Elsewhere, I gave three typical examples of intelligent liberal voters who knowingly betrayed strongly-held personal beliefs in order to support liberal candidates or causes. Not cases where people merely "held their noses" and overlooked a disagreement. No -- these were cases where they directly contradicted their core beliefs in order to portray their candidate or cause as right, or hate the other party:

For example, I have a friend who I'd never win a bet against: she's incredibly smart. Yet she blames Bush for putting additives in her gasoline -- though she knows full well Clinton did. And she was angry about Bush's overspending (no kidding!) but then voted for Kerry, even he promised to spend even more. And I know a very intelligent liberal-voting man with a strong anti-gay streak (not uncommon in older liberals, in my experience) who did an about-face when Republicans opposed gay marriage. His hatred of Republicans was suddenly stronger than his disgust towards homosexuals.

I noted that "for some, party support is a deep, deep value indeed", and started to write that it was a psychological issue, but then it suddenly struck me that we could almost call it a religious issue. And the more I thought about it, the more sense that view made.

I've long held that politics are simply one's true (not merely stated) religious or metaphysical values played out in the sphere of common action. How many of us know, for example, an ardent Catholic who favors a Democratic candidate -- one who ran on a platform opposed to her stated beliefs? If her religion is allegedly "Catholic", then what does it say about her politics? Surely, they occupy an even deeper place in her soul, as they trump her religious values.

I'm not alone in noticing this: Michael Crichton noted environmentalism "seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists."

So let's run with this a bit: What role does one's religion or one's guiding philosophy play? Certainly one basic human need is to have a sense of self-worth. As far as I can see, there are two ways of achieving that...

One way is to use some sort of "absolute" system of values. For example, one might compare one's behavior against a code of ethics, and/or believe one is loved by God, and thus valuable, or work to earn a parent's approval, or measure one's self by some other "fixed" standard. (As a Christian, I naturally tend to think of this as looking "up" to see where you stand with relation to God.)

The other option is to perform what I think of as a "relativistic" comparison, looking side to side, comparing yourself to others around you. If a person doing this feels they are at the top of the heap (society), they can feel good; if at the bottom of the heap, they appear worthless.

For talented or wealthy individuals, this can work out: If you have extraordinary skills, or a good lineage, wealth or great beauty, you can remind yourself you are the "fairest of them all" -- as the Queen in Snow White did -- and take pride in your mental placement near or at the top of the heap.

But for undistinguished folks, or those who feel average, and perform "relative" comparisons, things get a bit dicier: it's much harder to improve yourself than to put someone else down, so a negative temptation exists. I'm told in monkey troops that the dominant, strong monkey hits the medium size one, who takes it out on the small one, who ends up beating up a tree. Not that the tree did anything wrong, of course. But the little monkey needed someone to be "better than" so a scapegoat, Mr. Tree, is found.

And of course, the bigger the scapegoat-group, the more people you place underneath your feet (as it were), the better you feel about yourself. This is undoubetdly why people like Karl Marx were generally abusive: he needed to view himself, undoubtedly, as occupying the pinnacle of human society, thus he needed to mentally "walk all over" many different classes (no pun intended) of people.

And this is, I believe, the function that racism serves: It gives people who do not look to a fixed set of values a "safe" other to hate -- a lot of them, actually -- so that they can stoke or at least console their ego by feeling superior to a group. I believe it also explains why so many older secular male liberals have a bit of anti-gay bigotry: they were raised in a time when hating Blacks, Poles, Jews, etc. was starting to be wrong, so hatred of or jokes about homosexuals filled the same psychological niche.

And today, as it becomes incorrect to hate homosexuals, new scapegoats must be found -- especially for those with strong ego-needs. In the contemporary left we're seeing anti-semitism, hatred against conservatives, and especially against conservative Chrsitians. Just as with Hitler, in order diffuse tension in the group and ensure unity, you have to "align" the hatred in the same direction, and direct it outward.

For example, notice the hate-inducing power of some of these words -- spoken/screamed at a meeting of liberal "activists" and "liberal Christians":

The tone of the speakers was often quite shrill. "Jim Jones [the 1970s cult leader who led followers in a mass suicide] has gone mainstream!" cried journalist Katherine Yurica. "Today we are living in a nation governed by an unholy cult!" Yurica maintained that the Republican Party had gained power through "Hitlerian tactics." She insisted that evangelical leaders from Billy Graham to Jerry Falwell "had to have read Hitler's Mein Kampf." ....

"Our liberties are at stake!" declared the Rev. Bob Edgar, the NCC general secretary. Edgar added that "these may be the darkest times in our history." ....

Yurica called the president a "coward" and a liar, to hearty applause. She said that she identified Bush with "the evil," and she saw him as driven by an obsessive fear that his "real nature will be revealed." Miller declared, "You can't call George Bush a Christian!" ....

Joseph Hough, President of Union Theological Seminary in New York .... complained that John 14:6 (Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." NRSV) had been taken out of context to support a "Christian exclusivism." According to Hough, "that one verse is responsible for the Holocaust."

(So a traditional Christian, convinced of Jesus's exclusive claims (C.S. Lewis, for example) is the moral equivalent of a Nazi shoving starving Jews into the ovens at Auschwitz!)

This same effect, of trying to be an elite by putting others down, need not be done in an obviously negative fashion -- kind-appearing condescention works fine too. For example, Cecil Rhodes, whole apparently desired a one-world order, run by white anglos, was apparently rather beneficent to the black masses he controlled in Rhodesia. And, to hammer on poor Karl Marx again, perhaps he felt good for "caring" so much about the proletariat.

(And sometimes I wonder if the racism of the Democratic Party never went away, but simply inverted itself into affirmative action. If so, it's a great scam: while people of other skin colors are openly encouraged to hate whites, white liberals can still view themselves as superior to blacks and other minorities -- and as morally beneficent (what a deal!) -- by arguing minorities are inherantly inferior, regardless of socio-economic background, and need help from liberals. (At other people's expense, as usual.) Even the self-flagellation of white liberals could be insincere, if they are apologizing for what they believe are faults of others, faults they think they don't share.)

Of course, religions provide other things than self-worth. They provide a comprehensive worldview (obviously true for liberalism), a code of conduct (for liberalism, it's rather loose: "Do what thou will, yet profess liberals ideas, and support liberal candidates"), tithing, charity and good works (thankfully, done by others at the expense of others!), a notion of a coming crises (the utter destruction of everything we hold dear, the appointment of originalist judges, etc. -- same thing, really) a method of salvation or sanctification (putting liberals in control), "heaven" (earth would be amazing, peaceful, and green if only liberal policies prevailed), and -- of course, a social community to belong to.

I could be wrong, but it all sounds plausible to me.