The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (33 page)

Translation: Conservatives are literally too stupid to be spell-checkers at an M&M factory because they won’t be able to understand that the occasional W is just an upside down M, particularly when they start coming off the conveyor belt really fast like in the chocolate factory episode of
I Love Lucy
.

Shamelessly egged on by David Amodio, lead author of the study, the mainstream press ran with these findings as if they had found the key to unlocking the mysteries of politics.
The Guardian
dutifully declared, “Scientists have found that the brains of people calling themselves liberals are more able to handle conflicting and unexpected information.”
³
The
Los Angeles Times
announced in an editorial that the study “suggests that liberals are more adaptable than conservatives” and “might be better judges of the facts.”
⁴
Imagine a liberal driver and a conservative driver, Amodio told the
Times
. “If he’s a liberal,” the editors conclude, “he is more likely to be alert to a detour. If he’s a conservative, he’s more likely to, well, stay the course.”

“Stay the course” was, at the time, a reference to the Iraq war. Get it? And we all know that such liberal lions like Lyndon Johnson or John F. Kennedy would never, ever think of staying the course in a quagmire. And it must have been the old liberal in Ronald Reagan that caused him to suddenly reverse course and pull troops out of Beirut.

In another study,
⁵
researchers telephoned 1,310 residents of Lincoln, Nebraska. Out of that number, slightly more than 10 percent (143) of them had strong political views and were willing to come into a university lab for testing. In the end, 46 of them finished the test. The researchers measured the reactions of the subjects to disturbing images—maggots in a wound, spiders on a face, a dazed man covered in blood—as well as their responses to sudden loud noises. The authors found a statistically significant correlation between the fear responses of subjects and support for various “Protective Policies.” According to the authors:

Individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats.
⁶

In both cases, the samples are tiny and extremely vulnerable to filtering bias. Perhaps liberals are simply more deferential to academic authorities and therefore have calmer responses when the expert in the lab coat busts out the calipers or electrodes? Maybe liberals are more interested in pleasing their inquisitors? Perhaps skeptical conservatives are constantly wondering “What the Hell are these people doing?” Perhaps the findings reflect some other underlying but unappreciated causation such as religious attitudes?

As for the more ludicrous “M versus W” study, it’s difficult to know where to begin. The study purports to measure the subjects’ comfort with complexity and ambiguity, but as
Slate
’s science columnist William Saletan notes, the study actually excludes complexity and ambiguity and instead measures the reaction time to a binary visual acuity test: seeing Ms and upside down Ms. Almost by definition, conscious thought has no role in a video-game test measured in milliseconds. How can liberals be deemed to be more intellectually supple based on this nonsense? Would Socrates be better at spotting rogue Ws on a screen than the average mouth-breathing teenage gamer?

As ridiculous as some of this is, it doesn’t mean that these researchers are all just a bunch of Jacobins in smocks. Some are clearly judicious, committed professionals. And for every outlandish claim or study, there’s another scientist pointing out the numerous flaws and holes in their work.

Besides, it’s not preposterous to believe that there’s ample nature to go with the nurture when it comes to our political views. Scientists know that we
are not blank slates. We are hardwired as a species to believe and act in certain ways. In fact, conservatives have been saying as much for several millennia now—think original sin and human nature—while the Left has repeatedly bought into the idea we are born Rousseauian noble savages, or at least that the crooked timber of humanity can be straightened in a progressive fashion.

In other words, this is not a new story. The right is often accused, not always inaccurately, of thinking it has “God on its side.” This claim, according to various narratives, is a terrible thing for a long list of obvious and less than obvious reasons. It causes the self-declared chosen people to turn their opponents into enemies and their enemies into demons. It breeds witch hunts and closed-mindedness.

Well, for the Left science has long been a god. Friedrich Hayek called this misuse of science as “scientism”—the assumption and claim that scientific principles can be smuggled into the world of nonscience. As we’ve seen, part of the genius behind Marxism’s brand was its claim to be scientific. It came along at the dawn of “God’s funeral” when Western Civilization was casting about for a new source of certainty, a new infallible insight to the direction and meaning of history. It’s a largely forgotten insight to both Marx and Engels that they came to their communism via their atheism, and not the other way around. They hated God and sought to replace Him with a more reliable competitor. The Marxist god of science was the sole source of truth. Those who disagreed were denying not merely a “better way” but “objective” reality.

This was why the concept of “false consciousness” was so essential to communism. Any worldview, any ideology, that ran contrary to the atheist gospel of scientific socialism was delusional. Recognizing and accepting class consciousness was the secular equivalent of being born again for Jesus. Georges Sorel, the intellectual John the Baptist of both Italian Fascism and Russian Leninism, recognized that the science of Marxian scientific socialism was nonsense, but it worked extremely well as a political religion. He argued that
Das Kapital
should be seen as an “apocalyptic text… as a product of the spirit, as an image created for the purpose of molding consciousness.”
⁷
This created the rationale for the Leninist vanguard of the proletariat, the intellectual high priests of Marxism who took it upon themselves to shape attitudes and wage a merciless war on
backward thinking. They had the god of science on their side and that freed them up to say or do anything to deliver mankind to the next stage of history and, eventually, a new Kingdom of Heaven on Earth—the ultimate goal of the revolutionaries. “I suddenly realized that the devout Russian people no longer needed priests to pray them into heaven,” wrote John Reed, the American Communist journalist in his chronicle of the Russian Revolution,
Ten Days That Shook the World.
“On earth they were building a kingdom more bright than any heaven had to offer, and for which it was a glory to die.”

