Liberals Are Not Immune from the Pull of Authority

“My two cents is that respect for authority is neither a particularly conservative nor liberal trait. Rather, conservatives and liberals hold reverence for different categories of authority and the actors that operate within those spheres.”

Of all the academic work examining the cognitive nature of politics, little has been more influential than Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory, first proposed in a 2004 paper authored alongside Craig Joseph.

Moral foundations theory posits that six moral touchstones—care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression—underlay human moral reasoning. The twist is that not all humans use these foundations equally. Haidt’s research shows liberals (in the contemporary American sense, i.e. progressives) tend to rely heavily on care and, to lesser extents, fairness and liberty. Conservatives use all six moral foundations more or less equally, but, relative to liberals, they emphasize loyalty, sanctity, and authority. This is why political debate can often be unproductive: Liberals and conservatives are speaking to each other in different moral languages.

Haidt’s work is very compelling, and his acclaimed 2012 book The Righteous Mind should, frankly, be required reading for anyone who wants to write about politics. But if there is one element that never sat right with me, it’s the notion that liberals are relatively immune to authority’s pull, at least in practical terms.

My two cents is that respect for authority is neither a particularly conservative nor liberal trait. Rather, conservatives and liberals hold reverence for different categories of authority and the actors that operate within those spheres. Those who believe respect for authority to be a conservative trait are using too narrow a definition of authority, often restricting the domain to patriarchal institutions.