Moral Consensus and Antiestablishment Politics.

• Author: Wennstrom, Johan

As the year 2020 drew to a close, the tide of popular discontent with mainstream center-left and center-right political parties, which in the previous four years had roiled politics around the world, finally began to recede--at least so it seemed to governing elites. Most significantly, in the U.S. presidential election in November Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump, the most prominent symbol of that discontent. More broadly, the global nature of the coronavirus pandemic seemed to definitively illustrate the shortcomings of parochial nationalism, a force widely believed to have been at the heart of the political backlash. Surely it will be only a matter of time before the supporters of Brexit and of surging nationalist parties in the European Union will join once-errant voters in America who had delivered Trump's election upset in 2016 yet in 2020 had returned to the establishment fold.

This view, although tempting, is likely to be a fatal mistake. Most of the voters who abandoned the once-dominant catchall parties of the Left and Right for new political movements, including Trumpism, will not be going back to those parties--at least not until mainstream politicians understand the underlying sources of those voters' concerns and address their legitimate grievances. Crucially, these grievances do not stem from nationalism in the narrow sense or from economic anxiety in the face of globalization, as standard explanations have suggested. They are instead a foreseeable reaction against the limited moral conception of society offered by both traditional left and right parties.

This essay argues that traditional parties have effectively rendered many voters homeless by blindly and one-sidedly emphasizing liberal moral intuitions. I take the moral consensus of two Swedish establishment parties, the Social Democratic Party and the right-wing Moderate Party, as my primary example. The basis for my analysis is moral foundations theory (Haidt 2012), which demonstrates that liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral intuitions, both of which are fundamental to human selfhood and society. Whereas liberals tend to reason from within an individualistic, liberty- and rights-oriented framework, conservatives have a more communal moral sense. Mainstream party convergence around liberal values created a political niche that insurgent movements easily filled. If traditional parties were instead to become open to moral pluralism by acknowledging conservative moral intuitions, they would have an opportunity to win back the public support they have recently lost.

The first section provides an overview of moral foundations theory. In the second section, I discuss how the Swedish establishment parties' moral convergence can be seen, for instance, in their approach to both education and immigration. The final section looks at comparative international examples and considers the implications of my argument for the future of mainstream left and right parties.

Moral Foundations Theory

Moral foundations theory--conceived by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and popularized in his book The Righteous Mind (2012)--takes its point of departure from the now-accepted fact that humans are not born as moral "blank slates" but rather are equipped with prewired morality. (1) This prewired morality consists of a set of intuitions, evolved over eons, that Haidt describes as "moral foundations." According to the theory, selection processes have favored the development of at least six of them: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty.

This theory posits that all six moral foundations are the result of long-standing challenges faced by our primitive ancestors: "caring for vulnerable children [care], forming partnerships with non-kin to reap the benefits of reciprocity [fairness], forming coalitions to compete with other coalitions [loyalty], negotiating status hierarchies [authority], and keeping oneself and one's kin free from parasites and pathogens [sanctity]" (Haidt 2012, 125). These five foundations also include the "adaptive challenge of living in small groups with individuals who would, if given the chance, dominate, bully, and constrain others [liberty]" (Haidt 2012, 172). Although these moral foundations are ancient, they also help humans respond to challenges that exist in the modern world. For example, the moral foundation of sanctity can be broadened to encompass chastity, sobriety, the maintenance of moral taboos, and reverence for religious rituals or national symbols.

Because genes, culture, and experience interact differently within each person, some people give greater preference to certain moral foundations than to others. The particular mix of intuitions on which each person relies, moreover, shapes his or her political views. Liberals and conservatives tend to rely on different sets of foundations, or, as Haidt calls them, different "moral matrices." Liberals tend to emphasize the importance of care, fairness, and liberty--and can struggle to recognize the other three foundations (loyalty, authority, and sanctity) as valid--whereas conservatives endorse all six foundations more or less equally and view them as mutually...