Consumer Behavior
The Psychology of Socialism and Capitalism
Toward voting for the best candidates, not the best marketing machines.
Posted September 8, 2019 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
Previous presidential elections have been subject to the criticism that both parties are pretty much the same.
That's unlikely to be true in the 2020 election. It appears that it will be an election between a heavily socialist candidate (I’m predicting Warren) and a heavily capitalist candidate (likely Trump).
Many people believe that their views on socialism and on capitalism are driven by rational decision-making. But psychology—emotions and values—play an under-considered role, hence this article.
The psychology of socialist-leaning people
People who lean socialistic tend to feel good about community, sharing, and collaboration over competition. They often feel that the greatest good accrues from self-sacrifice for the common good and feel good about redistribution until all lives are much more equal. Of course, that was foundational to Karl Marx’s famous exhortation: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
Such a psychology translates into sadness, often anger, even fury, that top executives make millions, owning mansions while other people, despite government and private charity, live a meager existence. Socialist-leaning people also tend to feel government is more aligned with their values than is the private sector.
Socialist-leaning people’s positive feelings about redistribution and about government animate support, sometimes passion, against President Trump in favor of any of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, who tend to advocate, for example, free college for all, citizenship for illegals, making Puerto Rico a state, reparations for African-Americans, and equal health care for all, without regard to whether they’ve paid into the system or even are in the U.S. legally.
The psychology of capitalist-leaning people
Capitalist-leaning people tend to feel that rewarding successful people is ultimately wiser than redistributing to the unsuccessful. Consciously or not, they invoke the core psychological principle in behaviorism: You get more of what you reward. Capitalist-leaning people use that foundational principle in supporting free-market competition: If people are allowed to put their dollars where they believe is best, that will, with exceptions, reward the best, motivating them to continue to create better products and services while other entities succumb to the creative destruction of capitalism rather than government propping up unsuccessful corporations, for example, the bailout of GM and Chrysler, which couldn't compete with Japanese imports.
Capitalists' belief in the psychological principle of behaviorism animates their feeling that it’s wrong to raise taxes on the wealthy when already, the top 1% of earners pay more in taxes than do the bottom 90 percent. Capitalist-leaning people feel better about a purely merit-based rather than an affirmative-action approach to hiring and in college admissions. They feel more justice accrues from a health care system that rewards legal residents who pay into the system by providing them with a level of access beyond the basic level that anyone might be entitled to simply by virtue of being human. That same behaviorist principle undergirds capitalist-leaning people feeling it’s correct to be tough on crime, for example, opposing “disparate impact” policies that reward felons and punish law-abiding ones by giving ex-felons and non-felons equal footing when deciding whom to hire.
In addition, capitalists are more likely to believe that psychologist Abraham Maslow's theory of self-actualization over social contribution leads people toward selfishness and away from prioritizing needs of the collective. Capitalists point to the communes in the U.S. and kibbutizim in Israel, most of which have long since disbanded because, in practice, individualism (ahem) trumped the collectivist ideal.
Hence, people who lean capitalist are more likely to support Republicans, including Donald Trump, even though they may dislike his personal style, his past, and that he’s been inconsistent in his capitalism, for example, imposing a a tariff on Chinese goods. Capitalist-leaning people ignore those because they so advocate many of his other positions—perhaps most conspicuous, his calling for a merit-based immigration system, as opposed to the Democrats’ approach of amnesty for all except for major felons. Also, capitalists' belief in people's tendency to selfishness leads them to embrace Trump and other Republicans' wariness of trust but rather an insistence on stronger sanctions on Iran, a bolder defense and that Europe be pressured to pay its fair share of NATO expenses.
Where I sit
At the risk of appearing like a milquetoast, I am indeed a mushy moderate. I see great value in the socialist ideal of remedying the luck of how one fared in the genetic lottery: parents’ genes, how they were parented, the locale in which they grew up. So I feel okay about redistributing some resources from the genetic lottery's winners to its losers. Also, viscerally, I feel bad when I see people, not just the wealthy but in the middle class, buy dozens of pairs of shoes, change the furniture merely because they’re tired of it, and so on, while other people live in squalor. I feel that way about people whether they live in the U.S. or not: I have as much solidarity with a resident of New Guinea as with a resident of New York.
On the other hand, I respect the aforementioned psychological principle of behaviorism: We get more of what we reward. And socialism’s core principle is the opposite: Reward “the least among us.” I already see signs of the ill-effects of that—for example, the entitlement mentality and the bite-the-hand-that-feeds you syndrome. I also worry that if the U.S. continues further down the path to ever more redistribution, the nation won't have enough money for the crucial: for example, medical research, research and development of more useful products, and, ironically, foreign aid to help the very poor, the people that socialists claim they most want to help.
So while also considering politicians’ intelligence, ethics, and drive, I mainly vote for moderate candidates.
Of course, as I’ve tried to do in this post, a reasonable case can be made for voting for quite capitalistic and quite socialistic candidates. What seems unarguable is only that it’s important to remain conscious of your voting tendency's psychological underpinnings. That can be useful insulation against political operatives’ ever more sophisticated, focus-group-tested messaging. You want to vote for the politician whose voting record and promised priorities align with your psychological and other values, not for the candidate with the best marketing machine.
I read this aloud on YouTube.
