The Great Realignment is the Trait Realignment

Welcome to the neurotic-onomy

Before we begin, I have a couple exciting (and provocative!) posts coming down the pipeline — feel free to subscribe if you want to stay updated. In the meantime, please enjoy this post, which represents my remaining thoughts on the recent election – for the time being, at least.

Modern day psychology…

…is not to be trusted as an academic discipline, considering how much of it has been gutted by the replication crisis.

You’ve probably heard of the replication crisis; a lot of the papers that were supposed to be revolutionary ended up being debunked as they were constructed on faulty premises, or the conclusions were driven by bad methodology.

There are largely two reasons for the replication crisis:

1. People who go into the humanities (psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc.) are generally bad at math. If they were good at math, they would have likely gone into a more productive academic field.

2. Somewhat related, the field of psychology is heavily indexed on 20 suburban women – usually from an affluent background. They have a bias against people of different racial, economic, and gender cohorts as having unusual psychology.

We can see the runoff effects of bad psychology in many parts of society, such as the unnecessary propagation of “therapy speak” in everyday discourse, and the demonization of traditionally masculine character traits.

There is one psychological finding that has reasonably withstood the test of time, however – the five factor model of personality.

This model states that people's personalities can be summarized by five uncorrelated core personality traits:

1. Openness to experience (the degree to which someone tolerates novelty)

2. Conscientiousness (the degree to which someone can organize around goal oriented activities)

3. Extraversion (the amount of socialization someone needs in order to feel satisfied)

4. Agreeableness (the degree to which they prefer group cohesion versus personal expression)

5. Neuroticism (the degree to which a person's baseline emotions tend to fluctuate)

If you understand the big five factor model of trait psychology, you've extracted ~70% of all the useful information academic psychology has to offer.

More immediately, I believe trait psychology can help us understand our political landscape.

If you haven’t noticed, things have gotten weird

The typical Left/Right spectrum no longer makes sense to describe the current American Democrat and Republican party. Trump’s cabinet is filled with former democrats, and Kamala went out of her way to get endorsements from Liz Cheney and other Bush era republicans. Many people who voted for Bernie Sanders and even AOC have shifted towards Trump.

On one level, this realignment seems obvious. Many facets of our society have become feminized. Women have accrued greater social and economic power, and as a result their values and tendencies are increasingly represented in the political landscape. Women are naturally more liberal in disposition, and tend to value things like equality and justice over the truth and competence. As a result, the Democratic party has adopted these values in order to cater to this particular voter base.

And yet, this doesn't quite get to the heart of the issue. A lot of upper class men are still liberal, Trump gained with a lot of the female voter base, especially white women.

If we look one level deeper, we can think of it as those who are generally in favor of the establishment versus those who are more heterodox. The liberal party has become the party of institutions, primarily because they are the byproduct of those very same institutions.

The working class person has come to reject these institutions, primarily because education in these institutions doesn't necessarily grant any degree of skill or competence any more. Rather, it has simply become a facet of credentialism – a way to signal that a person belongs to the “correct” group.

But I still think we need to look one level deeper – that is to say, we need to look at the underlying traits which are causing these divides in the first place.

To illustrate, an anecdote.

“I’m literally shaking right now.”

This is a comment that we frequently see online. If you ever see it, you can predict the person's political leanings with an almost 100% degree of accuracy.

I always thought this was something metaphorical, an artistic way to express dissatisfaction in a given event. But after meeting my firend Jordan, I was forced to reevaluate that idea.

Jordan is a nice person. We met each other when we were interning for the same company right out of school.

Jordan is a fascinating person to watch, because her personality conflicts with her job. She went on to be a lawyer, considering she is meticulous, and she's good at working with people. And yet, there is some deeply rooted part of her that makes her so unfit for the job at some genetic level. That's one of the main reasons I remain friends with Jordan – it is fascinating to see how mismatched she is with her environment.

She's one of the most neurotic people I've ever seen in my life.

Late last year, we were both going to a wedding, and she spent no less than 40 minutes trying to decide which wrist-watch went with her outfit. To be clear, she was not a distinguished guest at this wedding; she would have been sitting in the back of the hall. She was also wearing full sleeves, leaving me utterly baffled why anyone would even see the watch in the first place. And yet, the choice left her with nearly crippling anxiety.

When we were interning together, we once had to move stacks of paper from one part of the office to another. While carrying over one particular set of papers, she dropped a folder, causing all of the sheets to fall out of order.

