Quote:
Originally Posted by bas_I_am
The only thing I can determine is their leanings are somehow instinctual and emotional. There is no fact that will ever sway them.
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I think it's pretty self-evident to anyone who's followed (never mind studied) politics for a while that the Republicans - compared to the Dems -are much more adept and experienced at resorting to smears and aggression and one-liners and simplistic appeals to fear and ignorance and ensuring their candidates are people "you'd like to have a beer with" and corny emotive warmth... folksy shucks darn tootin' you betcha. As tactics, they work; their target audience are more receptive to it. It's why, to many Republican supporters, the terms effete and intellectual and elite have become virtually interchangeable as insults. It's why many progressives were so utterly disgusted with Hillary when she chose to adopt similar tactics for her leadership campaign.
(We could open this out to other embarrassing (in a PC/taboo sort of way) yet undeniable overall correlations involving level of education or propensity to religion, but it'll go way off-topic)
Certainly I would never be as crass as to suggest all Republicans or Republican voters are wired up that way. But we'd be fooling ourselves if we didn't recognize the correlation of the conservative mindset to the emotional/instinctual way of "thinking". It's exactly the same here in Britain, with those reactionary dog-whistle issues that get conservatives responding from some lower part of their brain. There are a handful of conservative politicians and commentators who, to me at least, appear to buck that trend, but it would be silly to pretend they're not in the minority.
There was something in the news only a few weeks ago that detailed how a
propensity to a certain political outlook (conservative/liberal) could be more hard-wired into our brains than we realise. Similar to what was posited a couple of years back, but was criticized at the time for its generalizations.
I'll see if I can find a link to it.