Throughout history, mankind has looked to theologians and philosophers for the meaning of morality. One form, the theological, was closely linked to one of many religious creeds. Another type, the secular, sought to connect morality and wisdom to achieve the good life.
Personal morality was the operative guide to behavior when humans lived in small bands of 50-100 people during prehistoric times. Those bands were egalitarian, with no hierarchy. Consensual decision-making was the norm, and elders acted as arbiters when the group needed to make critical decisions. There was no group morality, so humans behaved according to their personal beliefs.
Primitive man encountered different ecosystems during his migrations, presenting obstacles to his survival. Food supply varied significantly between environments, and man did not understand the best methods of locating food. Quickly, perhaps over just a few generations, a behavioral adaptation developed in the human personality to make decision-making more flexible.
That adaptation would help mankind survive in heterogeneous habitats. The evolutionary mechanism driving this change was polymorphism, the expression of a gene in multiple forms. Polymorphism created two personality types: one was open to new experiences and liked complex decision-making, while the other worried about taking risks but was conscientious. A community with multiple views was more likely to survive if one group focused on hunting when food was scarce and the other focused on managing the food supply when food was plentiful.
The advent of agriculture profoundly impacted human existence. Men could now control their food supply and discard the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Human communities expanded because available food supported a higher population density, and governments emerged when population size reached a certain point.
Large human communities require governments to manage their community food supply and protect the people from harm. Those early societies evolved a public morality to represent the interests of the society as a whole. Public morality is the set of rules the government puts in place to limit public behavior. From the beginning of agriculture until the Enlightenment, authoritarian monarchs and their religious affiliates managed public morality without input from the people.
The Enlightenment demanded a redefinition of public morality when the individual received a place in modern society. Freedom to vote and influence government direction meant that the government could no longer dictate public morality without the people's approval. Individual freedom spawned a third type of morality called political morality, which is essentially personal morality applied to politics.
For example, if a society has no laws regulating abortion, individual opinions on the topic remain personal. But when government intervenes to limit the frequency of abortions, people support or reject that government action by applying their political morality. Some want strict limits, others a more relaxed version. Political morality lives inside each person and is used by the individual to influence public morality.
The emergence of political morality brought the behavioral differences between people to the surface. Some became liberals, and others became conservatives.
Liberals were the people in primitive times who were risk-takers and liked change; the conservatives were the ones who were cautious and preferred the status quo. Other personality traits labeled moral foundations further refined the differences between liberal and conservative politics.
Liberals strongly believe in equality and oppose capitalism. They are drawn to socialism because it promises to eliminate inequality. Conservatives possess the traits of loyalty and respect for authority. They believe government must be based on a hierarchy because that is the natural organizational model for humankind. They also think traditions are essential guideposts into the future.
There is no single political morality among human beings, only a spectrum of political views from left to right. Neither is right or wrong because political morality is relative, based on differences between people. Independent voters with balanced moral traits are in the middle of the spectrum. They do not lean left or right.
Since the Enlightenment and the advent of modern political systems, liberals and conservatives have fought to implement their strategies for running government. The battle between them was a draw until the last few decades when liberals began to take control of the communication systems in America. Today, the left dominates academia, the traditional media, social media, and the cultural narrative, giving them overwhelming access to the American people. That access is employed to broadcast their ideology.
Conservatives must play defense against this bias because they don't have equal access. They need to be more united to overcome the intrusion of liberal ideology. Fortunately, the number of Americans on the right is nearly the same as those on the left, so America's political morality is balanced between the parties.
That balance will not fix the right's weak position in the culture debate, however. The only way to repair that imbalance is for the right to define its positions more strongly and hold onto them vigorously until the most egregious radical left narratives have run their course and faded away.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
I am not in agreement with your broad assumptions of liberals and their beliefs/mindsets vs conservatives. I think it may be interesting to listen to this course, in particular lecture 5, The Rise of Tribal Politics. https://online.hillsdale.edu/courses/american-citizenship-and-its-decline