Why do social political views only "evolve" one way?

[dividendman]

I'm curious as to what social conservatives think about their views always being the ones that "evolve" to take the liberal/progressive view in the United States.

The latest example is ex Speaker of the House John Boehner becoming a pot head (ok, he's on the board of a weed company, but still, he's not there to shut it down). https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/11/politics/boehner-cannabis-company-board/index.html

Quote from the article:

His decision to join the board is a marked shift -- in 2009, Boehner said he was "unalterably opposed" to legalization

So this got me thinking... why is it always the socially conservative views that end up evolving? Why don't the socially liberal views ever change into the conservative?

This can be seen with (in roughly chronological order):
- slavery
- 18th amendment
- women's rights
- interracial marriage/minority rights
- gay marriage/rights
- weed
- transgender rights

I'm sure there are many more.

Is the conclusion that the socially liberal views are always correct? If so why don't social conservatives come to this realization?

Am I completely missing something?

[formerlydivorcedmom]

By definition, conservatives want to maintain the status quo.  Liberals/progressives want change. 

Not all liberal/progressive ideas are adapted into society.  Generally, most change begins with a small ("fringe") group who wants a specific idea(l) implemented.  In a lot of cases, those ideas aren't adopted by a wider group and peter out.  That is, the conservative viewpoint "wins".  (An example - polygamy was a really progressive/liberal idea in 19th century America.  Conservatives won.  There are still polygamists, but their numbers are small, and the practice is neither legal nor widely accepted.)

Change happens when a larger group, generally a majority, accept that the idea is a good thing, or at least not a bad thing.  When we hit that critical mass, the socially liberal view becomes more mainstream; the liberal viewpoint "wins" and the conservative viewpoint "loses".

And sometimes the perception of those ideas flips, and what progressives once fought for is now the status quo that conservatives fight to maintain.  One example - in the 1200s, the Catholic church banned priests from getting married, in large part as a response to widespread naughtiness in the clergy.  It was a progressive response to fix a perceived problem.  800 years later, conservatives want celibacy maintained and progressives think it's an outdated and ridiculous policy.

[Basenji]

I'll split your list, if you don't mind.

Debate regarding the use of intoxicants and (some) people's ideas about its morality, public nuisance/expenditure vs. the rights of individuals to conduct their lives as they like and the rights of people to sell stuff and make money. Can be complicated to resolve because there is (I believe) a good argument for government regulation (but not completely banning) intoxicating substances (e.g., driving while drunk, smoking indoors where coworkers can't get away from secondhand smoke, pilots and public transportation drivers being "clean" while working, public health issues related to addiction, etc.)
- 18th amendment
- weed

Human rights over tradition/racism/religious objections. These will, knock wood, always advance (slowly for sure, but surely). 
- slavery
- women's rights
- interracial marriage/minority rights
- gay marriage/rights
- transgender rights

ETA: Re Boehner: It's possible for people to change their minds in the face of new information, but it's also possible he was always a libertarian on pot but had to pretend to be anti-drugs to get/stay elected. Dunno.

[Financial.Velociraptor]

I have a friend who used to be the most die hard progressive ever.  He got a MS in Economics and is now a die hard conservative Trump voter.  It can go both ways.

[Sibley]

I've been told it's well documented (too lazy to find studies, sorry) that in general people become more conservative as they age. That isn't the political conservative, btw. I personally have seen this with family members.

In at least some cases, people are shocked out of a conservative position by external events. Examples:
-anti gay until loved one comes out as gay, forced to reconsider or risk losing contact with said loved one
-I know a couple people who have reevaluated their stances on gun control recently because of the student activism on the topic.
-anti-abortion until daughter/wife/etc is in a situation where an abortion is needed or desired.

[BDWW]

I generally thought it was accepted to be the other way around. Of course the world changes as you age, so perhaps they are not mutually exclusive.

"If You Are Not a Liberal at 25, You Have No Heart. If You Are Not a Conservative at 35 You Have No Brain"

I -apparently not alone- thought the above was a Winston Churchill quote, but in googling the exact phrasing found a lot disagreement.

One source has it based on Anselme Polycarpe Batbie 1875
"He who is not a républicain at twenty compels one to doubt the generosity of his heart; but he who, after thirty, persists, compels one to doubt the soundness of his mind."  ("républicain" being more closely aligned with modern democrat in this context)

Another has a version of it attributed to John Adams in 1799
"A boy of 15 who is not a democrat is good for nothing, and he is no better who is a democrat at 20."

