The Republican Brain

by is Mooney

  Dwight Eisenhower was a remarkably pro-science president. There were also many Republican professors, and Republican scientists, in the academe of the 1950s and 1960s.

  But more and more, that has changed. In part, this is surely the consequence of constant conservative attacks on universities and intellectuals, going back to Buckley’s God and Man at Yale. These would have cemented the idea that liberals hang out on the campuses and read Sartre, while conservatives go into the business world. Due to the importance of the Open personality in generating new research and ideas, we can probably assume that academia will always be a liberal-leaning haven. But U.S. cultural and political change, including right-wing attacks on intellectuals and facts alike, has clearly helped make matters much more lopsided.

  Today, then, we find the parties vastly divided over expertise—with much more of it residing among liberals and Democrats, and with liberals and Democrats increasingly aligned with the views of scientists and scholars. I’ve already shown that most college professors today are Democrats, as are most scientists. Indeed, according to the aforementioned body of research by the University of British Columbia’s Neil Gross, American professors have been drifting steadily to the left since the late 1960s.

  Something similar appears to be happening with advanced degrees in general. Gross and his fellow researchers find that nearly 15 percent of U.S. liberals now hold one, more than double the percentage that did in the 1970s. The percentage of moderates and conservatives with advanced degrees has also increased, but lags far behind the saturation levels of expertise among liberals. In fact, conservatives are about where liberals were back in the 1970s. As a result, Gross and his colleagues write, “more so than ever before the highly educated comprise a key constituency for American liberalism and the Democratic Party, one that may have surpassed a crucial threshold level in size.”

  But while Democrats may have considerably more experts in their ranks today than Republicans, Republicans have more total experts than they used to as well, many of them hanging out at think tanks. The whole society has more experts, thanks to the expansion of higher education generally, as well as the growth of a conservative ideas infrastructure to rival academia.

  And these conservative experts and elites are not giving in. They’re carrying on the tradition of counterexpertise in as many disciplines as they can, with dedication and with purpose. For every PhD, there’s an equal and opposite PhD—or so it can often be made to appear.

  To be sure, in many of these battles conservative experts don’t really end up faring very well. Sniping at climate science from a few D.C. institutes, citing a few sympathetic scientists, may turn friendly ears in Congress, but it does nothing to seriously undermine the conclusions and legitimacy of virtually every scientific society that can claim expertise in the subject, or the national academies of nations around the world.

  For a truly amusing example of the current left-right expertise imbalance, consider something called “Project Steve.” This is a clever ploy by the pro-evolution National Center for Science Education (NCSE) to undermine conservative sign-on letters boasting large numbers of experts who question the theory of evolution. Project Steve goes one better—it finds scientists whose names are “Steve” who support evolution. To date, over a thousand Steves have signed on. And, as the NCSE boasts, Steves are only about 1 percent of scientists.

  That’s a staggering expertise balance. And it’s important to appreciate how the average conservative thinker—who knows that he or she is smart and competent—must feel when staring it down.

  David Frum, the apostate Republican and former George W. Bush speechwriter who has increasingly fallen out with its party as it has turned more and more to the right, stresses the importance of what he calls “conservative self-consciousness of being a minority in the world of ideas.” As he explains:

  That’s got a little bit of a connection to the world of conservative religiosity, because if you are an intensely committed Christian and especially an evangelical Christian, you do feel yourself kind of beleaguered in an intellectual world that’s not hospitable to you, and that feeling of isolation and victimization is then spread through the tone and style of the whole conservative world. . . . because of the historic weakness of the conservatives in getting positions in universities, and other tenured positions of intellectual life, they are much more economically dependent on places where their livelihoods are much more volatile and unpredictable, like the think tank world. There’s no tenure at think tanks—which is potentially a good thing, if the think tanks have a strong sense of intellectual integrity in their mission. But if they don’t, it’s potentially a bad thing.

  This spoken by a conservative who was cut from his post at the American Enterprise Institute, the premier conservative think tank, after criticizing the Republican strategy on health care reform.

  Thus, the growth of conservative think tanks, and the leftward shift of academics and intellectuals, are two more critical factors in the “oven” of our politics that sharply drive our war over expertise and fact today.

  For once you have liberal experts squaring off against conservative experts and wielding liberal and conservative “science” and “facts,” motivated reasoning tells you exactly what to expect. As we’ve seen, among the more intelligent, knowledgeable, and sophisticated among us, there are reasons to think the process is even more advanced, not less. Precisely because of their training and ability—their power at selectively constructing arguments—the politically or intellectually sophisticated are better able to justify themselves, and also to convince themselves that they’re right.

  Thus, we would expect to see liberal and conservative experts constantly arguing with each other, each sounding reasonable and articulate—and each becoming more convinced they’re right the more they argue and the more they research the issues. As this process plays out, it has numerous pernicious effects. One is that many onlookers to these debates are left confused and frustrated about where reality lies on any contested issue. Another is that partisans on either side wind up with lots of handy arguments to carry into their own belief-affirming and confidence-bolstering intellectual battles.

  The result is polarization over the nature of reality itself.

