The rest of the world is looking at the United States and wondering, with good reason, why we have gone crazy. Not the entire country has gone crazy, of course. But we have a system of government in which a medium-sized minority can bring things crashing down if they so choose, and exactly such a group is rending one of the major parties apart. The minority group is roughly “the Republican base,” an uneasy alliance of Evangelical Christians and the Tea Party.
So it’s interesting and important to understand what these folks really think — something the media, with its valorization of drama, isn’t very good at conveying. The polling organization run by James Carville and Stanley Greenberg has recently tackled the issue, and presents a fascinating summary of what the concerns of the Republican base really are. (Carville and Greenberg are committed Democrats, of course, but I got the link from The American Conservative, where Ron Dreher completely agrees and expresses his horror and dismay.)
Here are the ideas floating in the mind of an average member of the Republican base, expressed in convenient word-cloud form:
For slightly more detail, here are the bullet-pointed main findings:
Most of the Republican base are not fat-cat plutocrats — there aren’t enough of those people to make up a sufficiently substantial voting bloc. A lot of the people described here are poor or at best middle-class, but their cultural identity and self-image is derived in large part from race/nation/religion/lifestyle categories that they see as under attack. The dominant emotions here are fearful ones. (I don’t mean to be condescending by talking about “these people”; this is the environment that I grew up in myself.)
This kind of analysis helps understand why Obamacare — which, for all its faults, is primarily aimed at providing health insurance to more people, many of whom are squarely in the Republican base — is such a hot-button issue. It’s not that they don’t want health insurance; it’s not even that they don’t want the government involved (since they love Medicare and Social Security). It’s that they see Obamacare as a craven ploy to get more people (people not like them) dependent on the government, establishing a permanent Democratic majority, and therefore easing the way for more power going to immigrants, gays, and so on.
Some of their analysis is actually correct! The demographics are tending strongly against what we now think of as the Republican base. The world is changing, and they don’t like it.
The scariest part of the report is that last bullet point, that “climate is next.” The Republican civil war is already bringing the US to the brink of financial disaster. It could end up causing the entire planet immeasurable harm. Scientists need to realize that the climate change debate, like the creationism-in-schools debate from a while a back, is actually not about scientific facts. It’s about culture, and that’s a much more difficult problem to address.
I have noticed a craziness so many people have about Obama care. Somehow the idea of a black president being associated with a health care reform has triggered the reptilian brain in so many people preventing them from engaging their higher brain functions in evaluating the health care reform rationally.
Whether ACA works or not remains an open question, only time will tell, though it does seem to have worked well in Massachusetts. But it doesn’t , in any way , pose the absurd threat level being presented in the right wing media.
We see an interesting psychological effect here where deeply held subconscious racist feelings are being manifest consciously as a totally irrational fear of a relatively modest health care reform. This is why associating Obama’s name with the Affordable Care act is so effective is generating fear and opposition to the ACA.
This is also why we see the resurgence of secessionist groups, where even republican governors and republican congressmen embrace secessionist views. The spectacle of Tea Party demonstrators holding confederate flags outside the White House illustrates the deeply racist nature of opposition to Obama care. Born in Kenya and Muslim are code words for racism.
The ability of right wing extremist elites to tap into the darker side of people poses a difficult problem in any democracy. We might guess that if Hillary had won the election, the right wing elites would have used subconscious misogynist feelings , the castrating female image , to invoke unreasoned opposition to any modest health care reform. Whatever works.
Wow. Just goggled “freegan” and got a peak into the mind of meh. Can’t believe I was trying to have a conversation with that person. I am going to be sore from laughing so hard. Freegan.info could easily be mistaken for an Onion article.
I understand that trying to look at both sides of a situation, I will be pegged as a member of the opposition by each side, but I can’t help it. I just can’t wrap my mind around the idea that the country is divided into the “good” party and the “evil” party. Rabid partisans on both sides have the same mentality. They project all that is evil onto their opposition, all that is good to themselves. When their opposition does something “good” it is an insincere ploy, when their opposition does something bad, they are showing their true nature. When their party does something good, it is because they are showing their true nature, and when their party does something bad, its because they are forced into it, in order to survive, by the evil opposition. Also, nobody’s perfect.
