Rick Moran writes for PJMedia.com about fascinating new polling data exploring Americans’ partisan divide.
“Do you think having opposing political views is ever an acceptable reason to cut off contact with a family member?”
“40% of 2024 Harris voters said yes, compared to just 11% of Trump voters and 18% of respondents who didn’t vote,” reports Josh Barro.
Passionate political views do not necessarily translate into punishing loved ones for holding “incorrect” political positions. There must be some other impulse at work that makes liberals more prone to dismissing familial ties than conservatives.
Lakshya Jain, The Argument’s director of political data and polls, believes there’s such a profound difference between right and left on this issue that liberals are outliers compared to the rest of the nation.
“I think liberals have got to understand that we, as a constituency, are very much unlike the rest of America. It’s not just that we’re different from Trump voters — it’s that we’re very different from people who don’t vote as well.
“The findings about who was more likely to cut off friends and family over politics really underscored this for me, because Harris voters were the only group that was even close to evenly split on that. That’s not a statement that we’re wrong, but it is a statement that the rest of Americans view and interact with the world very differently than we do.”
Barro writes that liberals are “much more fixated than conservatives on politics as a barometer of morality.” This may represent a difference between “secular” morality and a morality based on personal religious beliefs. For the left, “morality” is politics. The right’s view of morality rests upon a set of values and beliefs that emanate from a sacred text or the teachings of a revered figure. There is a divine intervention in the affairs of human beings that gives us a set of laws to abide by, while the left’s humanist approach to morality depends on individual conscience.