I didn't think anything of it – it's a mistake, and mistakes happen. It was late at night, and I figured we could just leave it on the nearby desk and tell our boss in the morning.

Jordan began to fucking hyperventilate.

I thought she was being dramatic, but then I saw literal hives burst out from her skin.

From dropping a folder. Again, there was absolutely no stakes attached to this. I knew for a fact that the boss wouldn't give a shit. And so it was quite fascinating to see her act like a child had just been murdered in front of her.

More than anything, people like Jordan make me understand at a visceral level that people do not process the world in the same way. It made me understand something that should have previously been obvious. Those people on YouTube who film themselves having meltdowns in their cars or on the streets – many of them aren't being dramatic. Sure, they might be exaggerating for the camera – but they actually feel that way inside.

On the one hand, it's kind of funny to watch. On the other, it's a fascinating byproduct of neuroscience that hearing the word “retard” produces the same bodily reactions as watching a loved one getting murdered.

Which brings us back to politics and society.

Welcome to the Neurotic-onomy

Out of the big five factor model of trait psychology, neuroticism is the most interesting.

For all of the other traits – openness, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness – it's usually good to have some degree of the trait. It's good to be agreeable, but not to the extent that you are a pushover; it's good to be extroverted, but not to the extent that you can never spend time alone; it's good to be open to new experiences, but not to the extent that you’re continually starved for novelty.

It's arguably good to not have some degree of conscientious, but not too much. Otherwise one becomes hyper-fixated on goal-oriented behavior. Think of the “I wake up at 3:30 in the morning to gratitude journal while sitting in the ice bath” optimizer bros.

Neuroticism is different. The more I read about it, and the more I see it in action from people like Jordan, the more it comes across as a pure negative in the modern world. Sure, this trait made a lot of sense in an evolutionary context, as it was a natural threat detection system.

Highly neurotic people are the functional equivalent of a highly sensitive smoke alarm, ready to go off at even the slightest perturbations. But a world where food is taken for granted and there is relatively low threat of being eaten by lions in the middle of Grand Central Station, neuroticism becomes increasingly obsolete.

Psychologists try to defend the idea of having a small degree of neuroticism, but the facets of neuroticism which compel us to act can easily be replaced by corresponding facets in openness and conscientiousness. If a person is sufficiently disciplined, and they have a genuine desire to experience new things, then they will largely behave in the same ways that neurotic people – without much of the corresponding stress.

If anything, we should be actively trying to reduce the amount of neuroticism in the world. And yet…

Neuroticism has come to define the modern landscape of politics

The overreaches of the far left and the feminization of institutions can be traced back to this characteristic of neuroticism. Women on average tend to be more neurotic than men, and liberals tend to be more neurotic than conservatives.

In the early 2000’s, the landscape of politics was defined by the trait of openness. Democrats were more open — they were the the party to champion reformed drug laws, LGBT rights, and open borders. Republicans, conversely, were historically the party to uphold institutions.

But in the early 2010s, the left half of American politics became overrun by neurotic liberals, many of them women with humanities backgrounds. The humanities is an important descriptor here, as it generally teaches people to view a given individual as nothing more than a component in a greater system, whether historical, sociological, or anthropological.

Couple this mindset with the false belief that everyone experiences the world with the same degree of neuroticism that they do, as well as the added gasoline of the online landscape, and you get the beginnings of the party switch. All of a sudden, the Liberals no longer became a party that raged against the machine – rather, they came to embrace the machine, as long as it made them feel safe.

Conversely, the modern Republican party is not really conservative in the classical sense of the word – there's a great deal of distance between the politics of someone like Tulsi Gabbard, RFK jr, Trump, and Vance.

The thing that holds them together is that they fundamentally reject what I’m calling the neurotic-onomy. That is to say, all of the organizations and institutions that have come to capitulate to the most anxious and least emotionally stable out of us.

This ties back into something that I mentioned in my broken previous post: “Broken Overton Windows Theory”. Trump is the living embodiment of breaking Overton windows – that is to say, expanding the scope of acceptable discourse due to his routine violation of perceived “norm violations”.

The Lesson

As a result of traits psychology, I've come to realize a fundamental fact about wide-scale discourse:

Left to its own devices, the boundaries of acceptable discourse will continually shrink to accommodate the most neurotic among us.

To be clear, it's okay to feel compassion for these people; I certainly feel bad for Jordan whenever she breaks out into hives over the smallest things. But we shouldn't cater to these people, we just need to remind them that they dropped a folder.

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