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Partisans don’t want to “understand the mind” of their opposition, they want a coherent picture of evil to project onto them. They need that to stoke their determination and justify their partisanship. They fear that truly understanding the mind of the opposition will water down their precious anger.
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You want my read on the mind of the republican party? If you look at the red-blue map, county by county, democrats are concentrated in the mixed-race urban centers, republicans in the white rural areas. I used to live in a rural area. The two societies are different environments, and must operate on different rules. Rural societies are face-to-face, everybody knows everybody else and their business. Outsiders are met with suspicion because they don’t know you and they need to. If you are white, you may, after years, be able to change your attitudes and appearance and appear to fit in, but if you are black, you have a hard row to hoe, because your skin color marks you as an outsider. Trust me, 90% of rural “racism” is resentment against outsiders and the glorification of the urban black person, not against the few black people who have been “vetted” by the rural community. And by “vetted” I mean, yes, they deal with the soft racism, and realize that it is by no means universal, just like I had to deal with the prejudice against myself for being a “big city” outsider. It’s still wrong, and needs to be fought.
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In a rural setting, you may disagree with another person’s politics, but you will be doing business with them, relying on them for assistance, and vice versa tomorrow, so blind hatred based on politics is not an option. The cop that pulls you over might be your third cousin, and he knows what you are about and vice versa. That can be good or bad. Also, you can draw a distinction between beggars and people truly in need based on personal experience and act accordingly. In an urban setting, people are high density, more anonymous, and can afford to restrict their circle of associates. Urban assistance is cash on the barrelhead, to a stranger. Urban centers, because of the closeness and lack of interconnection require more centralized control, rural not so much. Aid is channeled through the government as it must be, but the face-to-face information is lost and the potential for abuse arises.
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Religion is prevalent in rural areas. As Sean Carroll says, it is an expression of culture, not of science. They thump their bibles and curse evolution and cling to their guns when confronted by urban control freaks, but otherwise they form a sense of community for people who relatively geographically isolated, and help out those who have fallen outside the government safety net. They visit the old and the sick, instead of having them fill out forms. And that includes the “vetted” black people, who are often members of that same “white” church. They have little understanding of urban problems and don’t see their narrow-mindedness for what it is.
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Gun ownership is not such a big threat in a rural community. Vicious criminals don’t thrive in a rural community, but there is spatial isolation. The fact that your neighbor owns a gun is more often a source of reassurance than a threat. When the urbans try to take away their guns, their question is why? What do you have in mind? Everything is fine. Not in the big city, but who cares?
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Urban democrats often outnumber rurals, and, in their blindness, impose urban solutions to urban problems on everybody. The rurals rightly resist, and vote republican. When republican rurals outnumber urbans, they impose rural solutions to rural problems on the urbans, and they rightly resist, voting democrat. It’s a vicious blind circle, and the minority gets screwed. Instead of both sides trying to impose their narrow-minded utopia on their opposition, we need to truly understand the minds of our opponents, and understand how things work, and depend on something other than blind partisanship to stoke our determination to do the right thing.
This country was not founded by ‘the people’ in any French Revolution sense, where a delimited ambitious educated bourgeois were able to animate a huge, numerically overwhelming base of impoverished and starving peasant farmers and downtrodden laborers, into rising up against the intricately-linked powers of their immediate landed lords and employers, a recklessly self-interested monarchy, and the clergy that survived and flourished through mediating between the interests of the armed taxation powers by assisting them in working against the interests of the poor.
Instead, it was founded by mercantile interests, for mercantile interests, and designed by mercantile interests, to favor mercantile interests as defined by mercantile interests, above all other interests.
Each of A) the ‘visible’ Constitution people imagine they ‘know’, because they carry around on their persons little booklets with the words of the original and it two dozen or so amendments on them, and B) the ‘invisible’ Constitution, that is nonetheless open to being discovered and revealed by legal scholarship and systems analysis, remain, as they have been since the beginning, vulnerable to subversion and subjugation by mercantile interests.
