Jonathan Haidt: belief

Transcript context

…Here’s what I worry about with that explanation. If I look at local government — state legislators, governors, Congress for that matter — the Republicans seem pretty much in tune with people’s intuitions, because they control all those branches, sometimes pretty solidly, especially at the state and local level. And then at the national level there’s this huge disconnect. So if all the Republicans were losing, it would be easier to see. National politics is different from local. National politics, I believe, is much more like religion than local politics is. If you take it all the way down to the very local level — who the dogcatcher is, who the treasurer is of the town — that’s all very practical stuff. People are very worried about their property values and things like that. It’s not very ideological. National politics is much more like a religion. The president is the high priest of the American civil religion — I think that’s what Robert Bellah called it. At the national level it’s often unrelated to what happens at the local level. This is something that Ronald Reagan really understood much better than his challengers. He was able to appeal to the moral intuitions of people about America, making America great. It’s very different from what happens at the state level. Your core categories for understanding how values map into politics — in a second I’ll ask you to explain those — but do you see room for any new category? A lot of people are saying this year, there’s a new category of populism. My Thomas Friedman–like taxi driver experiences, I’ve spoken to taxi drivers. They say, “I’d like to support either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders.” Maybe that’s populism. A kind of new category. But tell us briefly what your categories are and how fixed do you think they are?…

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