Understanding Those Pesky Conservatives
While it's well known that there are profound differences between the left and conservatives, investigation reveals fundamental moral differences.
Johnathan Haidt researches these moral differences in his 2013 book: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
Haidt found that conservatives generally understand the morals of liberals, but liberals don't understand the morals of conservatives. Because of this, liberals routinely attribute evil motives to conservatives and consider them morally inferior.
Jared Taylor wrote an excellent review of the book: Why Everyone Else Is Wrong, American Renaissance, 31 August 2012. Taylor explains that:
Prof. Haidt and others have looked for what appear to be the different emotional areas on which morality is based. He calls these "foundations," and has found five... "Care" is the emotion that the helpless evoke; children, for example, must be looked after. "Fairness" requires that people not be cheated or exploited, and "Loyalty" recognizes that certain groups deserve allegiance. "Authority" is the sense that groups need rules and leaders that should be respected. "Sanctity" is the intuition that some things, such as God, flag, or chastity, are intrinsically sacred. What is most interesting about these foundations is how easily they distinguish liberals from conservatives...
Liberals are obsessed with fairness and caring, in the sense of looking after the weak, defective, and victims of oppression. They don't care much about loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Conservatives, on the other hand, base their morality on all five foundations...
Prof. Haidt recognizes that liberals are fetishistic about "oppression:"...
Prof. Haidt also notes that conservatives and liberals interpret "fairness" differently: "On the left, fairness implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality — people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes."...
For many liberals, equal opportunity is not enough; they want equal results. That is not possible in a capitalist society, so a deep hankering for equality is inherently socialist...
Haidt also found that liberal foundations of morality prioritize the individual before the group, while conservatives also value loyalty, authority, and sense of sanctity that groups require. In essence, conservatives incorporate a larger number of foundational moral pillars, which liberals don't recognize as significant.
Dennis Prager at one point succinctly observed that "Conservatives want to preserve what is good." The following 5 minute video by Dennis Prager explains how conservatives' focus differs from the focus of those on the left. Conservative look inward to improve society, while the left seeks to fundamentally transform society.
How Do We Make Society Better? Left vs. Right
This resource page presents several charts on how the left and conservatives differ: The political spectrum.