Traditional American politics is dead. The battle of ideals and policies is long gone and has been replaced by a battle between the sane and the insane. The political Right is exhibiting a near cult-like behavior where their many thought leaders are orchestrating a rhythm of hatred and discord that their followers are seemingly addicted to. It’s impossible to keep up with the toxic messaging that is spewing out of a wide range of conservative voices — ranging from subtle to shocking but always nonstop and always from multiple sources. They are feeding Americans a steady stream of new conspiracies to believe, new people to hate, and new ideas to fear — all of which, they are quick to point out, can only be remedied by the Republicans. They provide the “threat” and the “haven” — both of which are illusions.

These folks have always known that fear is one of our strongest and most primitive emotions and therefore one of our weakest points, and they play it, and us, perfectly to get what they want out of us. There’s a big difference between a divided nation and a nation that is actively and maliciously being divided, and we are the latter.

Fear-mongering does much more damage to us than we realize and it is critical that we understand the psychological behaviors related to fear, self-esteem, etc. that we all share and how they have been used to exploit many of us to the point of creating this national cult. Democrats do not seem to understand that fear, anger, and confusion are now buried deep in the subconscious of many of us and that a few speeches from behind a lectern will not help and could easily make things worse.

Our Malleable Minds

What follows is a cursory overview of some of the psychology behind our behaviors, all supported by years of research and studies. One thing to remember is that the behaviors outlined below are not necessarily associated with lower intelligence — people with higher intelligence simply come up with more sophisticated logic and reasoning to justify their emotional responses (which are often driven by their subconscious).

Flavors of Fear

Fear is one of our most primitive emotions and its job is to keep us safe. Readers may be familiar with the idea that fear quickly puts us into “fight or flight” mode when we sense danger. Threats will instantly trigger responses in the brain that will bypass reason for the sake of efficiency. Fear changes how we process information and react to that information well before we realize we do – all to keep us safe from direct threats. 

While fear protects us from immediate danger, anxiety and angst have the ability to destroy us. Anxiety is caused by persistent threats and angst is caused by your perception of an unraveling world. (For brevity, this article will use anxiety as a term that combines anxiety and angst.) Like fear, anxiety can reduce our ability to reason and increase our sensitivity to threats – but with anxiety, our imagination can come into play and that can make things worse and drag them out. Anxiety can make us retreat to the familiar (family, friends, tradition, rituals, people like us, etc.) for safety,  and when we do, it is not only from the threat (perceived or actual) but also from anything or anyone different from us. Anxiety reduces our ability to rationalize making us more likely to “see” exaggerated evil or threat in those who are different than us and, just as dangerous, we are more likely to accept the negatives or even the evils of those who are similar to us. It’s important to remember that much of this goes on in our subconscious, but the resulting actions are very much out in the open.

Terror Management Theory

Another thing our subconscious does is help us forget that we are mortal. One reason humanity has been able to deal with this unfortunate reality is that our subconscious drove us to create or embrace social constructs such as religion, tradition, heritage, ritual, family, patriotism, etc. These can create a greater meaning for our existence, a sense that we are part of something larger than us, or sometimes even a sense of immortality. Many of our social constructs act as a sedative that helps us subconsciously manage the terror created by our mortality awareness.

The deeply important comfort these constructs provide makes us highly protective of them and creates two responses in us. The first is that when we are reminded of our mortality (or exposed to mortal threats) we tend to fall back on our social constructs and look negatively at differing constructs and the people that embrace them. The second is that threats (real or perceived) to these constructs, especially those such as religion and heritage, are interpreted by our subconscious as threats to our “immortality”. In fact, the mere existence of an opposing construct (such as a different religion) invalidates our construct and therefore invalidates the meaning of our existence. This can trigger a “mortality defense” in our subconscious that will drive us to do whatever it takes to protect ourselves from these “threats”. This helps to explain why wars and genocide are often related to religion, race, tribalism, etc. We are willing to die to protect the constructs that give us “immortality”.

This behavior has been proven by social psychologists through hundreds of experiments performed around the world. It is known as Terror Management Theory and is very important to this discussion as it points out that seemingly benign fear-mongering can deeply affect listeners. In experiments, subjects who were reminded of their immortality responded with behaviors of bigotry and anti-nature. Other experiments have confirmed that death reminders or even artificial threats to our social constructs can push us to dangerous and deadly behaviors.

Self-esteem

There is more to self-esteem than driving around in a big truck or a Lexus. It’s also about our place in society – are we fitting in, do we belong, are we contributing, or are we successful to the degree that our society expects?

Many of us feel we’ve been left behind or victimized by modern society. Whether our condition is real, imagined, or persuaded it creates anxiety and crushes self-esteem. Being discarded and left to rot by society hurts us deeply and makes us susceptible to exploitation…

Humans need strong self-esteem more than we realize and one way our subconscious helps is to look down on others. This provides at least some, albeit false, sense of dignity or superiority by allowing us to believe that we are better than at least some people. Unfortunately, our subconscious will also tell us exactly who we should look down upon, and again, it will be those who are different from us. Importantly it doesn’t matter if they have caused our suffering – they are different and that is all our subconscious cares about. This also makes us susceptible to exploitation.