[Travis]

The views of a society at-large pretty much trend to the liberal side over time; however, it's worth mentioning that today's conservatives could be called liberals by the standards of a few decades ago.  Today, conservatives argue that gays shouldn't marry in a church. In the 1930s, they'd probably insist they should all be arrested and shuttled off to some leper colony. 

Looking at shorter span of time, it's possible and probably more common that you'd think that people go back and forth on their political views.  I heard a joke years ago that went something like "A conservative is simply a liberal who finally had to start paying taxes."  I doubt that is true enough to be stated as some kind of rule, but the sentiment is accurate.  We change our views depending on our circumstances, and I imagine a lot of it takes place when we're much younger and thought we knew everything.  Then we formed an educated opinion and either stayed true to those preconceptions or did a 180.

I don't know if Boehner's views on the subject radically changed, he was playing to his political base back then, or if he's just following the money. 

[wenchsenior]

I am also too lazy to go hunting for the study, but my understanding was that 'getting more conservative with age" isn't quite as common as conventional wisdom would have it. Or rather, the effects of it on voting are mostly swamped out across age cohorts by what your early political opinions and orientations were.  I think the correlation (voting wise, which doesn't always perfectly reflect conservative vs liberal opinions topic to topic) is that whatever party you vote and identify with in your initial political 'coming of age' (usually early college) tends to stick for your lifetime.  And this identification appears to be influenced by world events and politics that are happening at the point you make that initial affiliation.  So entire generations tend to vote more similarly to each other than you would expect, on average, and it swamps out the effect of aging in voting.  E.g., the old people who came of age in the Great Depression/WW2 era tended to vote much more Democratic their entire lives than the next generation, who came of age in the conservative 50s.

[maizefolk]

I think @formerlydivorcedmom has it right. It's a problem of ascertainment bias. Conservatives rarely are introducing new ideas, just defending what they see as the status quo. So when conservatism wins out there's no change, and when a new idea wins out, things do change.

Many aspects of hippie culture in the 1960s would be examples of new ideas which were adopted by a segment of society for a while, but were never widely adopted by society. This doesn't show up in history books as a "big win for conservatism" because nothing changed so there wasn't anything to write about.

In the 1930s and 1940s there were extremely active communist and socialist political parties in the USA. However those platforms were never widely adopted in the USA, so again there isn't really anything to write about.

TL;DR: It's very hard to compare "how frequently do things change" to "how frequently things don't change."

Generally when social political views have evolved, it has been for the better: lots of people have their inalienable human rights better recognized and protected by our legal system today. But at the same time, generally when people have tried and failed to change social political views, with the benefit of decades of hindsight the absence of change has also proved to be for the better: adopting communism turned out to lead to totalitarianism in most places it was tried, which we were able to avoid, and raising children on communes where everyone is married to everyone else doesn't seem to produce a particularly well adjusted next generation.

[Syonyk]

I'm curious as to what social conservatives think about their views always being the ones that "evolve" to take the liberal/progressive view in the United States.

I'd think that someone who holds that view has a very, very weak grasp of history, and has probably steeped, without recognizing it, in what JM Greer calls "The Religion of Progress" for a very long while.  And, also, a comically weak grasp of current global events and trends.  In many western nations, there is a growing, and increasingly successful, nationalistic trend countering the push for globalization that has defined the past 30-40 years.  It's not just the US - eastern Europe and even western Europe are managing to go that direction as well.  Poland is on the leading edge, but look at how impossible it was that the Brexit vote would be successful - until it was.

Historically, all you can say about "progressive" views is that they tend to represent a change.  A vast number of those ideas turned out to be truly awful ideas, and have been brushed aside to the dustbin of history, and people make awkward noises when asked about those.  Off the top of my head, the "progressive" idea of prohibition turned out to be a terrible idea (we're still dealing with the criminal gangs that took hold during that era, and if you're not a NASCAR fan, you can thank prohibition for that sport), an awful lot of the back to the land stuff in the 60s was very progressive at the time, and it turns out that "free love, back to the land, and why do we have to bathe, man?" doesn't work at all (plus, you get some quality antique diseases popping up).  And there are an awful lot of other examples.

So this got me thinking... why is it always the socially conservative views that end up evolving? Why don't the socially liberal views ever change into the conservative?

