Maybe more like Openness in the Big 5, but I’m not sure.
I spent some time thinking about this, but it seems complicated. For example, it seems to me that when liberals want the society to change, they usually want the whole society to change—as opposed to e.g. first trying the new experiment in one county only.
I mean, I understand that if one strongly believes that X is good and perfectly safe, then “X everywhere” is better than e.g. “X in one city”. But when it turns out that “X everywhere” is politically impossible, at least for today, in such case I would still prefer “X in one city” to “X nowhere”… but surprisingly, some of my liberal friends have the opposite reaction. It’s like they have a lot of courage about global changes, but somehow get scared by small-scale experiments.
It’s… sorry if this is too uncharitable… as if instead of conservatives’ “safety in tradition”, liberals prefer “safety in numbers”. Change everything, so that if hypothetically something goes wrong, we are all in it, together.
(Rejecting both the “safety in tradition” and the “safety in numbers” seems like a libertarian trait to me.)
EDIT:
Thinking about it some more, maybe Openness is the typically liberal trait, and Conscientiousness is the typically conservative one. And perhaps the paradox of willing to enact liberal policies at large scale, but not at small scale, could be explained by liberals understanding on some level that they are good at changing things, but conservatives are good at maintaining things. A functional country could have liberals at the top, but still must have conservatives at least at the bottom, or it will fall apart. (If everyone participates in the permanent revolution, no one makes bread.) If you try to create a small-scale liberal utopia, the conservatives could simply leave it, and then the utopia would fall apart; which is why you must create liberal utopias at state scale.
Let me offer you a couple more frameworks to think about it.
One is Haidt’s Moral Foundations framework. It is put forward in Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind, but Wikipedia tl;drs it thusly:
The original theory proposed five such foundations: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation
…liberals are sensitive to the Care and Fairness foundations, conservatives are more sensitive to the Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity foundations and libertarians are found to have roughly equal sensitive to each foundation. According to Haidt, this has significant implications for political discourse and relations. Because members of two political camps are to a degree blind to one or more of the moral foundations of the others, they may perceive morally-driven words or behavior as having another basis—at best self-interested, at worst evil, and thus demonize one another.
My hypothesis is that progressives, conservatives, and libertarians view politics along three different axes. For progressives, the main axis has oppressors at one end and the oppressed at the other. For conservatives, the main axis has civilization at one end and barbarism at the other. For libertarians, the main axis has coercion at one end and free choice at the other.
Jordan B Peterson is doing further research on Big5 vs politics. He already has some intermediate results, such as dividing the “liberals” into “egalitarians” and “PC authoritarians” (the latter are similar in some aspects to the egalitarians, but in other aspects to conservative authoritarians).
I haven’t read about that much yet, but it resonates with my impressions of politics. The short version is: imagine the “motte” and “bailey” of social justice… turns out, they actually correspond to two different groups of people, measurably different in personality traits. (The “PC authoritarians” were already called “regressive left” at some parts of internet.)
Maybe more like Openness in the Big 5, but I’m not sure.
I spent some time thinking about this, but it seems complicated. For example, it seems to me that when liberals want the society to change, they usually want the whole society to change—as opposed to e.g. first trying the new experiment in one county only.
I mean, I understand that if one strongly believes that X is good and perfectly safe, then “X everywhere” is better than e.g. “X in one city”. But when it turns out that “X everywhere” is politically impossible, at least for today, in such case I would still prefer “X in one city” to “X nowhere”… but surprisingly, some of my liberal friends have the opposite reaction. It’s like they have a lot of courage about global changes, but somehow get scared by small-scale experiments.
It’s… sorry if this is too uncharitable… as if instead of conservatives’ “safety in tradition”, liberals prefer “safety in numbers”. Change everything, so that if hypothetically something goes wrong, we are all in it, together.
(Rejecting both the “safety in tradition” and the “safety in numbers” seems like a libertarian trait to me.)
EDIT:
Thinking about it some more, maybe Openness is the typically liberal trait, and Conscientiousness is the typically conservative one. And perhaps the paradox of willing to enact liberal policies at large scale, but not at small scale, could be explained by liberals understanding on some level that they are good at changing things, but conservatives are good at maintaining things. A functional country could have liberals at the top, but still must have conservatives at least at the bottom, or it will fall apart. (If everyone participates in the permanent revolution, no one makes bread.) If you try to create a small-scale liberal utopia, the conservatives could simply leave it, and then the utopia would fall apart; which is why you must create liberal utopias at state scale.
Let me offer you a couple more frameworks to think about it.
One is Haidt’s Moral Foundations framework. It is put forward in Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind, but Wikipedia tl;drs it thusly:
The other one is Kling’s Three-Axes model. Briefly,
Jordan B Peterson is doing further research on Big5 vs politics. He already has some intermediate results, such as dividing the “liberals” into “egalitarians” and “PC authoritarians” (the latter are similar in some aspects to the egalitarians, but in other aspects to conservative authoritarians).
I haven’t read about that much yet, but it resonates with my impressions of politics. The short version is: imagine the “motte” and “bailey” of social justice… turns out, they actually correspond to two different groups of people, measurably different in personality traits. (The “PC authoritarians” were already called “regressive left” at some parts of internet.)