Birthers, a second look.

Last week I wrote a post about an encounter I had with a birther. I was rather shocked to meet someone who still held on to the false belief that President Obama was not born in the United States. All of the available, real, evidence shows that President Obama was born in the United States in Hawaii, (read the evidence here, here, here, here, here, and here) so how could anyone still believe he was born anywhere else? As a liberal my mind went to the same place that many liberal's minds go to when confronted with a birther, that the birther movement is populated by nothing but stark raving mad racists who hate the President simply because of the color of his skin but who want to hide their racism behind Section 1 of Article 2 of the US Constitution. I mean that is the only logical explanation as to why someone would believe such a ridiculous story... or is it?

Last week I also mentioned the work of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in a post. Ever since I first learned of Dr. Haidt's work, researching how we make moral judgments, I have been reading everything I could find that he has written. Well last week a new book by Dr. Haidt was released, The Righteous Mind, Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics. In this book Haidt not only looks at how we make moral judgments, he also looks at why we make the judgments that we do. Haidt uses a metaphorical "graphic equalizer" (the set of sliders on your old stereo that you could move up and down individually to adjust the sound) with six sliders. Instead of representing a value of sound each slider represents a moral concern in Haidt's metaphorical example, Care, Liberty, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. After years of questioning individuals to see how strongly they react to each of these moral concerns Haidt was able to see a pattern form that showed how liberals and conservatives responded differently. Liberals set the slider for care (or reducing harm) as high as it would go, liberty and fairness were also set quite high, but loyalty, authority, and sanctity were all very low on the scale. In contrast Conservatives set all of the sliders reasonably high and at almost identical levels. So while care didn't register quite as high with conservatives as it did with liberals, authority rated much higher with conservatives. Of course there is variation shown in individuals of both groups (and libertarians have to be considered completely separate from either liberals or conservatives) but the results were more than consistent enough to make a very strong generalization.

So what does this have to do with birthers not being racists?

It is no secret that most conservatives are not big fans of President Obama, in fact many detest him. They see him as disloyal to their vision of America. He violates their emphasis on sanctity by not holding as sacred many of the things that they do. They believe he cares too much about certain groups while blaming other groups for harm done to the groups he supports, and on social issues they see him too willing to expand liberty to include things they disagree with. So even if a particular conservative places more emphasis on one of the moral concerns than others there is a good chance that they will find disagreement with President Obama in that area. With one possible exception.

I can't remember hearing a loud chorus of conservatives claiming that the 2008 presidential election was rigged. There wasn't an entire movement of conservatives claiming that Obama stole the election and so it seems that conservatives, in general, do accept that Obama was fairly elected. In our country a person can gain authority over others through many ways, including being elected to the office of President of the United States of America. Conservatives tend to hold authority in great esteem and feel that it should be granted due respect. Some conservatives will put even greater emphasis on the importance of authority than other moral concerns, for these conservatives President Obama (truthfully any elected liberal) poses a serious problem.

You see if someone is fairly elected president and you strongly value authority it creates a problem for you if you want to vocally oppose that president. As I mentioned in the previous blog posting Haidt shows us that we do not arrive at moral judgments through reasoning and thought. We arrive at moral judgments through quick intuition and then use reasoning to come up with an explanation for the judgment we made. We have to have a good enough explanation that it satisfies others, and our own sense of values. We are so adept at performing these acts of post-hoc reasoning that we aren't even aware that we are working through the possible explanations for the judgments we have already made. This is what the birthers are trying to do. They know they don't like Obama, but they support the authority which Obama holds since he was fairly elected and so standing up against him would be disrespecting his authority. Unless his authority isn't real, isn't legitimate.

When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992 conservatives claimed he wasn't legitimate because of his lack of military service and the fact that he had won the election with only 43% of the vote. They couldn't build anything resembling a logical argument for him being born outside of the US, but they still questioned his legitimacy. Herman Cain did quite well in the polls for the Republican presidential nomination for a while, Michael Steel was elected to be the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Alan Keys was drafted to run as the republican candidate against then Illinois Senate member Barack Obama for the US Senate. All of these men are African Americans which makes it hard to claim that conservatives in general hold racist beliefs against African Americans. It is hard to say that it is an issue of xenophobia as well when you remember the initial popularity Austrian born and raised Arnold Schwarzenegger held among conservatives when he was first elected as governor of California. It would have much easier for me as a liberal to just see the birthers as crazy racists, but I can't find a way to make their actions equate with racism.

I have the feeling that if Barack Obama's father had been from Spain or France instead of Kenya there would be a fake Spanish or French birth certificate circulating on the internet today. Barack Obama being the legitimate leader of the United States is a very hard thing for many conservatives to deal with as it brings into conflict several of the moral concerns that they use to guide themselves through life. They cling to this false idea because without it their world starts to crumble a little at the edges. Most don't make these claims for attention, or for fame, they make these claims to try and help make the world a place they can understand once again. Their actions have much less to do with simple mean spiritedness than they do with moral self preservation.

I dislike the birthers less now than I did before. I feel I have a better understanding of why they do what it is that they do and I also realize that my previous beliefs about them reflected a bit of bigotry in myself towards conservatives. Truthfully I find myself pitying them a bit now. Of course a conservative would say that I am just being a typical liberal. There would be a considerable amount of truth in what they said.