Read The Republican Brain Online
Authors: is Mooney
The Republican Brain
Contents
Part I: Politics, Facts, and Brains
Prelude: Liberal Fresco on a Prison Wall
Part II: The “Nature” Hypothesis: Dangerous Certainty
Chapter 3: Political Personalities
Chapter 5: Don't Get Defensive
What Do Conservatives All Share?
Why Don't You Psychoanalyze Liberals, Too?
What about the Difference between Economic and Social Conservatives?
What about the Cultural Cognition Model?
What about Left Wing Ideologues?
Why Not Better Distinguish Conservatives from Authoritarians?
What about Centrists and Independents?
What about Political Conversions?
Chapter 6: Are Conservatives from the Amygdala?
Part III: Enter the “Environment”: Turning Against Change
Chapter 7: A Tale of Two Republicans
Chapter 8: The Science of Fox News
Part IV: The Truth: Who's Right, Who's Wrong, and Who Updates
Chapter 10: The Republican War on Economics
Chapter 11: The Republican War on History
Chapter 12: What the Frack Is True?
Part V: The Political Laboratory
Copyright © 2012 by Chris Mooney. All rights reserved
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Published simultaneously in Canada
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Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
âStephen Colbert
Introduction
Equations to Refute Einstein
We all know that many American conservatives have issues with Charles Darwin, and the theory of evolution. But Albert Einstein, and the theory of relativity?
If you're surprised, allow me to introduce
Conservapedia
, the right-wing answer to
Wikipedia
and ground zero for all that is scientifically and factually inaccurate, for political reasons, on the Internet.
Claiming over 285 million page views since its 2006 inception,
Conservapedia
is the creation of Andrew Schlafly, a lawyer, engineer, homeschooler, and one of six children of Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-feminist and anti-abortionist who successfully battled the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. In his mother's heyday, conservative activists were establishing vast mailing lists and newsletters, and rallying the troops. Her son learned that they also had to marshal “truth” to their side, now achieved not through the mail but the Web.
So when Schafly realized that
Wikipedia
was using BCE (“Before Common Era”) rather than BC (“Before Christ”) to date historical events, he'd had enough. He decided to create his own contrary fact repository, declaring, “It's impossible for an encyclopedia to be neutral.”
Conservapedia
definitely isn't neutral about science. Its 37,000 plus pages of content include items attacking evolution and global warming, wrongly claiming (contrary to psychological consensus) that homosexuality is a choice and tied to mental disorders, and incorrectly asserting (contrary to medical consensus) that abortion causes breast cancer.
The whopper, though, has to be
Conservapedia
's nearly 6,000 word, equation-filled entry on the theory of relativity. It's accompanied by a long webpage of “counterexamples” to Einstein's great scientific edifice, which merges insights like E = mc
2
(part of the special theory of relativity) with his later account of gravitation (the general theory of relativity).
“Relativity has been met with much resistance in the scientific world,” declares
Conservapedia.
“To date, a Nobel Prize has never been awarded for Relativity.” The site goes on to catalogue the “political aspects of relativity,” charging that some liberals have “extrapolated the theory” to favor their agendas. That includes President Barack Obama, who (it is claimed) helped publish an article applying relativity in the legal sphere while attending Harvard Law School in the late 1980s.
“Virtually no one who is taught and believes Relativity continues to read the Bible, a book that outsells
New York Times
bestsellers by a hundred-fold,”
Conservapedia
continues. But even that's not the site's most staggering claim. In its list of “counterexamples” to relativity,
Conservapedia
provides 36 alleged cases, including the following:
“The action-at-a-distance by Jesus, described in John 4:46â54, Matthew 15:28, and Matthew 27:51.”
If you are an American liberal or progressive and you just read the passage above, you are probably about to split your sidesâor punch a wall. Sure enough, once liberal and science-focused bloggers caught wind of
Conservapedia
's anti-Einstein sallies, Schlafly was quickly called a “crackpot,” “crazy,” “dishonest,” and so on.
