So I’m just starting this blog and who knows where it will go, but so far so good and to continue the enjoyment of the process, I went to a ‘bloggers night out’ organized by Vik Rubenfeld who runs The Big Picture. Also in attendance were Bridget Johnson, a blogger from Libertas, and a writer from Mayor Sam’s Blog in addition to my friend’s who also blog, Zendi and Tara. It turns out that everyone who I didn’t already know there was a conservative blogger, which was great because I didn’t realize that Los Angeles had a political blogging scene.

In addition, it is always wonderful to get fresh perspectives from people who are really passionate about politics about some of the academic theories that we study. So what did I learn…

• As a group, they lament the lack of civility and demonization of the other side that is pervasive in politics. Naturally, their focus was on the demonization of conservatives by liberals rather than vice versa. Still, it is good to know that at least among this group, one of the central goals of our political morality research is shared.
• It is hard to get passionate conservatives to dispassionately hear the academic theory that liberals don’t care as much about ‘loyalty’. While I tried to spin it in as non-judgemental a way as I can, my example that liberals may not care about patriotism was not taken in as dispassionate a way as I might have hoped. I think the idea that someone who doesn’t care about loyalty to other Americans as much is not a bad person, is rather radical. Indeed, much of the criticism of liberalism I heard at the table had tinges of loyalty based arguments (ie. why do liberals bash America?).
• In a face to face encounter, it’s hard to not get along, no matter what the differences…indeed, I think we all parted as friends and I look forward to drinking with them in the future.

The 2nd point above actually contains a somewhat testable hypothesis. Specifically, some people see morality as absolute (ie. people who don’t believe in my moral system are bad people) and some people see morality as more relative. The reaction I got to my revelation that liberals don’t care about group loyalty as much as conservatives leads me to believe that conservatives would score higher on scales of moral absolutism. We actually have a test that measures moral absolutism on yourmorals.org and I’ll be sure to run that analysis and post it soon.

Update: Here is the promised analysis and here is a blog post by Tara on the same evening.