by Will Wilkinson
Here is one of the most spectacular shifts in public opinion in our lifetime.
What explains this?
Don’t ask the psychologist and social scientists who study political opinion. They don’t know.
One family of influential theories says that our political opinions are “motivated” by certain deep-seated emotional needs. According to one version, the “system justification theory” of Jon Jost, variation in the need to justify the status quo distribution of goods and power in society determines whether one has a broadly liberal or conservative worldview. In other versions of the needs-based theory, our opinions are said to be fixed by the degree to which we are or are not dominated by a need to preserve comforting illusions, or, alternatively, the need to manage uncertainty and fear.
A related line of inquiry posits that variations in political opinion arise from ingrained differences in personality and moral…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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