conservatives, this is pretty easy to grasp. We often times see liberals asking why poor conservatives vote against their own best interests, why religious conservatives vote for someone who is as far from Christian values as you can get (like Trump has shown he is), or why they are constantly attacking the poor in America. The reason we don't understand them is because we neglect to see the real source of their beliefs. We keep going after the things we see on the surface, but if we are interested in having a conversation with conservatives and getting them to think about things differently we have to go deep. This election brought up a term we hadn't heard in the media very much prior to the elections, "authoritarianism". We learned that Trump supporters tended to score quite highly on psychological tests that looked for authoritarian tendencies. Sadly too many of us didn't delve deeply enough into this to realize what authoritarianism really means. Someone with authoritarians tendencies is not necessarily a person who wants our country run by a dictator or who identifies with Nazis. Normally these are people who see appeal in a political candidate who talks about issues of law and order. They are people who see a great deal of value in the social and cultural norms of the places thy live. They are people who place, to some extent, a higher value on the society than on the individual. The average authoritarian is more correctly called a collectivist and the opposite of a collectivist is an individualist. Liberals tend more to the individualist side of things. We are proponents of individual rights, pro-choice, pro- marriage equality, pro freedom of expression. We support social welfare programs because they make a poor individual's life better. We support universal health care because it helps individuals. We wrap these ideas up in a society wide wrapper sometimes but the core reason for our support is individual rights. A collectivist takes a different view of things. Free expression is wonderful as it brings new and beneficial ideas into a society, but it must be tempered so these new ideas do not become so varied and widespread that they dissolve the foundational ideas the society is based on. Anything that threatens to upset the social norms is suspect. Women's rights, civil rights, gay rights, legal abortion, new technologies are suspect, the list goes on and on. Collectivists see society as a thing they owe their rights and existence to and they want to protect it. Individualists see social and cultural norms as something that can prohibit the development of the individual and societal progress.

Let's take marriage equality for an example. Liberals often have a hard time understanding why anyone would want to stand in the way of two men or two women getting married since it doesn't affect anyone else's life. Conservatives, because of their collectivist principles see it quite differently. They look at our society and see that heterosexual marriage has been the norm for a very long time. They see that families are an important facet of our society. A change to this structure could lead to unforeseen consequences and they therefor see that change as threatening. Many will say that their arguments against same sex marriage are based on religious principles, but when confronted with Biblical arguments that disagree with them their opinion doesn't change at all. This is because their feelings about same sex marriage aren't based in religion, they are based in collectivist ideals. This is why we have heard so many people refer to heterosexual marriage as "traditional marriage", this is why they say they believe that same sex marriage will destroy the institution of marriage. They aren't concerned with religion, they really aren't even concerned with marriage. They are concerned that any change to an institution like marriage, which has such great importance to our society, will cause the downfall of our society.

We see this in all sorts of issues. Why would anyone care about having to press a one or a two to select a language when they place a phone call? It isn't that they feel inconvenienced, it is because they feel that our society is an English speaking society and to accept another language could disrupt our society. They may love to go to Mexico and have formed friendships there on vacation, but be in an uproar about Latino immigrants coming to the USA. They don't hate Mexicans but they see increasing numbers of Mexican immigrants as a threat to our social norms.

We see social welfare programs as a way to help individuals move forward. They may not hate low income people but they see our society as a meritocracy and see our society helping someone who isn't working as a threat to us all. This doesn't mean they wouldn't be willing to help that same person individually but for our government to do it is a threat to our way of life.

When we think of collectivist societies we tend to think about places like India and China, but after living in the Netherlands for a few years I found that Northern European societies were much more collectivist than the US. The problem isn't that conservatives tend to be more collectivist and liberals tend to be more individualistic, the problem is that both sides think their way should be the only way. This causes them to create false narratives for why the other side does what it does. We are one of the most individualistic societies in the world, even our collectivist tendencies are quite mild compared to some other places. We can get past this, without having to change who we are. But first we have to realize that people are allowed to think about different things in different ways. We have to stop looking for the simple explanations. We have to be willing to try, that is the only way we can protect the rights of the individual while also protecting our society.