Because you're using a very warped definition of the two sides, and cherry picking ideas that happen to prove your point, ignoring the vast, vast remaining history of ideas that haven't worked out.

Is the conclusion that the socially liberal views are always correct? If so why don't social conservatives come to this realization?

Well, are you defining "liberal" as?  You elsewhere blend it with "progressive," and I'd argue that the two are different.  One is more about individual freedom and limited representational government, the other is an awful lot about change for the sake of change.

Also, many of the ideas currently being experimented with are the type of thing that takes a long while to determine if they're good ideas or not.  Large shifts in society, such as women increasingly in the workplace, delaying having children, easy divorce, abortion, and such, don't show the results overnight.  Even relatively recent things, like the rise of smartphones, take a long while to see the results (and if you don't like them, it's probably too late to change them).  We'll see, in 20 years or so, what happens when you raise an entire generation with smartphones and unlimited social media access.  Empirically, so far, the results don't look particularly promising.  I'm hopeful that the next generation will see the mass ruin that smartphones and social media have caused, and will consider it a bit more carefully instead of jumping in with both feet to whatever seems nifty at the moment.

"Social conservatives" tend to be more in favor of, as might be implied by the name, a slower rate of change and more focus on things like the nuclear family and extended family, and sticking with things that have been shown to work for long periods of time, across many civilizations.  If thousands of years of recorded evidence indicates that some particular arrangements work well, why change them?

[/quote]Am I completely missing something?[/quote]

Quite.  I could write many more words on this, though I haven't decided if you're actually open to a discussion, or are just trying to get back pats about how right you are for thinking certain things (that will, almost certainly, be considered embarrassing by your grandchildren's generation).  I'd encourage you to read outside your current information bubble and then reevaluate your position.

[ender]

Because conservatives have lost the "what is conservatism" debate and allowed "liberals" to define it, basically.

It's easy to say an entire perspective (conservatism in this case) is wrong if you define it to be whatever you want.

[PKFFW]

"Social conservatives" tend to be more in favor of, as might be implied by the name, a slower rate of change and more focus on things like the nuclear family and extended family, and sticking with things that have been shown to work for long periods of time, across many civilizations.  If thousands of years of recorded evidence indicates that some particular arrangements work well, why change them

I'd say you forgot one important part here.

"Social conservatives" tend to be more in favour of what works for them.  Ie:  The status quo under which they prosper.

I don't know of any social conservatives that favour keeping things the way they are just because "they work" when they are personally being negatively impacted in any real way by those things.

[J Boogie]

I think conservatives tend to function as a dam, or a filter. In areas of human rights we all here probably agree the filter has been way too stingy, but I think the filter is a necessary part of our democracy, just as the progressive ideas are.

To further the metaphor, I think the filter tends to get clogged far too readily full of straw man type progressive ideas (all guns get confiscated, criminal charges for failing to use gender neutral nouns when requested, etc) which prevents the more sound and rational ideas from emerging.

However as the filter gets agitated and cleaned these sound and rational ideas can emerge, as we've seen recently with gay marriage and marijuana.

I think the reason things tend to go one way is because conservatives err on the side of keeping these ideas at bay. The only way that views could evolve the other way is if progressives are able to succeed with a bad idea that needs to be rethought, and then that rethinking would be the evolution in the other direction.

Russia/The Soviet Union is a good example of evolving from far left ideas, though the totalitarian nature of the Soviet Union doesn't gel with progressive ideas about human rights. But there is a slope, of which the slipperiness is debatable, on which progressive ideas can begin to limit individual freedoms for the intended benefit of the collective. Banning some-> all firearms, a 20% -> 80% income tax rate, state control of X, Y, Z industries -> A-Z industries, ETC.

And that's why conservatives don't immediately jump on board with all progressive ideas, even though many progressive ideas end up being the right ones. Some progressive ideas need limitations, and many personalities tend to push things to their limit and go exactly as far as they're allowed.

[DarkandStormy]

Conservatives only become liberal/progressive on social issues when it impacts them or someone they know/love.  Examples:

-Boehner - ok with pot now because his daughter married a pothead/a guy with a drug conviction
-Cheney (and a bunch of other politicians) - ok with gay marriage because their kid came out as gay
-Laura Ingraham - same thing as the politicians on gay marriage

Conservatives only care about social issues to the extent that it affects them.  They still rank very low on the empathy meter compared to progressives.