May 2, 2012 |
Photo Credit: ShutterStock.com
Consider for a moment just how terrifying it must be to
live life as a true believer on the right. Reality is scary enough, but
the alternative reality inhabited by people who watch Glenn Beck, listen
to Rush Limbaugh, or think Michele Bachmann isn't a joke must be
nothing less than horrifying.
Research suggests that conservatives are, on average, more
susceptible to fear than those who identify themselves as liberals.
Looking at MRIs of a large sample of young adults last year, researchers
at University College London discovered that “greater conservatism was
associated with increased volume of the right amygdala” (
$$).
The amygdala is an ancient brain structure that's activated during
states of fear and anxiety. (The researchers also found that “greater
liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the
anterior cingulate cortex” – a region in the brain that is believed to
help people manage complexity.)
That has implications for our political world. In a recent interview, Chris Mooney, author of
The Republican Brain,
explained, “The amygdala plays the same role in every species that has
an amygdala. It basically takes over to save your life. It does other
things too, but in a situation of threat, you cease to process
information rationally and you're moving automatically to protect
yourself.”
The finding also fits with other data. Mooney discusses studies
conducted at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in which self-identified
liberals and conservatives were shown images – apolitical images – that
were intended to elicit different emotions. Writing at
Huffington Post,
Mooney explains that “there were images that caused fear and disgust --
a spider crawling on a person's face, maggots in an open wound -- but
also images that made you feel happy: a smiling child, a bunny rabbit.”
The researchers noted two differences between the groups. The
researchers studied their subjects' reactions by tracking their eye
movements and monitoring their “skin conductivity” – a measure of one's
autonomic nervous system's reaction to stimuli.
Conservatives showed much stronger skin responses to negative images,
compared with the positive ones. Liberals showed the opposite. And when
the scientists turned to studying eye gaze or "attentional" patterns,
they found that conservatives looked much more quickly at negative or
threatening images, and [then] spent more time fixating on them.
Mooney concludes that this “new research suggests [that] conservatism
is largely a defensive ideology -- and therefore, much more appealing
to people who go through life sensitive and highly attuned to aversive
or threatening aspects of their environments.”
But those cognitive biases are only part of the story of how a
political movement in the wealthiest, most secure nation in the world
have come to view their surroundings with such dread. The other half of
the equation is a conservative media establishment that feeds members of
the movement an almost endless stream of truly terrifying scenarios.
The phenomenon of media “siloing” is pretty well understood – in an
era when dozens of media sources are a click away, people have a
tendency to consume more of those that conform to their respective
worldviews. But there is some evidence that this phenomenon is more
pronounced on the right – conservative intellectuals have had a
long-running debate about the significance of “
epistemic closure” within their movement.
So conservatives appear to be more likely to be hard-wired to be
highly sensitive to perceived threats, and their chosen media offers
them plenty. But that's not the whole story because of one additional
factor. Since 9/11, and especially since the election of President
Barack Obama, one of the most significant trends in America's political
discourse is the “mainstreaming” of what were previously considered to
be fringe views on the right. Theories that were once relegated to the
militia movement can now be heard on the lips of elected officials and
television personalities like Glenn Beck.
Consider, then, what it must be like to be a true-blue Rush Limbaugh
fan, or someone who thinks Michele Bachmann is a serious lawmaker with a
grasp of the issues – put yourself into that person's shoes for a
moment, and consider what a nightmarish landscape the world around them
must represent:
The White House has been usurped by a Kenyan socialist named Barry Soetero,
who hatched an elaborate plot to pass himself off as a citizen of the
United States – a plot the media refuse to even investigate. This
president doesn't just claim the right to assassinate suspected
terrorists who are beyond the reach of law enforcement – he may be
planning on rounding up his ideological opponents and putting them into concentration camps if he is reelected. He may have murdered a blogger who was critical of his administration, but authorities refuse to investigate. At the very least, he is plotting on disarming the American public after the election, in accordance with a secret deal cut with the UN and possibly with the assistance of foreign troops.
