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What Makes Red Red and Blue Blue?
Explaining American Political Preference


Why do conservatives and liberals in the United States want what they want?

Why is it that if a person advocates for gun rights they likely also support traditional marriage and the loosening of environmental protections? And why is it that people who support finance regulation often also support a woman's right to abortion and health care for all? What underlies the correlations within these two collections of policies that we, as Americans, often feel so strongly about?

One could explain from principle—showing how conservative and liberal positions result from different and often incompatible ideals and conceptions of what it means to be human, live in a society, and have a good life, and then show how their policy preferences arise from those. Explanations like that have a lot of purchase, but I doubt they offer the whole story. Many of the principles offered on both ends of the political spectrum sound pretty plausible. Why adopt one rather than another? If disagreement about them was really all that was going on, we might wonder why American politics are quite so polarized and their policy positions quite so correlated as they are.

It may be helpful to augment the explanation from principle with an explanation from power—showing how different ways of relating to power ground policy preferences. Here's an explanation like that.

The two sides, conservatives and liberals, define their stance on issues largely along the axis of power distribution. Power is simply the ability to get what you want. The fundamental question is: Who gets power? Who gets what they want?

In many cases power is a limited commodity: if some people get what they want, others won't get what they want. They may want the same limited resource, or they may want things that conflict with each other. Sometimes there are ways to increase the number of people who get to decide what they want without a trade-off. Modern farming technology, for example, has meant that more people get to choose what they want to eat when they want to eat it. But in many cases an increase in power for some people means a decrease in power for others. This leaves us with a few basic dynamics. Individuals can maintain power that they have, they can lose power to others, and they can attain new power either by taking it from others or innovating (either technologically or culturally) new sources of power.

Almost all people in the United States try to maintain or increase their ability to get what they want. Conservatives and liberals both tend to adopt policies that maintain or increase their power. That is, people stake their policy positions (partly) in light of their sources of power, and the utility of those policies to increase or maintain their access to those sources.

Now we can address the correlation in our question. Lots of people have correlated policy positions because sources of power tend to be correlated among people. For example, if you have a degree from a prestigious college or university, there’s a good chance you have access to creative and robust employment and a wealthy social circle based in cities. If you happen to be deeply religious, there’s a good chance you may participate in, say, patriarchal power structures and own a suburban home. And these correlations are caused by the fact that people who are culturally similar tend to access the same sources of power. And that’s because culture tends to set the things we want and how we go about getting them.

An explanation from power like the one sketched above answers our original question by identifying typical sources of power that liberals and conservatives (respectively) tend to have. It then points out that picking policies to maintain and increase power (given those sources) results in the typical policy correlations observed in the respective groups. The explanation predicts, therefore, that policy positions chosen by conservatives tend to benefit conservatives, and policy positions chosen by liberals tend to benefit liberals.

But there’s a wrinkle. There are many policies that liberals support that seem to decrease their potential access to power, and the same can be said for conservatives. Why does a liberal support a tax increase that will ultimately cost him thousands of dollars in lost income to support social services he does not require? And why does a conservative argue against government-sponsored health care that will mean a large decrease in medical bills for her family?

An explanation from power might give the following answer.

The powerful among conservatives and liberals face a problem caused by large power differentials in a democracy: if those in power pursue policies to maintain or increase their power, they will be overridden by the people with less power, who are by far in the majority. Both sides have developed relationships to power that include partial solutions to this problem. And these solutions account for instances in which people support policy seemingly against their interests.

For powerful liberals, this solution is as follows. In addition to power increase and maintenance, they also support power transactions that involve the ceding of irrelevant power to marginalized groups and the production of new power thereby. That is, many of the positions liberals endorse represent power transactions in which an old source of power is ceded from those with more power to those with less, in such a way that there is an ultimate increase in power for both (liberal) parties to the transaction.

Old or irrelevant sources of power may include things like excess wealth; or familial, patriarchal, religious, or racial standing. Liberals with access to these sources of power tend also to have access to other sources of power like education, network, employment, or cultural status. When liberals shed access to the former kinds of power by endorsing liberal positions, their overall access to power tends to increase.

What sort of power stands to be gained by ceding old sources of power? The increase often manifests as both social capital and as a voting alliance with those marginalized people benefitting from liberal policies. Consider social capital—the power that comes from acceptance in a community, or acting as an ethical exemplar. In some liberal communities, the term “woke” designates this position of ethical exemplar. Being woke allows one access to communities and networks with all of their attendant resources, cultural and otherwise. The importance of social power cannot be overstated. It can mean the difference between wealth, employment, partnership, friendship, status, expression, support, and none of those things. In recent years we have witnessed a tightening of security, so to speak, when it comes to access to these kinds of social power in certain communities. If a person holds the wrong political position, speaks the wrong way, supports the wrong political candidate, or participates (or participated in the past) of actions that are judged by the community to be contrary to the ethical code at the time, they may be barred from these benefits. This dynamic has crystalized into what has been called “cancel culture.”

There are real and manifest sources of power to be tapped by liberals that support the correct policies. And these sources are valuable enough that many liberals are willing to part with old sources of power in order to gain or maintain access to them.

Taxes are a good example of the dynamic. Many liberals are benefitted by government services (as are conservatives), and when taxes go up the quality of the services they receive, and thus their relative power, goes up. But why does a relatively powerful liberal person that will not directly benefit from many government services support such a measure? After all, the money they will lose is often disproportionate to whatever direct boons they might receive from the enactment of such a policy. The people who support the tax increase have enough power from their wealth, their job, their education, and especially their social and cultural status in their community that would not be impinged upon by the increase in taxes. The marginal power concession, coming in the form of a higher tax rate, is more than compensated for by the power gained by supporting such a cause.

