Mint Spectacles on: When Should a Liberal Pretend to be a Conservative

Continuing the conversation on why conservatism sells (the first part is here). If you were a liberal, when would you want to pretend that you were a conservative?

When you want to make money of course!

How so?

How many liberals do you see with merchandise displaying their belief such as say, global warming exists  or that we did ascend or descend (as your preference might be) from apes? Not many. Truly – look around you.

Whether it is tee shirts or mugs or key chains or whatever, conservative stuff sells more.  Just like the blogs with conservative point of view on how global warming doesn’t exist or how the earth was created 10000 years ago get far more traffic than their liberal/progressive counterparts. So do blogs that say that the science behind evolution or global warming is not science.

This was gently pointed out to me when I was thinking of putting up an online store with my smart alecky slogans about global warming and some creative insults etc.  So naturally I got to thinking why there was this imbalance.

It’s not like conservatives have more income or that they work less hard or are somehow different. I knew some really, really nice people who voted for Bush in 2000.  In short, conservatives aren’t different from others except in their doggedly held opinions.

And so my final hypothesis is:

that conservatives spend so much time and money on reiterating their opinions because they need to constantly reaffirm to themselves that they are right about things.

Now it may be that you are disappointed by this hypothesis. I was. I said really – is that all?  Then I began to see what it meant. It meant that anyone who makes conservatives feel good about their beliefsis sitting on a gold mine. On the other hand, liberals/progressives et. al are so comfortable with their beliefs that they don’t need to display them on  tee shirts.

So someday I may write a post about why conservative beliefs  about global warming etc are so lightly held that they need constant reassurance that they are right!

And a note:

Some of you may wonder why I did not have a hypothesis that conservatives buy stuff because they feel like they are in a minority. I didn’t because the fact is conservatives talk to other conservatives and really don’t have very much reason to suppose that they are in a minority.

Mint Spectacles on: Making Money Off Conservativism or Why It Sells Part 1

Sometime ago I read about a guy who said he had a six figure income from selling tee shirts with conservative slogans on cafepress (you can read the article here) .  Which got me to thinking about why is it that conservatives spend so much on stuff that basically keeps repeating what they believe.

When I say spend, I don’t mean just money, but also time. Conservative blogs whether on wordpress or elsewhere have dedicated readers.  One of the few liberal blogs which has a huge readership is the Huffington Post.  If there are other such blogs with a million plus readers, please do let me know.

Now why is that?

One reason could be:

All the conservatives have more money and therefore do not have to work so much and therefore have all the time in the world to congregate on the Internet, whether to promote creationism, now called intelligent design, or to tell each other global warming doesn’t exist or that science and scientists know squat.

But although this may seem to explain why conservative stuff sells, it is not supported by data. Conservatives that spend their time and money are not likely to be richer than progressives, scientists and liberals. At least I can’t find any data that says one is richer than another. I have seen comparisons between red and blue states but every state has both conservatives and liberals so to say blue states are richer and therefore liberals are richer is simply not good logic.

So if that is probably not the answer, then what other reasons could there be?

More tomorrow.

An aside: for all those who think that the globe is cooling (a.k.a. global cooling), Northern Californians now feel the need for fans and air conditioners – ask anyone who can remember 20 years ago or earlier about how cool Northern California has always been. Remember Mark Twain’s famous San Francisco quote?

“the coldest winter I ever saw was the summer I spent in San Francisco”

I should mention that all Twain scholars are not convinced that he actually said this.