The two party electoral system is fueled critically off money, and so constantly vulnerable to subversion by those with money, and particularly those with money who see commercial advantage in using that money to get their ways, that is as investment in their own commercial ventures, that is: mercantile interests.
There is only marginal minority approval of ‘government’ per se, most recently at 19%, because only around 1 in 5 among all adult Americans in any way interested in ever voting have an immediately appreciable vested interest in the continuation of government: 1) those employed within government (and not all of them); 2) those who get checks AND have NO OR INSUFFICIENT alternative means to survive without those funds (and not all of them either); and 3) those who receive favors from government (who nonetheless are very often among those most inclined to express dissatisfaction with government, and in any event don’t even make up a number that rounds up to 1%). Even that 20% largely only ‘support’ government out of apprehension that their meager circumstances might well worsen.
So some number that doesn’t just approach but very nearly adds up to 100% of the potential voters in this country, whether they’re rational or deluded in their appreciation of what government is and does, are nonetheless unified in their dissatisfaction with government.
And that dissatisfaction is ENTIRELY RATIONAL, even where motivated by delusion, because, whether or not a given voter or group of voters realizes precisely HOW mercantile interests ‘their’ government and thereby suppress the interests of the 99%+ — that is, whether ‘through’ government or ‘as’ government — they all are correct in concluding that their interests are subverted to those of banksters and mega and multinational corporations.
The U.S. government never was YOUR government. It is the government of mercantile interests; the rest of us are squatters on sufferance.
Could I bring to your attention a recent article by Yale Law Professor Dan Kahan at culturalcognition.net, who found that : “. . . those who identified as part of the tea party movement were actually better versed in science than those who didn’t”. Also, please see the October 19th Economist article “Trouble at the Lab”, which cites a Nature article which said that Amgen, a few years ago, could only replicate 6 of 53 studies considered “landmarks in the basic science of cancer”. Bottom line: Perhaps we could do with less ad hominum argumentation and a little more humility in discussing any issue which intersects politics and science.
Instead of “thumbs down” on Ed Shafer’s recent post, why don’t people just follow the link that he offers? This Dan Kahan guy is extremely interesting. In fact, he explains why Ed Shafer cherry picked his (nevertheless true) statement, and why he got lots of “thumbs down” rather than a reasoned response! Partisans of any stripe will be disappointed by the article, and self-styled rational people (like myself) will be scared by it. (Maybe not so rational after all?). Then again, he is a self-styled rational person too. Hmmm.
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Check out Dan Kahan’s original article at:
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http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2013/10/15/some-data-on-education-religiosity-ideology-and-science-comp.html
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and his response to the Ed Shafers and the thumbs-downers of the world at:
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http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2013/10/19/congratulations-tea-party-members-you-are-just-as-vulnerable.html
LOL – did anyone follow the links and discover that Dan Kahan is in fact a self-professed liberal, defends Obamacare, except is in favor of a single payer system? Has also discovered that liberals are more likely to be scientifically educated than conservatives? He does not agree at all with the Tea Party platform, and is angry at the way his data and conclusions are being misconstrued? That he is deeply concerned by the inability of the right to accept the overwhelming data supporting climate change?
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Give this post an uncommented thumbs down if you didn’t follow the links because of your partisan tunnel vision, and are ashamed for being so wrong.
I accept Dan Kahan’s conclusion that rationality and scientific knowledge have little to do with political persuasion. That was the point of his discovery that tea party adherents are insignificantly more scientifically knowledgeable than average, contrary to the “knuckle-dragging homophobic racist morons” that are portrayed in the mainstream media. I agree with him that any political persuasion has roughly equal measures of stupid, ignorant people, incapable of any behavior except “thumbs down”, and rational, knowledgeable people who, argue as rationally as they might, cannot agree because they have different value systems, they “cherry pick” the facts to support their need for a world they feel comfortable in. I also agree with him that it would be nice if some of those intellectuals could transcend that sort of bullshit, if just for a minute. We who are about to die salute you.
The good news is that once all the glitches surrounding the “log in” screen for Obamacare are ironed out in a few months, crack teams of government employees and contractors who can’t be fired for incompetence will now be in charge implementing 10,000 pages of rules regarding our health. How could those ignorant Republicans be so worried? The nerve of those racists!
