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For a while now, Kevin Drum has been blogging about the "hack gap" in relation to reactions to the presidential and vice-presidential debates. Here's how he defines it:
The hack gap is a liberal problem of long standing. Put simply, we liberals don't have enough hacks. Conservatives outscore us considerably in the number of bloggers/pundits/columnists/talking heads who are willing to cheerfully say whatever it takes to advance the party line, no matter how ridiculous it is.
My conservative readers may scoff at this notion, but rarely has the hack gap been on such febrile display as it has since last Wednesday's presidential debate. Ask yourself this: can you even imagine Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh tearing their hair out over a weak debate performance by Mitt Romney the way that liberals have been over President Obama's? I can't.
Obama clearly, starkly lost the first debate - and did so in a way that powerfully showed how liberal psychological traits can fuel poor communication skills. But last night, and almost as starkly, Joe Biden shellacked Paul Ryan. So did conservatives pan Ryan in the same way that liberals panned Obama? Of course not. Drum notes that his "hack gap" theory is gaining adherents now, as this asymmetry is on such stark display.
For my part, I'm still waiting for somebody to explain, simply, the psychological reason that there is a "hack gap." It's really very simple--conservatives are more loyal than liberals. It's right there in the data from Jonathan Haidt et al:
That's right, folks. On a 1-5 scale, conservatives score a full point higher on in-group loyalty! So why on earth would you expect anything but for them to rally around their guy, no matter what? (Note, interestingly, that we would not expect nearly as much of a hack gap between liberals and libertarians, based on these data).
In politics, this unity is a key conservative strength. And it's been a relative constant throughout political life in the U.S., for at least as long as I've been paying attention, and surely much longer.
I'm still amazed - occasionally, anyway - at how political commentators strive to ignore the wealth of data on deep-seated, left-right differences in psychology, even as they're on constant display, and you can't really understand politics without them.