Here's another example: equal marriage rights for same-sex couples is a policy supported by liberals and opposed by conservatives. An explanation from power tells us that conservatives oppose gay marriage rights because they see in the policy a challenge to a source of their power, perhaps the patriarchy and traditional social structures based on gender norms. Allowing same-sex marriage seems to erode the position of the traditional family, and the ideas of men as the heads of households, and the subservience of women to them. Liberal advocates of the position, on balance, feel less of this kind of power-loss. They tend to derive less of their power (relatively speaking) from the patriarchy, looking instead to sources like higher-education, wealth, and social and cultural capital among other liberal people. They have relatively less to lose by embracing such a policy. Given how much they stand to gain in terms of social positioning and ethical standing, the potential loss of power often appears justified.

Note that the power trade-off doesn’t always work out. In instances where positions might seem in accordance with liberal views but on balance reduce sources of power beyond a comfortable margin without requisite power gain, we see Liberals arguing against Liberal-seeming positions. This was the case, for example, with "busing"—a policy that in some cases attempted to integrate communities by transporting primarily white students from suburban homes to inner-city schools and primarily black students from urban homes to suburban schools. On the face of it, this policy would have furthered many of the causes in line with liberal principles like equity and social justice. However, many liberals argued against it. This is because it might have introduced the serious risk of disrupting the education of constituent's children, a threat to their power sufficient enough to overwhelm any social gains to made by supporting the policy.

Now consider conservatives. Like powerful liberals, powerful conservatives must deal with the problem of inequality in a democracy. If they straightforwardly act to help those in power retain power, they will fail to do so because those without are by far in the majority, and will vote to end this activity. When the interests of conservative leaders and constituents conflict, an attempt is made by leaders to convince constituents to support policies that do not result in the maintenance or increase of the constituents’ power. This is often accomplished by appeal to principles: self-reliance, less government, etc. However, other, more extreme modes of convincing often come in to play. The modern conservative movement—with its substantial reshaping of media and even concepts like news, truth, and fact; and its appeals to emotion that encourage polarization, fear, and hate—is largely a manifestation of these other extreme techniques.

The proposed repeal of the Affordable Care Act is a good example of how the strategy works. By granting health subsidies, ACA shifts some power from the powerful to the less powerful. Powerful conservatives pay more in taxes, less powerful conservatives pay less for healthcare. In order to combat this shift, powerful conservatives needed to persuade the less powerful, arguing that it is not, in fact, in their interest to support the policy, though it so clearly is. Argument from principle became only one of a suite of rhetorical strategies that included the control of information sources, the delegitimization of credible authorities, the presentation of confusing or misleading information, and the repetition of falsehoods.

Opposition to policies that regulate powerful corporations, increase taxes for the wealthiest, and extend social programs are further examples of typical conservative positions that benefit powerful conservatives at the expense of the less powerful. In each case these policies would have a positive effect on the power and quality of life for many conservative constituents in the form of say, a higher minimum-wage salary, or clean drinking water. Powerful conservatives, on the other hand, would see a reduction in their power upon their enactment (usually in the form of money lost to regulatory restrictions and higher taxes). And in each case, we see a stark effort to convince constituents, by hook or by crook, that these kinds of policies should be opposed.

Note that powerful liberals have less pressure to persuade anyone (besides conservatives) to act against their interests, and can often feel self-congratulatory and ethically superior: on the right side of history. This is because they have found a way to cede the power needed to fuel the progressive agenda that their principles call for, and maintain a powerful voting constituency without having to lose power in the final tally. Up to a point, they get to have their cake and eat it too. Though this also means that powerful liberals are vulnerable to social movements that rapidly change social power dynamics. The MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements are examples of situations in which the liberal power calculus changed. After BLM it might become far more costly to a powerful liberal's social status to argue against, say, an affirmative action measure in her community than supporting it would be risky for her job prospects.

Although I'm expressing these positions as somehow consciously held, they need not be. Liberals probably believe that they are doing the right thing because it’s the right thing, even though it costs them a bit more, and they also know that it would hurt to bus their kids into the city, and they avoid that. They'll probably justify it with one argument or another. Similarly, conservatives in power probably do not feel that they are persuading people to act against their interests, just that their arguments are true.

It may be argued that this explanation is too cynical. It discounts the arguments that individuals give for their political positions and tries to look instead at how they are motivated by their desire to choose outcomes that favor their interests. On the contrary, we must take the arguments people make for their positions very seriously. And yet, in politics arguments are never the whole story—they are often faulty, or inconclusive, or based on bad evidence, or inconsistent with other good arguments. Often all the arguments seem good enough, but are completely at odds with each other. If we want to work toward a complete picture of what drives us politically, it behooves us to ask what motivations, other than the arguments given, a political camp may have. What makes an explanation from power important is that the maintenance and increase of one's power is often far more motivating, self-evident, and clear-cut than arguments from principles and ideals.

Almost all Americans, conservative and liberal, support policies that tend to increase their power. Powerful liberals balance their power books by mining new sources of power and powerful conservatives do it by persuading others to allow them to keep what they already have or give them more. What can we take from this explanation from power? Of course, those without power should be wary of what people in power say, because it is in the interests of powerful people to influence them to act against their interests or put ceilings on their access to power, and Conservative leaders are especially incentivized to do so. Conservatives, as is too often the case, should ask themselves if their scorched-earth strategy is really consistent with the democratic tradition they claim to honor. Liberals should acknowledge that the policies they support for supposedly principled reasons seldom limit their own power but often impinge on the power of others.