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Criticism of The Republican Brain by Chris Mooney
"I have found that no amount of facts or evidence will shift an “ostrich” republican back to the old ways of Goldwater and Buckley, in pre-Fox days, when conservatism respected knowledge and facts. Back when the average education level of republicans was higher than democrats, when 40% of scientists were in the GOP, instead of less than 5% today. When knowledge and intellect weren't the openly declared enemy.
Nevertheless, I found a bullet! When faced with absolute denial and perfect assertion-addiction, one thing cracks the turtle shell. Demanding a wager!"
"Our analysis has shown that this conservative, anti-public worker agenda works hand-in-glove with both restrictions on reproductive freedom and attempts to curtail voting rights. In 2010, Republican Governor Mitch Daniels argued that conservatives should call a “truce” on culture issues and focus on reducing the deficit. Instead, conservative state governments managed to do both at once: push through a record number of government layoffs while also restricting reproductive freedom and democratic voting rights."
"I had two questions about this that I tried to answer in this article. The first was where these state losses were occurring, and whether there was anything interesting going on with the distribution of lost jobs.
The second question was how the new Tea Party influenced Republican state legislatures, especially Republicans that took over 11 states in the historic 2010 midterm elections, were governing. "
"In their 2009 book “Class War? What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality,” Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs put together survey data and make a convincing case that this cynical story is not a fair summary of public opinion in the United States. Actually, most Americans—Democrats and Republicans alike—support government intervention in health care, education, and jobs, and are willing to pay more in taxes for these benefits."
"Given the well-known Republican antipathy to evolution, President Obama’s recent description of the Republican budget as an example of “social Darwinism” may be a canny piece of political labeling. "
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An obvious inference is that, if people could be given better information they would change their views. But, as Mooney shows, and has become steadily more evident thanks to the Internet, better educated and informed Republicans are more likely to hold crazy views consistently and less likely to change them in response to new information.
That leads to Mooney’s primary conclusion, that Republicans/conservatives don’t simply have different beliefs from liberals/Democrats (or, for that matter, leftists), or even different values. They have (bear in mind that this a statement about population averages) different psychological characteristics, summarised as high authoritarianism and low openness to ideas different from their own.
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This brings us finally to the question that set off all the fireworks in the original post. To what extent are authoritarian personalities the product of environment, genes or some combination of the two. Again, it’s worth pointing out that, even if there is a genetic role in personality, there’s no such thing as a genetic predisposition to be a conservative/Republican. The content of these terms isn’t fixed, and the implications are very different depending on social circumstances. To take the most obvious case from comments: Republican policies and rhetoric appeal strongly to (US) white tribal/ethnic loyalty. So, US whites who respond well to in-group appeals are likely to vote Republican and call themselves conservatives. US blacks with similar predispositions obviously won’t vote Republican and are unlikely to call themselves conservatives.
To take another example from Mooney’s book, authoritarian attitudes in the US are typically associated with support for free-market/pro-business economic policies and virulent hostility to “socialism”. By contrast, in the former Soviet Bloc, the same attitudes are associated with support for the old order and positive feelings about “socialism” (I’m using the scare quotes to indicate that, in both cases, the term is something of a blank canvas, onto which all sorts of things can be projected). And indeed, in this context, the term “conservative” is commonly applied to hardline members of the surviving Communist parties.
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"Almost all of the $8 in added debt since 2000 can be traced to policies enacted under the cover of post-September 11th nationalism; these policies cemented the transition from neoliberalism to full-blown neoconservatism. Nothing more accurately illustrates the contradictory movements of the neoliberal project than the biography of the fundamentalist son of an American-owned autocrat, who spent millions of American dollars expelling the Soviets from Afghanistan, then bankrolled and organized September 11th, then was assassinated by the US and dumped into the ocean."
"October 2011 marks two events in the Republican Party that political observers from ten years ago would have claimed were utterly impossible: first, an African-American man is leading in the polls for the Republican nominee for president. Second, the same GOP frontrunner openly admits he wants to hike taxes on most Americans."
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No, the new conservative religion is the cult of Objectivism. GOP legislators and even conservative Supreme Court members force Rand's books on their clerks and staff members. A John Galt who has never held elected office currently leads in the polls--the second such dalliance Republican voters have already made with a corporate CEO this cycle alone.
"Sure, there will always be liars in positions of influence—that's stipulated, as the lawyers say. And the media, God knows, have never been ideal watchdogs—the battleships that crossed the seas to avenge the sinking of the Maine attest to that. What's new is the way the liars and their enablers now work hand in glove. That I call a mendocracy, and it is the regime that governs us now."
"Unfortunately, it appears that attacking the in-power opposition's legitimacy may be an increasingly effective way to derail policy initiatives. When a substantial portion (at least 30%, perhaps up to 50%) of the Republican party, for example, believes that not only does Obama have bad policies, he has no legitimate right to be President, compromise and negotiation become difficult at best."
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I haven’t found anyone making the case that the public sector workers in Wisconsin are overpaid. Andrew Biggs of AEI, who watches public sector compensation closely, replicates data and research done by EPI and incorporates his version of benefits and concludes, “At the end of the day, I just don’t think we can make any final conclusions on state/local pay [in Wisconsin] because so much of the data, particularly on the benefits end, is still too loosey-goosey. There’s just more work to be done.” Mind you, that’s the strongest attack by a conservative wonk using the data I can find: it’s too tough to tell one way or the other. Given that the teacher’s unions are willing to take a hit on benefits, their position is actually to the right of AEI’s.
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I’ve noticed all these in isolation but haven’t been able to put them together into a whole. But Ed Kilgore just wrote a great piece for the New Republic that puts it into a narrative. This is about taking the smokestack-chasing model of growth of the 3rd world and combining it with the Moonlight and Magnolias Deep South model of development:
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"Forfeiting a both-houses Republican victory, rational conservatives ignored or excused the most hateful kind of populist claptrap (e.g., the fetid weirdness of Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project). The poison they’ve helped disseminate will still be in the American bloodstream when the country needs it least.
By Christopher Hitchens"
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As I started by saying, the people who really curl my lip are the ones who willingly accept such supporters for the sake of a Republican victory, and then try to write them off as not all that important, or not all that extreme, or not all that insane in wanting to repeal several amendments to a Constitution that they also think is unalterable because it’s divine! It may be true that the Tea Party’s role in November’s vote was less than some people feared, and it’s certainly true that several of the movement’s elected representatives will very soon learn the arts of compromise and the pork barrel. But then what happens at the next downturn? A large, volatile constituency has been created that believes darkly in betrayal and conspiracy. A mass “literature” has been disseminated, to push the mad ideas of exploded crackpots and bigots. It would be no surprise if those who now adore Beck and his acolytes were to call them sellouts and traitors a few years from now. But, alas, they would not be the only victims of the poisonous propaganda that’s been uncorked. Some of the gun brandishing next time might be for real. There was no need for this offense to come, but woe all the same to those by whom it came, and woe above all to those who whitewashed and rationalized it.
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