When it comes to equality, for the political left, it’s just a talking point, and basically, that’s it. According to recent studies, when it comes to how people are treated, conservatives are more likely to treat people equally.
You read that correctly.
According to a recent article on Psychology Today, “several recent studies over the past few years cast doubt on” the idea that liberals treat individuals and groups more equally than conservatives despite liberals’ “self-reported support for equality.”
On Twitter, “liberals were more likely to amplify the successes of female and Black athletes than male and White athletes, whereas conservatives treated the successes of groups more similarly,” one study found.
Other studies showed that “white liberals presented less self-competence to black than white interaction partners, whereas white conservatives treated black and white interaction partners more similarly. And in another set, liberals had stronger desires to censor passages that portrayed low-status groups unfavorably than identical passages that portrayed high-status groups unfavorably, whereas conservatives treated the passages more comparably.”
This unequal treatment by liberals extends to other areas as well. Psychology Today researchers found that “people had more generous acceptance criteria for admitting black than white candidates to an honor society, and this tendency was stronger among liberals.” In addition to that, “Whereas those high in social dominance orientation favored a white over a black job applicant, the reverse tendency to favor a black over a white job applicant was stronger among those low in social dominance orientation.” Further, while conservative “found jokes that target low-status and high-status groups similarly funny,” liberals “found jokes that target low-status groups less funny than those that target high-status groups.”
While it seems obvious that the left talks about equality but doesn’t walk the walk, Psychology Today has its own explanation for these results. “This does not necessarily mean that liberals are not the egalitarians they claim to be,” political psychologist Cory Clark Ph.D. explains. “It might be that liberals—first and foremost—prioritize equality of outcomes and view unequal treatment (at least for a time) as a means of attaining equal outcomes” while conservatives “prioritize equality of treatment and view unequal outcomes (at least for a time) as an unfortunate side effect.”
Clark suggests that the results of these studies “may lead one to wonder whether the relationships between ideology and egalitarianism are more complicated than certain mainstream narratives suggest.”
You think? How often have Republicans been deemed racists, bigots, white supremacists, etc., etc., etc. simply because of their political affiliation? Pretty much all the time. In fact, every GOP presidential candidate of my lifetime has been equated to Hitler. That the left cares more about equality of outcomes than treatment is hardly groundbreaking either.
In the end, it seems pretty clear to me which ideological group best fulfills Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
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Matt Margolis is the author of Airborne: How The Liberal Media Weaponized The Coronavirus Against Donald Trump, and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter, Gab, Facebook, MeWe, Heroes, Rumble, and CloutHub.
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