Not every socialist was a Marxist, in the same way that not every Protestant is a Lutheran. But these ideas were in the water. In America the progressives had their own version of the kingdom of Heaven, their own scientific gospels, their own hymns at God’s funeral. The pragmatists, too, sought liberation from the old dogmas. The eugenicists set to work at weeding out the old blood lines of those unfit for the next great leap forward in history. The social gospellers sought not to defenestrate Jesus but to rebrand him as “the first socialist.” But one thing united all of these disparate denominations of the church of scientific determinism: those who did not share the faith were a problem, a problem that needed to be solved.

In the late 1940s, Theodore Adorno, the Marxist sociologist and philosopher, was the lead author of perhaps the most influential—and most shoddy—piece of social science of the twentieth century. Ultimately published as a book entitled
The Authoritarian Personality
, the study purported to “prove” that holding conservative or right-wing views was a mental defect. Using the notorious “F-Scale” test (the F stood for Fascist), Adorno and his colleagues purported to have come up with an objective test to determine how protofascist—or just plain fascist—a person was. The problem was that the test—as well as the long interviews the researchers conducted—worked from the assumption that traditionalism and devotion to a strong family were both symptoms and causes of fascism (Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleagues were convinced that Nazism was spawned by the traditional German family). If that wasn’t bad enough, a test designed to find totalitarian tendencies treated Communists—including outright Stalinists—and conventional American liberals as almost indistinguishable. In fact, Adorno thought that anyone
who saw similarities between Nazism and communism was suffering from delusions. A methodological mess,
The Authoritarian Personality
used next to no statistical sampling and relied on tendentious interview techniques, loaded phrases, and ideological question begging.

While
The Authoritarian Personality
had its diligent critics, it electrified the liberal academic nervous system. Richard Hofstadter, one of the most influential liberal historians of the twentieth century, drank deep and long from Adorno’s elixir, arguing that all political arguments could be boiled down to cheap psychological motivations. Charles Beard was a pioneer of this approach as well, arguing that the Founding Fathers were motivated by little more than their class consciousness as rich landowners. In 1958, Herbert McClosky, a trailblazer in the field of “political behavior,” published his famous “Conservatism and Personality” study in the American Political Science Review. His extensive “research,” complete with the “latest methods,” found that the conservative “fears change, dreads disorder, and is intolerant of nonconformity,” and he tends to “derogate reason and intellectuality and… eschew theory.” These “personality types” were drawn from the ranks of “the uninformed, the poorly educated, and… the less intelligent,” but also that they were “inflexible and unyielding” and “intolerant.” To boot, the conservative “derogates reason.”

How can you reason with people who are hardwired to “derogate reason”?

Throughout the 1960s, this arrogant bigotry masked as science leached into the popular political culture, finding expression in editorials, books, and even films (the General Jack D. Ripper character in the movie
Dr. Strangelove
and his phobia about Communists sapping our precious bodily fluids was a perfect satirical stand-in for the work of Adorno, McClosky, et al.). In 1964, over a thousand mental-health professionals thought nothing of signing a statement that Senator Barry Goldwater was not “psychologically fit” to be president of the United States—without ever having met him. Why? Because he was a conservative. The organizer of the petition took out an ad in the
New York Times
announcing this very scientific finding. Goldwater sued—and won.

Today textbooks from grade school to grad school are chockablock with subtle variations of this clinical bias, working from the assumption that conservatism is
something to be educated out of students. In 2003, researchers at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Personality and Social Research published “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition” in the
Psychological Bulletin
—one of the most prestigious journals of academic psychology. The study did no original research. Rather, it performed a meta-analysis of previous studies, some eighty-eight in all, and found—shockingly!—that conservatism is, as much now as ever was, a kind of mental defect. The methodology was the academic equivalent of shouting into an echo chamber and discovering that there are indeed echoes inside.

The press release issued by Berkeley explained that:

Disparate conservatives share a resistance to change and acceptance of inequality. Hitler, Mussolini, and former President Ronald Reagan were individuals, but all were right-wing conservatives because they preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality in some form. Talk host Rush Limbaugh can be described the same way, the authors commented in a published reply to the article.
⁸

Ahah. So Hitler and Mussolini—who both sought to socialize their economies, ban guns, ban dissent, ban freedom of every kind—were just like Reagan and Rush Limbaugh, who hold diametrically opposite positions in virtually every regard. Hitler was obsessive about economic and social equality—for all Germans. Mussolini never for a moment relinquished his adamantine faith—forged as a leader of the Italian Socialist Party—that he was a revolutionary. What’s more, both men were devoutly atheistic enemies of Christianity, and yet the literature going back to Adorno and McClosky tells us that religious dogmatism is the soul of conservatism.

The actual paper is no better. What about authoritarian personalities like, say, Castro and Stalin? Easy! They too were conservatives. The authors write:

There are also cases of left-wing ideologues who, once they are in power, steadfastly resist change, allegedly in the name of egalitarianism, such as Stalin or Khrushchev or Castro (see J. Martin, Scully, &
Levitt, 1990). It is reasonable to suggest that some of these historical figures may be considered politically conservative.
⁹

We are in the funhouse now. If your algorithmic whirligig spits out the finding that Joseph Stalin—the global leader of communism for two decades—and Fidel Casto—the global dashboard saint of recrudescent left-wing asininity, may now be reasonably “considered politically conservative” it’s time to take the gadget out to a field and smash it with baseball bats like the printer in the movie
Office
Space
. And remember: in no way were Stalin and Castro “against change.” Stalin transformed eastern Europe, imposed revolutionary changes from above, attempted to create the “New Soviet Man,” erase religion, and slaughtered millions. During this time the cream of the American Left defined opposition to all of this as backward and fascist.