If You’re Being Fatalistic or Panicking, You Are Helping Donald Trump
The psychological differences between liberals and conservatives are an important and underexamined aspect of politics. Never are they more transparently on display than at election time, and I would submit to you that if Kamala Harris ends up losing this race, the tendency I’m seeing on display among liberals may actually bear some part of the blame for the loss.
To put it simply, liberals tend toward fatalism and panic; the label often employed is “bedwetters.” Did you see those new anti-trans ads? She’s doomed. Oh my God, did you see what Nate Silver just said? It’s over. Yikes, the polls in Pennsylvania just shifted seven-tenths of a point in Trump’s favor, this is a nightmare. Oh dear, the Nevada early vote totals are a disaster. And on and on and on and on: Liberals look for things to panic about. Everywhere you look, liberals are finding a reason to white-knuckle their way through these final hours.
Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to do the opposite. They look for things to feel confident about. Hey, check out Polymarket today—our guy is cruising. Look at the new Insider Advantage polls; looking good. Harris bombed in that CNN town hall. She’s a joke. This thing is over, over, over. (And if we lose, well, you know it was stolen.)
This isn’t monolithic. There are some confident liberals and some worrywart conservatives, but generally, what I describe above is true. Why?
I’m not really sure. I’d need to be a psychologist to give a full answer, but I think it starts with the fact that liberals worry more about the world; carry more psychic weight around with them. Conservatives worry about the world too, but they do so in a very different way. Liberals love complexity, while conservatives prefer simplicity. Crime? Well, says the liberal, it’s all very sociologically complicated, and we need to study it and think it through and look at the root causes. Whereas for the conservative, the answer to crime is pretty simple. Lock ’em up.
