I have given considerable thought to the underlying differences between liberals and conservatives. There are, of course, many. Some are intellectual, some emotional, and some temperamental. There is no one, simple reason why people gravitate to one end or the other of the political spectrum.
I've alluded to this before, but I thought I would expand on my many elliptical comments regarding what I think is an important reason that liberals and conservatives think so differently: conservatives tend to think of human relations, including "love," as embodied; liberals tend to see relationships in more abstract terms.
Concretely, when conservatives see a person in distress, they see a person. When a liberal sees them, they see a social problem. It is abstract and requires abstract solutions. A change in systems, class oppression, "addiction" instead of an addicted person.
It's the underlying reason why many liberals "love humanity," but can't seem to stand many human beings. Likes and dislikes, acceptance or hatred, are based on abstractions, not the concrete person right in front of you. Liberals have "allies" and enemies, and an ally can become an enemy if they deviate from a preconceived notion of what a "good" human being is. A perfectly decent person must be canceled because, well, nobody with the wrong opinion CAN be perfectly decent.
Think of how liberals see black people. You are black not because of an accident of genetics--your skin color is merely a clue to your potential blackness. Rather, black people THINK LIKE THIS, so Thomas Sowell is a white supremacist. Blackness is an abstraction, not a concrete reality.
Even moderate liberals tend to think like this to some extent. It's why they can support liberal policies that don't help the actual people they claim to help. Helping somebody overcome addiction, or get out of homelessness, or confront any of a number of horrific challenges requires helping individual people confront their particular demons. Each tragedy in a basically well-functioning society is the result of particular, concrete, and largely individual circumstances. A battered woman is not helped by a bureaucracy or a law, but by a person who is helping THEM in particular.
Conservatives tend to think in terms of concrete results, not abstractions like "caring" or vague intentions or grand gestures. It's not that we don't care about systems and incentives--we do--but the goal is to find solutions that work. We don't tend to think about loving humanity at large, but in what JD Vance often refers to as the ordo amoris. We love things that are closest to us the most, and the most abstract the least.
The first thing you can do to make the world a better place is to live a good and happy life and spread the happiness outward. You build a virtuous society first by being virtuous yourself, not destroying what you think is less than perfect outside yourself. Rioting makes things worse--yet liberals do it in order to destroy an order they think creates all problems. Conservatives don't, because destroying order usually makes things worse.
The decline of religion--particularly among liberals--contributes (or perhaps is caused by?) to this growing divide between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives believe that God expects them to make their little plot on Earth a bit better by being good stewards of home and family. We may be enjoined to love others as ourselves, but in a practical sense, the love of the abstraction "humanity" is God's realm.
Liberals have replaced God with an abstraction. Reshaping humanity itself is their goal because God the Creator doesn't exist to do it. There is no heaven, so heaven on Earth must be created, even if the pursuit of that goal creates its opposite, because man is not God.
"Real communism has not been tried." We can get it right this time.
A conservative is more likely to see "tough love" as a form of love, not cruelty, while a liberal will rush to "harm reduction." Conservatives tell people that life is sometimes tough, that illness and dying are a part of life, and that unplanned children are a blessing in disguise; liberals embrace abortion and medical murder.
It's the difference between "When life hands you lemons, make lemonade," and "when life hands you lemons, it's better toss them out and die of thirst because you were screwed by fate." Or, better yet, take that Coke from the guy next to you.
The focus on the particular and concrete is why conservatives disdain bureaucracies, programs, and big government in favor of churches, charities, and moral education. The focus on the abstract--on classes--is why liberals love big government, to whom they hand over problems that are too messy to deal with.
What's striking is how liberals don't actually seem to care about the concrete results. All those billions of dollars to solve homelessness in California have made things worse, but liberals are indifferent to the results.
It is, I believe, because the homeless are not people to them, but an abstraction. As long as they can say "I gave at the office," it's all right. Even better, in places like Canada, homelessness is an acceptable reason to request euthanasia. Soon enough, the homeless will be offered fentanyl and a free trip to the afterlife. Already, the Brits are openly crowing that legalizing euthanasia will save money. It's why in Iceland they crow about almost eliminating Down syndrome by killing all the infants who have it.
B is for Burden.
— Dan Hitchens (@ddhitchens) June 25, 2025
Under the bill, if someone meets the criteria and their sole motive is feeling like a burden, they qualify for an assisted death.
If unamended this could open the way for large numbers of people to receive lethal drugs out of mere guilt.https://t.co/2np2MqMzHw
Liberals see conservatives as selfish because their first priority is their close circle, and their "love" extends outward ever more weakly to city, state, country, shared culture, and lastly to the abstract "humanity."
This is why somebody like me cares more about what happens in the UK than Germany, Germany than Russia, and Russia than Uganda. It's not that these places are "white," as liberals think, but that they are generally more like me. An American Persian is part of my circle, a Saudi Arabian Islamist is not. We are embodied beings who live in particular places, with particular cultures, and particular interests.
A liberal doesn't tend to think that way, at least they try not to. A Venezuelan migrant might be superior to a selfish conservative in their eyes, because they are a victim of circumstance, and I am "privileged." It's all abstract. The fact that this migrant is a member of Tren de Aragua is a mere circumstance of his not having privilege. It is an act of virtue to prefer them, even if they make things worse in a concrete way.
People are not abstractions. But "humanity?" It's a concept too big for most of us to get our minds around.
