Thread: Guiding Principles for the Righteous

By Jay Kuo

In “The Righteous Mind” by Jonathan Haidt, a book I highly recommend for those who want to understand how we got here, the author posits that there are five innate moral senses that humans developed as a result of evolutionary or social pressures. This is a very useful framework to diagnose what is currently terribly wrong with the modern Republican Party. First, some context.

The harm/care sense grew out of the need to care for the young and the helpless and developed into a morality of caring for those outside of our immediate families. The fairness/cheating sense evolved to ensure humans could reap rewards without being exploited. The loyalty/betrayal foundation grew out of the need to form larger coalitions like villages and nations. The authority/subversion sense was a trade off of personal gain for group protection. And the sanctity/degradation sense evolved out of the need to live in a world full of pathogens and parasites.

We have different instinctive reactions to things that trigger these senses: the image of a child suffering, the rich getting richer while others go hungry, the burning of a flag, respect or disrespect for those in uniform, the sight of maggots on a corpse. These feelings well up in different ways depending on who we are and how we were raised.

Politically, liberals tend to be heavy on the harm/care sense, while conservatives lean into loyalty/betrayal, but I want to talk about how the modern GOP seems to have abandoned each of these senses, which helps explain why we can’t figure out what’s going on with them or where their moral centers lie.

We’re accustomed to conservatives having a “tough” approach to the question of caring for others, with a fierce sense of individualism and freedom underlying that. While we might have disagreed with them over how much the community should help the individual, at least in the past it was a principled and consistent stance. The Trump base, however, is uniquely callous toward any who are other, including minorities and immigrants, a sentiment fed by racist rhetoric from their leaders.

On fairness and cheating, the GOP has now gone off the rails on the foundation of our political system: elections. While they claim without any factual basis that Democrats stole the election from Trump, they are also busy passing laws that will make voting harder for minorities and trying to cheat in future elections by rigging them in their favor. This is a fundamentally anti-democratic agenda, and it is picking up steam.

On loyalty and betrayal, more GOP voters trust Russia’s president over our own, and they have placed their faith in an authoritarian figure, trading a politics of conservatism for a politics of cult-like worship. Their loyalty shifts depending on what their president tells them, which means they are not loyal to country but to party or person, a dangerous development.

On authority and respect for the rule of law, the insurrection of January 6 eviscerated any notion that Trump’s base is willing to respect the democratic process and the authority of elected leaders. If they don’t get their desired result, they are willing to rebel violently. A majority of Republicans today believe that it might require violence to restore political power rightfully to them.

And on sanctity of the human body and God’s creations, they have warped the sense to a point of catastrophic pandemic denial through anti-mask and anti-vax politics, even while refusing to acknowledge that humans are destroying the very planet our God supposedly gave us.

That doesn’t leave a lot of “innate” human morality for them to stand on, and this is both confusing and dangerous. The only thing that remains to them is blind trust in a would-be despot, one who has allowed hundreds of thousands of them to die from pandemic and who daily undermined the rule of law and conservative values around family, sex and faith through his poor and cynical example.

Whether or not you agree with Haidt’s five moral foundations, it is an interesting exercise to see how far Trumpism has led the GOP astray from these enumerated core values. It also can inform how we convince those in the GOP who have not completely cast their lot with Trumpism, perhaps even get them to step away from the brink.

It’s not so much about reasoning with them as asking them to search their hearts for the things that matter to them. Even a small shift by those who, like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, believe in conservative values, in something greater than Trumpism, can mean electoral losses for the modern GOP. This is why we need to support those true conservatives even though we may disagree with them on many, many levels. Their moral compass is still there, and we desperately need an opposition that actually steers its ship by it.