The Tea party is very fearful of the fiscal direction or the country. US debt is now $17,000,000,000,000 (that’s Trillion)! Unfunded US liabilities are $126 Trillion!
(as calculated by the Federal Reserve, see the website http://www.usdebtclock.org/).
US debt exceeds US GNP ($16 Trillion) and US Liabilities exceed all US Assets both public and private ($105 Trillion).
The debt and liabilities are growing faster than the GDP and the National Assets!
Closing the Government is an extreme action required to get the public’s attention.
We are headed for our own Greek tragedy. How many years before it hits, nobody knows! It will most certainly come with much higher interest rates and much higher taxes and sharply reduced government benefits. I expect much street violence as well.
This is our future unless we change our current path before it is too late. What will it take for the people to demand fiscal responsibility from Washington. View the website http://www.usdebtclock.org and you will be shocked.
The Tea party is very fearful of the fiscal direction or the country. US debt is now $17,000,000,000,000 (that’s Trillion)! Unfunded US liabilities are $126 Trillion!
(as calculated by the Federal Reserve, see the website http://www.usdebtclock.org/).
US debt exceeds US GNP ($16 Trillion) and US Liabilities exceed all US Assets both public and private ($105 Trillion).
The debt and liabilities are growing faster than the GDP and the National Assets!
Closing the Government is an extreme action required to get the public’s attention.
We are headed for our own Greek tragedy. How many years before it hits, nobody knows! It will most certainly come with much higher interest rates and much higher taxes and sharply reduced government benefits. I expect much street violence as well.
This is our future unless we change our current path before it is too late. What will it take for the people to demand fiscal responsibility from Washington. View the website http://www.usdebtclock.org and you will be shocked.
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This is nonsense. It’s true the debt issue needs to be solved but it’s a myth that the GOP-Tea Party has any real interest in solving this problem. The real interest of the GOP-Tea party is using this debt created by GOP policies of massive corporate welfare spending and more and more tax cuts for the very rich as an excuse to go after programs like Social Security, medicare etc. The goal has always been to “starve the beast” by cutting off tax revenue which is more politically doable than direct attacks on these very popular programs. That is why we see deficit spending decrease under Democratic administrations and ramp back up under republican administrations. Dick Cheney , a new Tea Party convert from his former religion of Neo Con , has said Deficits don’t matter.
With regard to the debt ceiling and the Tea Party. most if not all Tea Party congressmen advocate not raising the debt ceiling under any circumstances which would have the affect of causing the fiscal disaster they claim to be worried about. Many of the Tea Party are Christian reconstructists who desire to see the dollar destroyed as a world currency , which they think will force the creation of a new Christian nation. Other Tea Party members are secessionist who desire to see the federal government destroyed and/or Ayn Rand extremists who see a financial meltdown as Atlas shrugging bringing into being their vision of a society based on social Darwinism into reality, the selfish utopia. The Tea Party was created to push the GOP further to the right by powerful elite which fund this party to tune of billions. The tea party also reflects that the GOP base represents a declining demographic and they have found themselves tapping into the more crazy and extreme to win elections.
This is one of the most interesting and perceptive analyses I have read. I have always believed that our gut/emotional constitution, genetics and inner ‘biases’ about the world around us make up most of our personal responses (beliefs) and external affiliations. I don’t throw logic or so called clear thinking under the bus, but nothing occurs that is not in a context, including what we think about things. Understanding the belief systems of others plays an important role in how we interpret the situation we are presented with. Would that it were true that we can all objectively understand our internal contexts when we interface so that we at least communicate honestly with one another. Given that, if those of us who favor compromise and a ‘reasoned’ approach to governing are facing a population that truly believes this is a near life-or-death situation, our options for coming to agreement are limited at best. I don’t want to just settle for ‘yeah, this makes a lot of sense, but I don’t know where we go from here,’ but I am at a loss on how to proceed… this appears to be an extreme test of implementing a successful democracy.
Ray: I completely agree with the following statement you made:
“I have always believed that our gut/emotional constitution, genetics and inner ‘biases’ about the world around us make up most of our personal responses (beliefs) and external affiliations. I don’t throw logic or so called clear thinking under the bus, but nothing occurs that is not in a context, including what we think about things.”
