Why You Probably Don't Understand Conservatives

By Rhys Adams ‘26

Unless you count yourself among the roughly 9.7% of Milton students who, according to 2025 State of the Acad data, lean “conservative,” it is highly unlikely that you understand conservatism enough to engage with it in good faith. I don’t intend that statement as a dig at your capacity to academically analyze the conservative canon; many readers of The Milton Paper can adeptly summarize the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes or Lee KuanYew without necessarily sympathizing. Still, I doubt academic analysis will get you very far in understanding your conservative peers and family members, because the proportion of people who derive their real-world beliefs from political theory is vanishingly small.

Think about it: why are you (most likely) a progressive? Unless, in answering, you whip out your annotated copy of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice or some other foundational liberal text, you might be barking up the wrong tree when you expect conservatives to analogously draw their beliefs from systematic research. When I see throngs of my liberal classmates promoting Instagram propaganda that labels Republicans “hypocrites” for clamping down on anti-government speech on college campuses while hollering “free-speech” in defense of “bigoted” guest speakers, I do not find it necessarily dishonest to omit the fact the Democrats are guilty of the exact inverse hypocrisy, because I don’t think either side actually claims to believe in free expression as a theoretical concept.

Although both sides of this conversation largely view ingroup offense as more injurious than the suppression of free speech, they also both slam their opponents for not upholding free speech. Here’s the crux of the misunderstanding: people assess their own political opinions morally, even emotionally, while expecting others to justify their opinions logically. In his seminal 1996 book Moral Politics, cognitive linguist George Lakoff convincingly outlines how the voting patterns, rhetoric, and biases of American liberals and conservatives are better explained by a pair of family-based metaphors—the “strict father” model for conservatives and the “nurturant parent” model for liberals—than by the internal logic of ideological conservatism or liberalism.

This trend is often easy to intuit; in my experience managing political discussion spaces on campus, I’ve found that, under some gentle cross-examination, many Milton liberals, progressives, and leftists state that they prefer to judge politics on an “issue-by-issue basis” than to adhere to holistic doctrines. Again, I don’t consider this an inherent problem, but the rampant assumption that conservatives are cut from a more dogmatic cloth than progressives impoverishes our discourse. Understanding those with different party politics than you requires the acknowledgment that your moral vocabulary and priorities are likely very different as well.

To that end, I encourage all readers to dispel the comforting lie that “we all want the same things,” regardless of political leaning. This mantra tends to justify viewing those who disagree with you as “those who don’t agree with you yet,” a condescension born out of the notion that undesirable moral politics come from logical misunderstandings rather than genuine philosophical disputes. This layer of analysis is nearly absent when Milton progressives lock horns with Milton conservatives, particularly because the progressives tend to think they can win the conservatives over with their prodigious use of facts and figures.

The last decade has seen an enormous realignment in political communication, but as the dust settles, it appears that both parties have come to completely misunderstand this realignment in parallel ways. Democrats and the Left erroneously believe that offering detailed, consistent policy platforms will win over voters’ rationality, even in the face of overwhelming psychological evidence that partisan affiliation is primarily emotionally driven. On the other hand, Republicans and the Right have grown so savvy at media-trained emotional appeals that they seem to have entirely decentered the concept of “truth” from their messaging.

As a Democrat, I fear that I must rebuke my party’s tradition of boring, emotionless politics. If the Democratic Party—or any of its further-left challengers—want to stop Republicans from holding onto power long enough to transform US politics into a wholly emotional affair, then the Democratic Party must first admit that politics is already at least a partially emotional affair. This admission does not mean abandoning politics’ ultimate purpose of improving people’s lives through policy; it simply calls for a reframing of political communication away from an idealized universal language for policy wonks and toward the sober admission that individuals’ personal moral codes are not all interchangeable, that true communication requires reckoning at the philosophical level as well as the factual.