  So we now can see where the “American culture war of fact,” as it has been called, comes from, and why it has had such pernicious effects.

  At the same time, we can also see how the modern conservative movement was, simultaneously, a contingent and uniquely American outgrowth, and yet also classically conservative on a psychological level. It was a powerful and emotional reaction against change. It was driven by leaders who were often Manichean in worldview (or at least adopted this style). It took on a religious character, defending hierarchy, when provoked by demands for more egalitarianism.

  Most of all, because of the sharpness of the divide that this created—a true battle of deep seated and irreconcilable worldviews—it left the country completely polarized. Not only were Americans strongly divided politically, but they were highly emotional about that divide: inclined to demonize the other side, to clash vigorously and angrily with little or no understanding.

  I needn’t do much to document the nature of our present polarization; it has been done extensively. But it includes explicitly tribal behavior based on party affiliation: people straining everything they perceive through a lens of partisanship. It also includes demographic trends, in which conservatives and liberals—those more and less Open to Experience—are changing where they live based on politics, and self-selecting into “blue” and “red” states.

  Another crucial example of this polarization, and one with perhaps the greatest consequences for triggering biased reasoning and divergent views of the facts, involves media choices and how we consume information. For nowadays, people have the ability to opt into streams of political information that reinforce their points of view. This phenomenon has grown so dramatic, and is so psychologically important, that i
t is the subject of my next chapter.

  In a sense, you might think of my analysis of media change as an extension of this argument about conservative think tanks and elites, and how they facilitated the creation of an alternative reality on the right. Simply put, the think tanks made motivated reasoning a heck of a lot easier, because they provided evidence, arguments, and “expertise” in support of conservative positions.

  But these were largely for other experts, wonks, policymakers, and journalists to consume, not average citizens. Not the conservative base.

  Hence the need for conservative media outlets: radio shows, television stations, and ideological web sites. What this means is that changes in communications technology—and economic changes in the media industry—represent another central “oven” factor that helps to explain the current split over reality.

  This factor—which allows people to select themselves into ideologically-reinforcing streams of information, and ultimately to construct their own realities—is so powerful that many have argued that it is the cause of the problem we’re tackling. “People don’t believe whatever they want to believe, they believe whatever they can get away with believing,” says University of California-Irvine motivated reasoning researcher Peter Ditto. In a previous era, Ditto remarks, “you might have wanted to believe something, but you turned on Walter Cronkite that night, and he gave you some facts that were different. And now these guys can develop these ideas that are emotionally satisfying and turn to a television station that tells them that that’s true.”

  There’s no downplaying the importance of today’s media in polarizing us over the nature of reality. But in the next chapter, I’ll show that there are also psychological factors which interact with our media choices and drive our desire to be selective about them. Once again, it’s nature and nurture, cake and oven, combined.

  And once again, I will present evidence suggesting that overall, conservatives will react differently in this wild new media context than liberals.

  Notes

  129 In March of 2011 The opening of this chapter is based on an article I wrote for The American Prospect magazine entitled “Reality Bites: The science-based community was once split between Democrats and Republicans—but not anymore,” June 6, 2011.

  129 “global warming alarm is an anti-scientific political movement” This testimony was from J. Scott Armstrong of the University of Pennsylvania. Testimony to Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, Committee on Science, Space and Technology, “Research to date on Forecasting for the Manmade Global Warming Alarm,” March 31, 2011.

  129 in his written testimony Kerry Emanuel, testimony before the House of Representatives’ Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, March 31, 2011. Available online at http://science.house.gov/sites/republicans.science.house.gov/files/documents/hearings/Emanuel%20testimony.pdf.

  130 “I don’t like it when ideology trumps reason” Interview with Kerry Emanuel, April 26, 2011.

  130 “I was so horrified” Interview with Kerry Emanuel, April 26, 2011.

  130 “by silliness and injustice of utterance” Quoted in Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, p. 98.

  131 “There weren’t nutcases” Interview with Kerry Emanuel, April 26, 2011.

  132 a helpful analogy . . . put forward by James Fowler KPBS, “These Days with Maureen Cavanaugh,” “Exploring the ‘Liberal Gene,’” November 1, 2010. Transcript available online at http://www.kpbs.org/news/2010/nov/01/exploring-liberal-gene/.

  133 Schlafly’s story Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

  134 “a formidable political outlook” Critchlow, p. 27.

  134 Manichean worldview As Donald Critchlow writes, “Christian doctrine, as it was interpreted by grassroots anticommunist writers and speakers, magnified the fight against communism into a historic battle between the forces of good and evil, light and darkness, Christianity and paganism. Driven by this apocalyptic vision of a world at war, grassroots anticommunist Protestants and Catholics joined forces in an uneasy alliance to battle their common enemy—communism” (p. 66–67).

  134 “fire and brimstone” Quoted in Critchlow, p. 62.

  134 “Total War” Quoted in Critchlow, p. 63.

  135 the Equal Rights Amendment My account of Schlafly’s successful battle against the ERA is based on Critchlow, Chapter 9, “The ERA Battle Revives the Right,” p. 212–242, and Chapter 10, “The Triumph of the Right,” p. 243–269.