These being liberals and scientists, there were also ample factual refutations. Take
Conservapedia'
s bizarre claim that relativity hasn't led to any fruitful technologies. To the contrary, GPS devices rely on an understanding of relativity, as do PET scans and particle accelerators. Relativity
works
âif it didn't, we would have noticed by now, and the theory would never have come to enjoy its current scientific status.
Little changed at
Conservapedia
after these errors were dismantled, however (though more anti-relativity “counterexamples” and Bible references were added). For not only does the site embrace a very different firmament of “facts” about the world than modern science: It also employs a different approach to editing than
Wikipedia
. Schlafly has said of the founding of
Conservapedia
that it “strengthened my faith. I don't have to live with what's printed in the newspaper. I don't have to take what's put out by Wikipedia. We've got our own way to express knowledge, and the more that we can clear out the liberal bias that erodes our faith, the better.”
You might be thinking that
Conservapedia
's unabashed denial of relativity is an extreme case, located in the same circle of intellectual hell as claims that HIV doesn't cause AIDS and 9/11 was an inside job. If so, I want to ask you to think again. Structurally, the denial of something so irrefutable, the elaborate rationalization of that denial, and above all the refusal to consider the overwhelming body of counterevidence and modify one's view, is something we find all around us today. It's hard to call it rationalâand hard to deny it's everywhere.
Every contentious fact- or science-based issue in American politics now plays out just like the conflict between
Conservapedia
and liberalsâand physicistsâover relativity. Again and again it's a fruitless battle between incompatible “truths,” with no progress made and no retractions offered by those who are just plain wrongâand can be shown to be through simple fact checking mechanisms that all good journalists, not to mention open-minded and critically thinking citizens, can employ.
What's more, no matter how much the fact-checkers strive to remain “bipartisan,” it is pretty hard to argue that the distribution of falsehoods today is politically equal or symmetrical. It's not that liberals are never wrong or biased; a number of liberal errors will be described and debunked in these pages. Neverthelessâand as I will showâpoliticized wrongness today is clustered among Republicans, conservatives, and especially Tea Partiers.
Their willingness to deny what's true may seem especially outrageous when it infects scientific topics like evolution or climate change. But there's nothing unique about these subjects, other than perhaps the part of campus where you'll find them taught. The same thing happens with economics, with American history, and with any other factual matter where there's something ideologicalâin other words, something emotional and personalâat stake.
As soon as that occurs, today's conservatives have their own “truth,” their own experts to spout it, and their own communication channelsânewspapers, cable networks, talk radio shows, blogs, encyclopedias, think tanks, even universitiesâto broad- and narrowcast it. The reality described through these channels is vastly different than the reality that liberals occupy. The worldviews are worlds apartâand at most, the country can only exist in one of them.
Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome, and that's precisely where our country now stands with regard to the conservative denial of reality. For a long time, we've been trained to equivocate, to
not
to see it for what it isâsweeping, systemic. Yet the problem is gradually dawning on many of us, particularly as the 2012 election began to unfold and one maverick Republican, Jon Huntsman, put his party's anti-science tendencies in focus with a Tweet heard round the world:
To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.
But the right's rejection of science is just the beginning. And our political culture remains unwilling to acknowledge what our own eyes show us: That denying facts is not a phenomenon equally distributed across the political spectrum.
The cost of this assault on reality is dramatic. Many of these falsehoods affect lives and have hadâor will haveâworld-changing consequences. And more dangerous than any of them is the utter erosion of a shared sense of what's trueâwhich they both generate, and perpetuate.
In these pages, we'll encounter an array of lies, misperceptions, and misguided political beliefs, and marvel at some of the elaborate arguments used to justify them. And we'll do some debunkingâbut that's not the point of the exercise. The real goal is to understand how these false claims (and rationalizations) could exist and
persist
in human minds, and why they are endlessly generated. In other words, we seek to understand how the political right could be so wrong, and how conservatives, Republicans, and Tea Party members could actually believe these things.
