Do values have anything to do with politics?

I should probably start today’s post with a warning.  My sense of political reality may have been really skewed by House of Cards and Scandal.  Politics can’t be that corrupt...I hope!  And yet, it often seems as if political processes are quite House of Cards-like – a lot of talk about values and a quite a bit of jostling for power and spinning of facts to justify it.    

An interesting psychological perspective on how politics works - and might work better - is presented by Johnathan Haidt in the book The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion.  He has a TED talk based on these ideas https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind?language=en. Haidt says that moral reasoning is after-the-fact (Haidt, 2001). When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, you see that we reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later to justify what we have already decided.  What we decide is based on our moral intuitions. These come about the same way we acquire food preferences, we start with what we’re fed as children.  If liberal values taste good to me, I have them often.  If not, I may choose more conservative fare.   My liberal or conservative moral intuitions will tend to blind me to the virtues of other with different views.  

If I am a liberal, instead of listening to the reasoning of a conservative, I will be are busy looking for the arguments will allow me to influence her.   So when politicians spin a story, they are using their moral intuitions.  Haidt has studied moral systems worldwide and come up with six moral values that are part of our fundamental nature: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity.  Liberals emphasize caring and fairness; conservatives have a broader palate and can taste across the values spectrum.  I tend to have liberal views so it was a bit of a shock to read that conservatives are more broad-valued than me.  However, Haidt is coming not from a place that supports any one group.  Rather, he is making a plea for the idea that the world needs all of these values and asking for more openness and a more civil political discourse.  I like the idea and I liked his book - but I doubt that Frank Underwood will be swayed.  

References

Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814-834. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.108.4.814

Haidt, J.  (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. New York: Vintage Books.