  136 “basic unit of society” Quoted in Critchlow, p. 217.

  136 “it makes the libs so mad!” Quoted in Critchlow, p. 247.

  136 the consummate culture war issue See Critchlow, p. 221: “A remarkable 98 percent of anti-ERA supporters claimed church membership, while only 31 to 48 percent of pro-ERA supporters did. Studies done at the time consistently showed that anti-ERA activists were motivated by a strong belief in the tenets of traditional religion.”

  136 “We taught ‘em politics” Quoted in Critchlow, p. 300.

  137 “Nobody who is a good American is against equality” Quoted in Critchlow, p. 252.

  137 “I just don’t see why some people don’t hit Phyllis Schlafly in the mouth” Quotation from Critchlow, p. 253.

  137 “I would knock her into the next time zone” Quotation from Critchlow, p. 253.

  137 Hundreds turned their backs Kavita Kumar, “Hundreds turn back on Schlafly at ceremony,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 16, 2008.

  137 “I’m not sure they’re mature enough to graduate” Quoted in Karin Agness, “One university rebels against political correctness,” May 20, 2008, available online at http://townhall.com/columnists/karinagness/2008/05/20/one_university_rebels_against_political_correctness/page/full/.

  137 “Much of what is taught as evolution” The Phyllis Schlafly Report, Vol. 34, No. 8, March 2001, available online at http://www.eagleforum.org/psr/2001/mar01/psrmar01.shtml.

  138 “how to be poised and smile when attacked” Critchlow, p. 224.

  138 “effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals” Quoted in Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008, p. 431.

  138 “liberal establishment” Sam Tanenhaus, “The Death of Conservatism,” Slate.com, October 1, 2009, available online at http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_book_club/features/2009/the_death_of_conservatism/the_right_has_always_insisted_its_driven_by_ideas.html.

  140 the most convincing explanation of this occurrence Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler, Authoritarianism & Polarization in American Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

  141 Lewis Powell Quoted in Neil Gross, Thomas Medvetz, and Rupert Russell, “The Contemporary American Conservative Movement,” Annual Review of Sociology, 2011, vol. 37, p. 325–354.

  141 hit back against liberal expertise Conservatives created think tanks, writes Donald Critchlow, “to erect countervailing sources of power to undermine the liberal establishment. The Left had the prestigious Brookings Institution and the liberal academy to influence policy makers and public opinion, and conservatives wanted to create their own sources for what Washington insiders called “policy innovation.” Donald T. Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007, p. 105.

  141 “counterintellectuals” Mark Lilla, “Zionism and the Counter-Intellectuals,” in Israeli Historical Revisionism: From Left to Right, Anita Shapira and Derek J. Penslar, eds., London: Frank Cass, 2003, p. 77–83.

  141 fighting back against the “intellectuals” Another historian who has studied the growth of think tanks, Jason Stahl, spent months in the Library of Congress with the papers of William J. Baroody Sr., the longtime head of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Based on this research, Stahl fi
nds a very similar theme—an intellectual counter-revolution against change, and against liberal expertise. Baroody presided over the dramatically successful growth of his institute, from a staff of 18 and an annual budget of just over $ 1 million in 1970 to a staff of 150 and a budget of $ 10 million by the early 1980s. He did so by inspiring conservative and corporate funders to “break [the] monopoly” on ideas held by the left, and ensure that “the views of other competent intellectuals are given the opportunity to contend effectively in the mainstream of our country’s intellectual activity.” For a lecture in which Jason Stahl describes his research, see here: http://onthinktanks.org/2011/02/17/the-rise-of-conservative-think-tanks-in-the-u-s-marketplace-of-ideas.

  141 Lionel Trilliing Trilling L. 1950. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. New York: Viking. Quoted in Neil Gross, Thomas Medvetz, and Rupert Russell, “The Contemporary American Conservative Movement,” Annual Review of Sociology, 2011, vol. 37, p. 325–354.

  141 helping conservatives to construct their own reality For the role of think tanks in organizing and supporting the conservative denial of global warming, see Peter J. Jacques, Riley E. Dunlap, and Mark Freeman, “The organization of denial: Conservative think tanks and environmental skepticism,” Environmental Politics, 17:3, p. 349–385.

  142 American professors have been drifting steadily to the left Interview with Neil Gross, April 12, 2011.

  142 “the highly educated comprise a key constituency for American liberalism” Ethan Fosse, Jeremy Freese, and Neil Gross, “Political Liberalism and Graduate School Attendance: A Longitudinal Analysis,” Working Paper, February 25, 2011. Available online at: https://www10.arts.ubc.ca/fileadmin/template/main/images/departments/soci/faculty/gross/fosse_freese_gross_2_25.pdf. Findings at p. 40–41.

  143 Project Steve The Steve-o-Meter can be found online at http://ncse.com/taking-action/project-steve.

  143 “you do feel yourself kind of beleaguered in an intellectual world that’s not hospitable to you” Chris Mooney interview with David Frum and Kenneth Silber, Point of Inquiry podcast, August 1, 2011. Available online at http://www.pointofinquiry.org/david_frum_and_kenneth_silber_conservatives_and_science/.