I too feel an overwhelming sense of “loss on how to proceed” given that individuals’ perceptions of the world very so greatly. It seems to me that “knowing” these biases exist provide very little guidance as to what direction one should take. A very good book called “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman provides many wonderful examples of these concepts and how we have very little control over them.
China is the number one contributor to greenhouse gases and pollution which affect the entire globe. They are our main economic competitor and soon to be our main military competitor. For every Einstein we have, they have ten. As soon as people on both sides of the aisle come to terms with this, political divisions will lessen a lot. It seems to me that ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, people can afford to politically bicker endlessly. Faced with visions of a conservative utopia or a liberal utopia, people vote for the one that they feel they will thrive in. When faced with the fact that a relentless, draining fight over which utopia wins may result in a Chinese utopia, the fighting will become more reality based.
Or Frank, or…it just seems like china is beating us when it is instead that America is becoming dumber. You must have the permission of a parent in order to fail a student in America, and if the parent says no, then you can’t give them a failing grade. That’s not just the class grade, that’s homework assignments and daily tests too. If you could give them an F on their homework, then at least they wouldn’t be so arrogant while simultaneously being so stupid. We keep lowering the bar while china just keeps the bar at the same height. What do you think happens? They aren’t getting any better. We are getting worse.
Secondly, China isn’t in a competition with America. America is in a competition with China. This means that we incorrectly allocate resources to an imaginary cold war which we are the only ones fighting; like say, I don’t know, a shitload of tanks that the military repeatedly says they don’t want but congressional republicans force them to accept. Meanwhile, China spends that money on education and infrastructure. So it’s good that it’s brought up here, because it’s the same gross ignorance with a refusal to accept liability that makes the Tea Party such a drain on our country.
@Visionary – I agree with your first paragraph, and most of your second. I agree that tanks and dumbing down education is a dumb answer to the US-China competition, and I also think that viewing China as a cold war adversary is “fighting the last war” and a dangerous mistake.
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The fact remains that China floods American markets with inexpensive goods. They can do this because the workers are working for 50 cents an hour, and they spend much, much less on pollution control, pollution which harms the globe, not just the Chinese. Much less on workplace safety. They do not ignore worker safety, pollution and global warming, they simply do not see the same cost/benefit ratio that Americans do. (See http://www.factsanddetails.com/china.php?itemid=393&subcatid=66). Americans cannot compete with them on this point, and the gobs of money the Chinese get is spent on Chinese interests, not on American interests.
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They have a more authoritarian form of government, so that when they build infrastructure, like the three gorges dam, they can displace a million people to make room for it with little fuss. They have an education system that is forcibly focused on science and technology, and no teachers unions demanding more jobs and less accountability. Since the death of Mao, they are not intent on establishing a communist utopia, but rather on acquiring economic power and they won’t let blind ideology deter them from that. They allow free markets and private ownership when and to the extent that it suits their needs.
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Economic power and military power go hand-in-hand and they understand that. The Chinese military is the largest in the world. China has increased its military budget by double digits for the last twenty years. China has hundreds of ICBMs capable of delivering nuclear warheads anywhere in the world, but they understand that anything more than a deterrent force is counterproductive, given their advantages in the economic sphere.
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China is not a totally lean, mean, economic machine any more than Japan was thirty years ago, even though it looked that way. In particular, their authoritarian government is especially prone to corruption, but it is the economic opportunities staring them in the face that helps unite them and make them strong. America is rich and has been lulled into political and military stupidity by its dominant position, and China has MUCH to gain by focused competition with America. The American indians were rich in land, but with stone-age weapon technology. Europeans were land poor, but with technologically advanced weaponry. The result was inevitable. If we don’t wake up and meet the Chinese challenge, the results will be just as inevitable. And by that I mean we stop shooting ourselves in the foot blindly and relentlessly fighting over whether we should have a conservative knuckle-head cold war utopia of the 1950’s or a socialist utopia of gentle non-competitive flower-pickers. I think that will slowly happen, hopefully sooner than later.
More gay immigrants? Yes, please.