Again, these ideas are not relegated to the fringe of forwarded emails. Glenn Beck
talked about FEMA camps on Fox News (he later debunked them, which only fueled charges of a media coverup); dozens of
Republican elected officials have at least hinted that they are birthers, while an erstwhile front-runner for the GOP nomination has
repeatedly claimed that Obama is not eligible to be president. The
head of the NRA, and the
GOP's presidential nominee have both claimed Obama is plotting to take Americans' guns.
In reality,
Americans are safer and more secure today
than at any point in human history. But inhabitants of the world of the
hard-right are surrounded by danger – from mobs of thugs at home to a
variety of powerful and deadly enemies abroad.
For the true believers, Latin American immigration isn't a phenomenon
to be managed, but a grave existential threat. A plot to “take back”
large swaths of the Southwest is a theory that has aired not only on
obscure right-wing blogs, but on
Fox and
CNN. On CNN, Lou Dobbs claimed immigrants were
spreading leprosy; Rick Perry, Rep. Louie Gohmert and other “mainstream” voices on the right (that is, people with platforms)
agree
that Hezbollah and Hamas “are using Mexico as a way to penetrate into
the southern part of the United States,” possibly with the aid of “
terror babies” carried in pregnant women's wombs.
In the real world, the rate of violent crime in the US is
at the lowest point since 1968 – in fact, it is
somewhat of a mystery
that the violent crime rate has continued to decline even in the midst
of the Great Recession. It's also true that 84 percent of white murder
victims are killed by other whites. But if you read the
Drudge Report, or check in at
Fox, on any given day you will see extensive coverage of
any incident in which a black person harms a white person. These fit in with the narrative – advanced by people like
Glenn Beck and
long-touted by Ron Paul
– that we stand on the brink of a race war, led by the New Black
Panthers (just consider how frightening it would be if there were more
than a dozen New Black Panthers, or if they did more than say stupid
things). Marauding
“flash-mobs” of black teens – a near-obsession at many conservative outlets these days -- are simply a harbinger of things to come.
Continue, for a moment, to stroll in the shoes of a true believer on
the right. Imagine how frightening it would be to believe Frank Gaffney,
a former Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration
and leading neoconservative voice, when he
claims the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the highest levels of the US government, or Newt Gingrich, when he
says
that “sharia law” (there isn't such a thing in the way conservatives
portray it – as a discrete canon of laws) poses a grave threat to our
way of life.
Imagine believing that the Democrats' business-friendly insurance
reforms included panels of bureaucrats who would decide when to let you
die, as Sarah Palin
infamously suggested. Or that virtually the entire field of climatology is perpetrating a “hoax,” as senator James Inhofe
claims,
in order to undermine capitalism and impose a one-world government.
Imagine seeing energy-efficient lightbulbs as part of an international
plot to, again, undermine capitalism, as Michele Bachmann
believes.
Imagine thinking that the public school system “indoctrinates” young
children into the “gay lifestyle,” as influential members of the
religious right – Pat Dobson, Bryan Fischer, Anita Bryant – have
claimed for years. Imagine believing our electoral system is tarnished by massive voter fraud or that
union thugs are running amok or that the Department of Homeland Security
is making a list of people who advocate for “limited government.” Imagine if there really were a War on Christmas!
These dark narratives come in addition to more run-of-the-mill
fearmongering about the Iranian “threat,” or nonsense about how
“entitlements” are leading our economy to look like Greece's. Those of
us in the “reality-based community” may look at these specters haunting
the right with exasperation or amusement, but just consider for a moment
how bleak the world looks to those who buy into these ideas.
Perhaps the most frightening part of all of this for the true
believers is that even though these things aren't just fringe ideas
circulating in forwarded emails – they're discussed by influential
politicians and on leading cable news outlets – the bulk of the media
and most elected officials
refuse to investigate what's happening to this country.
That one ideological camp is so consumed with fear also has a lot to
do with why conservatives and liberals share so little common ground.
Progressives tend to greet these narratives with facts and reason, but
as Chris Mooney notes, when your amygdala is activated, it takes over
and utterly dominates the brain structures dedicated to reason. Then the
"fight-or-flight" response takes precedence over critical thinking.
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