Conservatives and the Liberals: Do they represent our mind and our heart?

Recently, I have taken profound interest in trying to understand political systems worldwide. Democracy, republic, monarchy, communism and dictatorship being some of them. For the sake of this article, we shall stick to my favorite, democracy. A democracy in a more traditional sense is a political system that allows each individual to participate. There are two kinds of democracies – direct and representative. For the sake of this article, we shall stick to representative democracy.

In representative type of democracy, citizens elect representatives who actually make the law. Understanding the merits and de merits of this system is not the intention of this article. The intention is to understand the participants of this process and getting into their minds. In addition, we shall consider a representative democracy where every citizen has the right to vote and has only one vote.

It is clear that in a representative democracy there will be elections as the representatives who will represent the people have to be chosen. In addition, because there is universal voting and principle of one vote with equal weight-age, the winner of the majority of votes shall get to be the elected representative. This implies that there will be campaigning where people who want to be chosen as those representatives need to interact with the people to ask for their support and votes.  

Let us now focus on the people who will vote and what are their issues. If we see Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as an example, we see that the basic needs are the ones which political system can easily provide to all citizens via the government. These needs like food, water and clothing are physiological needs, materialistic in nature. Needs as security and safety can also be provided by raising policing and army.

The higher needs are more to do with internal self of a human and governments can only create an atmosphere where people get equal opportunity to attain them. But whether they attain them or not is completely up to people themselves.

We see that issues like security, safety, food, clothing are basic and if not provided for don’t allow people to attain higher needs. These issues impact the mind. People become unhappy if they are not provided for with these basic needs. Likewise when these basic needs are provided for, there is a big section of the society which becomes satisfied and starts to live their lives peacefully. But a major section of the society also starts to try to move to other higher needs. Trying to attain these needs is what we shall call our needs of the heart. The softer needs.

Thus, when the mind is not troubled by issues like food and security, ideal conditions get created for things like art, science, culture, drama, etc to evolve. People start to move towards self actualization. But sadly life is a pendulum. If there are good times. There shall be bad times.

We do not exist in isolation. Hence, we are subject to calamities from nature like floods and earthquakes. Man made ones like war. Personal issues like losing some one near and dear. Some affect all while some affect few. Thus, in a nation not everyone is in the same buckets of needs. Some are stuck at basic needs while the others are moving towards self actualization.

At this stage we shall bring our politicians back into the picture. They want to be elected and for that they need to attain majority. Thus, some of them start targeting the basic needs like food, clothing and shelter. While some others start to focus on higher needs and try to appeal to that section of the society which is inspirational. Here we shall divide our politicians into liberals and conservatives.

I argue that generally liberals try to appeal to the heart, conservatives try to appeal to the mind. Liberals generally go for populism as they try to fulfill the basic needs, so that people start to aspire for higher needs. And this is where their expertise lies and trying to bring everyone to at least aspire for higher needs is their basic objective. Conservatives on the other hand do not believe in populism and try to build strong foundations for fulfilling basic needs. They do not like to sell dreams and focus on reality.

Depending on how the majority feels in a country will determine whether the liberals or conservatives will come to power. We have seen in the past, whenever countries are financially broken, suffer from high crime rates and economy does not do well, conservatives are sworn in.

As soon as a nation becomes relatively prosperous and people start aspiring for higher needs, liberals start to appeal to them. Like I said above that good times and tough ones come in a cycle and so do the liberals and conservatives.

We all know that politics and politicians are a reflection of our own aspirations, ideas, and thoughts. Thus, when a society is suffering from corruption, war, etc conservatives have the highest probability to come to power. I suggest all of us try and use this for future elections and see of the theory holds true.