Exploitability comes into play from our low self-esteem making us vulnerable to the influence of others. This often happens as we subconsciously turn to charismatic leaders who promise to restore our rightful place in society. Our instinct to repair our self-esteem by looking down on “others” is magnified when authority figures (falsely) validate our feelings of being victimized and tell us precisely who to blame and why… and what we should do about them.

Low self-esteem works hand-in-hand with anxiety. When our self-esteem is in poor shape we are more susceptible to being pulled into a spiral of growing anxiety and despair, all leading to further damaged self-esteem.

Group Identity

We are social creatures and we rely on each other more than most would admit. Our brains have been hard-wired for millions of years to rely on “the group” to survive. Homo Erectus stood little chance against a saber-tooth tiger so being booted from the tribe was a death sentence. Because of this wiring, we see social rejection as an existential threat and we will look for inclusion in any accepting group for our safety.

When fear or damaged self-esteem makes us withdraw or if we feel ostracized, we are greatly relieved to find others like us.  We don’t need to interact with them – just knowing they exist gives us a much-needed sense of belonging and safety as we feel that those who are most like us can be the ones who will help us restore our world.

Belonging to a group will keep us safe and boost our self-esteem, making us very protective of our group membership. Not only do we identify with the group, but the group can become our identity and we are willing to reshape ourselves to be more like the people in our group. We will even gladly trade in our morality for that of the group in exchange for our survival. We can further boost our self-esteem by exaggerating the worthiness and purity of our group while denigrating others.

The safety we find in our group is more important to us than truth and we will readily ignore facts or embrace conspiracy theories if that helps to prove our commitment to the group. This is exacerbated by the internet and social media, which create a 24/7/365 virtual back porch where actual interactions with our new-found group validate and amplify the fears and threats that brought us together while increasing our distrust of outsiders.

As we increase our reliance on and connectivity to people like us we also decrease our connectivity to others and we lose our sense of a balanced and mutually empathetic society. As we can see every day in the news, this can easily spiral out of control, resulting in tribalism and cultism.

Finding meaning, purpose, and identity in a group makes moving away from it very difficult. In doing so, you’d betray those who give your life meaning and head out into the unknown and possibly a hostile environment where you would be surrounded by those you’ve attacked. For this reason, it is critically important that we assure MAGA Americans, activist Evangelicals, Christian Nationalists, and far-right extremists that they are welcome back – no questions asked.

Cognitive bias

Cognitive biases are mental shortcuts we all use to simplify or quickly process information. As is often the case with shortcuts, the results aren’t typically ideal and our biases can make us easily misinterpret the world around us. There are many types of cognitive biases – we’ll look at two.

Confirmation bias is our tendency to interpret events or information in a way that supports or strengthens our existing beliefs. It also causes us to actively seek out confirming information and ignore contradictory information – skipping over newspaper articles based on their headline is a typical example. It is another way we protect our self-esteem by continually validating our beliefs and values.   

In-group bias causes us to prefer those people in our group while disregarding others – the “out-group”. Tightly coupled with the above discussion on Group Identity, in-group bias greatly influences our interpretation of information.  If information comes from a source that we believe is against our group we will tend to ignore it or maybe even consider it an attack. 

In both cases, we will “dig in our heels” or “double down” on our position, sometimes regardless of the cost or danger to ourselves, to protect our ego, self-esteem, or group. The more emotionally attached we are to a belief the stronger we will react against conflicting information, ideas, or people.

Physiology

Experiments have provided ample evidence that even brain structure comes into play as those people who identify as conservatives tend to have a larger and more responsive amygdala (the fear and anxiety processor in our brain), conversely, those who identify as liberals showed more activity in their anterior cingulate cortex which is believed to be related to accepting change.

This aligns with other studies that show that Conservatives’ sensitivity to fear causes them to more readily retreat to the familiar and comfortable and are therefore more likely to lean on religion, nostalgia, tradition, heritage, and well-defined hierarchical and authoritative structure for both family and society.  Related research has shown that Conservatives’ morality tends to come from the top down and is rooted in purity, while Liberals’ morality tends to be more “horizontal” and rooted in fairness.

The impact of prolonged anxiety can rewire and even restructure our brain as an “activated” amygdala will continually impact neurotransmitters, neurochemical and hormonal levels, nerve circuits, etc. Over time, anxiety can reduce the physical size and capabilities in areas of the brain related to reason, emotional responses, and memory while increasing the physical size and sensitivity of the amygdala, making us even more defensive and susceptible to fear and anxiety.

The Psychological Perfect Storm

All of the above is just part of being human and none of it is necessarily bad. Left purely to our own devices humanity would probably get along fairly well. Unfortunately, people have always been under the influence of leaders in one way or another and it’s pretty easy to see how our subconscious processes and today’s abundance of ill-intentioned voices and actions can easily align against us. Because most of this happens in the background it is difficult for us to self-correct. We’re even unable to recognize it in our resulting conscious and often public behavior.

