Engineers, on the other hand, very often don’t particularly care for science/math. And regardless of how good they are at it, can’t wait until they get out of the lab and into management. In fact, being so good at their work that they keep on getting raises but never get promoted out of the shop is considered a form of failure; a lack of ambition.

Then again, maybe we’re overthinking the part about liberals and conservatives. Maybe it is psychological after all. Most liberals are guys who just aren’t very good at business, temperamentally unsuited for it, not highly motivated to do it, or simply too lazy to learn it, so they compensate by affecting a disdain and contempt for the commercial world, its ethos and the people in it.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are narcissistic enough to fancy they are natural-born business geniuses, tycoons and entrepreneurs with all the intellectual and moral virtues they feel are essential for success in that field. If it turns out they really aren’t very good at it, they are paranoid enough to have a ready-made list of excuses and scapegoats to blame their failures on: the government, the media, the immigrants, academia, the poor, the minorities and, of course, the “liberal elites”. Those “elites” are, by the way, liberals who are better at business than the conservative wannabees are. They really hate those guys.

You need proof? Have you ever heard a conservative failure complain that he was just outmaneuvered by a competitor. Its always the libs and their allies who are to blame. The libs and their lackeys are lazy and incompetent and lack all creativity and ambition, but somehow, always manage to pull a fast one on the conservatives, treacherously stab them in the back, and steal what they are entitled to by genetic birthright: der ewige liberal.

As always, it comes down to narcissism and paranoia.

A bit of nuance I need to interject regards the proclivities of engineers. You paint with too broad a brush–engineering is a huge discipline spanning the spectrum from the literally concrete–mechanical and civil engineering–to the totally abstract: programming. In my experience there is a very high correlation along that spectrum with the political spectrum right to left. Engineers who work with atoms tend to be conservative, engineers who work with bits tend to be liberal.

The programmer kind of liberal is often the very traditional kind, with its focus on civil liberties and individual expression; programmers delight in being “characters”. And take seriously political issues like encryption and privacy. In the ’90s I was associated, at the fringe, with the “Cypherpunks”, the group of cryptographers who’d banded together to fight the government’s noxious and tyrannical “Clipper Chip” initiative. Clipper was blatant Big Brother: Every product built using encryption would be required to implement it using a government-designed microchip which had a backdoor the NSA could use to read anybody’s private data. We won that one, even though Edward Snowden has revealed that the NSA never gave up, and latched on to 9/11 as manna from heaven. Oh lord were we justified! And today, once again, it’s the codemonkey community that’s most outraged and most motivated to fight back.

There’s been some nonsense on the Net conflating the views of asshole uber-capitalist entrepreneurs with the views of “Silicon Valley”, smearing all of us with the noxious views of asshats blogging about how all the poor people in San Francisco are spoiling their days. Waaaaah! That’s not us. And for the record, San Francisco is not Silicon Valley.

I first noticed the prominence of predisposition years ago in connection with religion, but of course it’s a small step indeed to seeing the same thing with politics. We start with what feels right; our moral compasses live in our guts, not our heads. You can’t think your way to a system of morality. I find it amusing that those who proclaim loudest that they reached their ideology through careful thought and rational evaluation tend to gravitate to crackpot religionsideologies like “Objectivism” that loudly proclaim their own rationality while spouting unsupported nonsense. Funny how the most passionate supporters of the supposed Vulcan detachment of Ayn Rand saw the light during adolescence. Lord knows that’s every human’s most rational and reasoned phase of life.

I’m cautiously optimistic these days. One thing I’ve noticed about conservatives over the years is that they never, ever, anticipate the backlash. It’s building as an inevitable reaction to the excesses of the right over the last few years; Congress’s 8% approval rating can be pinned overwhelmingly on the Tea Party Caucus.

But if the mood of the nation can swing, even a little bit, between conservative and liberal, what does that mean for our thesis of predisposition? Well, first, disposition is a nuanced thing; it’s a tendency, a vector pushing each person a certain direction. But we’re social beings, most of us, and we’re influenced by the mood of people around us. After 9/11 the country swung violently in a conservative direction, and I found it hard not to be infected by the anger and hatred of the times. It was only a displacement, not a tectonic shift; while I thought we were justified attacking Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, I also knew that the “Patriot” Act was bad news. And damn, was I right about that or was I right?

But that fever has broken for a lot of Americans, and we’ve moved on to new fevers. The growing awareness of inequality of economic opportunity is awakening moral outrage, and will nudge the country leftward…slightly. And we can thank Edward Snowden, daily, for blowing the whistle on Big Brother.

The times they are a’changing, a’gain.

Right now the US has the worst of both worlds, socialism for big corporations and capitalism for individuals and small business.

I think you try to give a balanced view, and then always come down on the Conservative side. For instance, your remarks about a “workable universal health plan”. All for universal health care, if it’s “workable”. But nothing so far has been “workable”, nor will it be. (You’re not outraged about paying more than anyone else in the world, and having 36 countries charge less and have better outcomes as measured by time-honored standards. That is considered “workable”.)

I agree about some corruption in government, and I’m under the impression it benefits big business, which is as corrupt as it can get away with. The recent financial crisis was due to government corruption not regulating big financial institutions. Madoff got away with what he did because of government corruption. Government corruption must be counted as big business corruption.

Who’s evil? I’m not saying anyone is, part of human nature is greed and unfettered greed (“Get the government out of the way of progress!!!”) is a trait expressed more by big business than any other sector of society.

Another example of governmental corruption benefiting big business is the Executive Order preventing the prosecution of Halliburton and Bechtel for overcharging, shoddy work, plain stealing or any and all other criminal activities in the Iraq war. I didn’t see anything preventing prosecution of food stamp fraud. All on the side of big business.

All of the Union corruption in the US would not have cost what one Enron did.

You’ve described what is to me a Southern Conservative attitude, not an evil attitude but not one which considers the needs of the less fortunate, either.

At least, that’s my impression based upon your posts over time and as exemplified by your above post.

BTW, you may be the only Conservative around here who is a college graduate, though it is in a strongly capitalistic major.

I’m all in favor of small, local goivernment, but every now and then the King has to send the Inspector General to town and kick a little local ass.

Hmm. Maybe that’s what’s behind the Tea Party phenomenon. Every Carpet Barn or Fish Fry Franchise owner fantasizes himself a big frog in a small pond: a Community Leader.

A great argument for decentralized (local) government.

I graduated from HS as a typical southern conservative. I graduated from college as a liberal, even though I was a marketing major. I don’t think my career in business turned me into a conservative, it made me ruthlessly pragmatic.

AS for me, I am not driven by dogma. e.g.,I have said many times that I would love to see a workable universal health plan. I just have not seen one yet that is suitable for the US. I am not impressed with baby step options and the something is better than nothing philosophy.

If I have been influenced in any way it is to believe that corporations and business in general in not evil and they often have the ability to get things done better than government.

Personally, I dislike all government because it is, in my opinion, inefficient, dull witted and far more corrupt than the private sector. I tend to resent any authority that is illogical and unlikely to succeed.

Specifically, do our political and ideological opinions arise from rational analysis, or are they more a consequence of our emotions and personalities? Our psychology and history? This a question Robert has brought up several times but he always gets shouted down in a flurry of indignation and outrage. That alone should tell us something.

I’m particularly interested in your answer to that question, Frank. You seem to have a lot less emotionally invested in the politically correct answer than the other conservatives here.

My impression of the conservative everyman is not much better.