That's what I set out to discover when I embarked on researching this book. I wanted an explanation, because I saw a phenomenon crying out for one.
Consider, just briefly, some of the wrong ideas that have taken hold of significant swaths of the conservative population in the U.S., and that have featured prominently in public policy debates and discussions in recent years. This catalogue is necessarily quite incompleteâignoring entire issue areas where falsehoods are rampant, like immigration. Still, it gives a sense of the problem's sweeping extent.
The Identity of the President of the United States.
Many conservatives believe President Obama is a Muslim. What's more, a stunning 64 percent of Republican voters in the 2010 election thought it was “not clear” whether he had been born in the United States. These people often think he was born in Kenya, and the birth certificate showing otherwise is bunk, a forgery, etc. They also think this relatively centrist Democrat is a closetâor even overtâsocialist. At the extreme, they consider him a “Manchurian candidate” for an international leftist agendaâand yes, those are their actual words.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009.
Many conservatives believe that the law they deride as “Obamacare” represented a “government takeover of health care.” They also think, as Sarah Palin claimed, that it created government “death panels” to make end-of-life care decisions for the elderly. What's more, they think it will increase the federal budget deficit (and that most economists agree with this claim), cut benefits to those on Medicare, and subsidize abortions and the health care of illegal immigrants. None of these things are true.
Sexuality and Reproductive Health.
Many conservativesâespecially on the Christian Rightâclaim that having an abortion increases a woman's risk of breast cancer or mental disorders. They claim that fetuses can perceive pain at 20 weeks of gestation, that same-sex parenting is bad for kids, and that homosexuality is a disorder, or a choice, and is curable through therapy. None of this is true.
The Iraq War.
The mid-2000s saw the mass dissemination of a number of falsehoods about the war in Iraq, including claims that weapons of mass destruction were found after the U.S. invasion and that Iraq and Al Qaeda were proven collaborators. And political conservatives were much more likely than liberals to believe these falsehoods. Studies have shown as much of Fox News viewers, and also of so-called authoritarians, an increasingly significant part of the conservative base (about whom more soon). In one study, 37 percent of authoritarians (but 15 percent of non-authoritarians) believed WMD had been found in Iraq, and 55 percent of authoritarians (but 19 percent of non-authoritarians) believed that Saddam Hussein had been directly involved in the 9/11 attacks.
Economics.
Many conservatives hold the clearly incorrect viewâexplicitly espoused by former president George W. Bushâthat tax cuts increase government revenue. They also think President Obama raised their income taxes, that he's responsible for current government budget deficits, and that his flagship economic stimulus bill didn't create many jobs or even caused job losses (and that most economists concur with this assessment). In some ways most alarming of all, in mid-2011 conservatives advanced the dangerous idea that the federal government could simply “prioritize payments” if Congress failed to raise the debt ceiling. None of this is true, and the last belief, in particular, risked economic calamity.
American History.
Many conservativesâespecially on the Christian Rightâbelieve the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.” They consider the separation of church and state a “myth,” not at all assured by the First Amendment. And they twist history in myriad other ways, large and small, including Sarah Palin's claim that Paul Revere “warned the British” and Michele Bachmann's claim that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly” to put an end to slavery.
Sundry Errors.
Many conservatives claimed that President Obama's late 2010 trip to India would cost $200 million per day, or $2 billion for a ten day visit! And they claimed that, in 2007, Congress banned incandescent light bulbs, a truly intolerable assault on American freedoms. Only, Congress did no such thing. (To give just a few examples.)
Science.
This is the area I care about most deeply, and the denial here is particularly intense. In a nationally representative survey released just as I was finishing this bookâmany prior surveys have found similar thingsâonly 18 percent of Republicans and Tea Party members accepted the scientific consensus that global warming is caused by humans, and only 45 and 43 percent (respectively) accepted human evolution.