Through no fault of our own, many of us have been left behind by decades of wealth-inspired, conservative-driven policies such as supply-side (trickledown) economics, runaway (and one-way) capitalism, the free-market ideology, etc. This resulted in a decimated working class, a massive shift of wealth, and a corrupted pro-corporate government that made us disengage out of frustration. Others, through relentless conservative fear-mongering, have been persuaded to believe that we either have been or soon will be left behind. On top of that, there’s a national awareness that we’re in a rigged system, we’re working harder for less money, and many of us are a mere pink slip or diagnosis away from financial ruin.

People like certainty, control, and a sense of belonging, but any of the above can make us feel that we’re losing everything –  our livelihood, places in society, and comforting social constructs.  This has a devastating impact on us as we are overwhelmed by diminished self-esteem and increased anxiety about our future. In turn, we become more vulnerable to the daily barrage of divisive rhetoric and more willing to be herded into those ready-made safe havens (such as The Tea Party, MAGA, QAnon, Trump rallies, etc.), which ultimately make us even more easily manipulated and controlled.

Conservative media has been orchestrating a long-running attack on our sanity. Initially, it was only to provide cover for their pro-corporate policies, but it has evolved over the years to be more about control – and they are no longer subtle about it. Their rhetoric has moved far beyond “welfare queens” and “takers vs. job makers” as they keep us in a constant state of anxiety with a steady supply of manufactured threats to saturate our minds, making us dizzy with fear and hate and making us unable to process our world. An abbreviated walk through this history includes:

• Urban crime
• UnAmerican, oddly dressed, and military-hating hippies
• Expoititative welfare queens vs. hard-working independent workers
• The Left’s push for socialism
• The Left’s attack on Christmas
• Coastal elite vs. the fly-over states
• A Kenyan/Muslim president
• Democrats taking our guns away
• Reframing the pandemic response as a socialist/communist plot
• The stolen election
• Critical Race Theory
• The Left’s softness on pedophilia
• Grooming children
• Replacement theory
• Reframing bigotry as freedom of speech
• Reframing the protection of minorities as wokeness
• Biden’s burger ban (seriously)

These are repeated over and over again in a non-stop barrage that prevents our minds from coming up for air. In fact, we keep going back for more so we can get a confirmation bias “fix” from Fox News or from elected officials at the highest levels who validate our mass-produced anxiety and rage and tell us that only they understand and support us. It’s worth repeating that social media also plays a big role here with algorithms that filter out any countering information while simultaneously allowing us to find online interactions where we commiserate only with those who “suffer” as we do. This increases our isolation and reduces that important connectivity to other groups and ideas in society.

When our world is crumbling and our self-esteem is in desperate need of repair we eagerly embrace and even obey the charismatic voices that promise to alleviate our suffering. Authoritative leaders have always divided and exploited vulnerable populations and Donald Trump is no exception. If candidate Trump had one message, it was “There are many forces that are working against you, and only I can save you”.  We are empowered when public leaders at the highest levels openly, even if disingenuously, have our back. We believe that such leaders will return what has been taken from us. Trump drastically increased our divide by feeding and exploiting the top-down, purity-based morality of Conservatives while simultaneously attacking the fairness-based morality of Liberals.

This psychological perfect storm of anxiety, poor self-esteem, group identity, and a charismatic leader can be used to control us to dangerous levels. Under these conditions, many of us believe we now possess a newfound power. With this power, combined with the belief that our very lives are at stake, we are ready to make sacrifices for our protectors, protect our group, and even strike out at the “threats”.  This feeling of power makes up for all the years we were wrongly cast aside – and we will not let go of this power. We are oblivious to the fact that this power is a myth that will be short-lived

All of this has allowed the Right to create a brotherhood of perpetual victimhood and their membership drive is relentless. They tell us every day that we are victims and that there is nothing we can do about it other than use the unwritten rule that victims are allowed to strike back.

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Those of us who identify as conservative are a bit more vulnerable to all of this because of a tighter relationship with heritage and tradition, greater resistance to change, and a stronger desire for a structured hierarchy of authority. None of these are wrong or bad, but they are ruthlessly used against many of us.

Untangling our Synapses

Thoughtful and helpful legislation, the occasional speech, and catchy slogans during campaign season will do little to unwind this mess. If we expect to calm folks down and bring them back to the table then we first need to understand what has pushed them to the brink in the first place. Only then will we have political discussions that once again include reason and a rational view of the world. 

Words are powerful and have more impact on people than most of us realize; because of this, it is important to choose those words wisely — especially these days. We don’t necessarily have to coddle everyone all the time, but being aware of what messages will fan the flames can guide us in tempering what we say. If done correctly, not only will we reduce the digging in of heels, but we will give listeners more constructive things to think about and work towards. There are discussions to avoid or reframe and there are discussions to carefully highlight. District-level elections are often won or lost by a handful of votes so more thoughtful messaging could make a difference.

Even now, with Democracy staring down a cliff, Democrats still fail to see that they sometimes needlessly push voters away, contributing to Democracy’s slide. To be clear, it is the Conservatives and Republicans that have gone down a shockingly dangerous path, keeping their base in a state of war. But the Republicans aren’t going to change (other than getting worse), and neither is conservative media and even mainstream media…so the Democrats must change.