These are some good quotes about conservatives from Metafilter:
2nding George Lakoff’s Moral Politics : How Liberals and Conservatives Think. He uses cognitive metaphor theory to elucidate how different the basic political intuitions of American conservatives and liberals are. For both the nation is like a family where government plays the role of parents, and the rest of us are the children. Conservatives, however, see the world as a dangerous place where a tough-love parenting style is appropriate, while liberals see the world as a basically pleasant opportunity for personal exploration where the appropriate parenting style is nurturing.
Of course a nation is not really like a family. But Lakoff shows how a lot of party policy differences can be derived from the assumption that such a metaphor is guiding people’s values and moral intuitions.
At some point he argues that for liberals the Communist dictum of ‘To each according to his needs, from each according to his means’ represents a lofty political ideal whose realization is unfortunately for practical purposes impossible. While for conservatives, the same dictum is deeply immoral, because it implies many would have their needs fulfilled without suffering for it, which contradicts the tough-love in a dangerous world model.
Not a lot of people feeling happy and economically stable in the world just right now. It’s like a big horrible grumpy hangover that won’t go away.
Another great bit:
The individuals in the Tea Party may come from very different walks of life, but most of them have a few things in common. After nearly a year of talking with Tea Party members from Nevada to New Jersey, I can count on one hand the key elements I expect to hear in nearly every interview. One: Every single one of them was that exceptional Republican who did protest the spending in the Bush years, and not one of them is the hypocrite who only took to the streets when a black Democratic president launched an emergency stimulus program. (“Not me — I was protesting!” is a common exclamation.) Two: Each and every one of them is the only person in America who has ever read the Constitution or watched Schoolhouse Rock. (Here they have guidance from Armey, who explains that the problem with “people who do not cherish America the way we do” is that “they did not read the Federalist Papers.”) Three: They are all furious at the implication that race is a factor in their political views — despite the fact that they blame the financial crisis on poor black homeowners, spend months on end engrossed by reports about how the New Black Panthers want to kill “cracker babies,” support politicians who think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an overreach of government power, tried to enact South African-style immigration laws in Arizona and obsess over Charlie Rangel, ACORN and Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Four: In fact, some of their best friends are black! (Reporters in Kentucky invented a game called “White Male Liberty Patriot Bingo,” checking off a box every time a Tea Partier mentions a black friend.) And five: Everyone who disagrees with them is a radical leftist who hates America. ___
If you want to argue that the nation’s ignorant whites would have been just as out of sorts if Hillary Clinton had been elected, you might have a point. But there is simply no ideological or principled defense of the Tea Partiers. It is 100% tribalism, which just so happens to come from the exact same people who argued that desegregation was tyranny.