In honor of CPAC, the annual right-wing cavalcade of clowns.
We have always known they were stupid; they reconfirm it with every inane utterance about how government is the enemy, the family is being destroyed by gay marriages and women no longer “know their place,” global warming is a hoax to take away tax breaks for oil companies, the hagiography of Ronald Reagan, and the alleged foreign birth of Barack Obama. The list could go on for pages, but we know they’re stupid too because there are so many obvious ways that the social changes in public policies that they are for or against what obviously, in the final calculus, benefit them. We know there’s stupid because their ideologies, prejudices, and susceptibility to sheer fantasy drive them further and further from rationality. We know this because we all know some of them. There are around us, everywhere, even in our own families, and laced through the media. Theirs is a ubiquitous stupidity. We know from experience, but there has been far less empirical confirmation of our intuitions and inferences from their behavior.
Now we have some evidence of an empirical sort. I know this sets the up for charges of arrogance, elitism, and other leftist malevolence. I can hear the mumbling out there amongst some of you, and I say this: it’s not that I’m alleging that I’m smarter than you, I’m alleging that far right wing political conservatives are dumber than a cherry stone clam. Well, there, I’ve said it. (Actually, anyone who’s read these pages for any length of time knows that I’ve set it in a host of different ways on a variety of topics for years.)
When I say “you,” I mean a plural you, an amalgam of all those who formulate and give form to that body of values, attitudes, and opinions I cited above. So I only mean a specific “you” should a reader self-identify (perhaps even with some pride) as to I mean as being politically stupid. I could of course have someone specific in mind at times, in which case I am referring to a singular, but unidentified, you. No, not you. You, there in the back. No, not you; the one to the right. No, silly, to my right. There. No, not you . . . Yes . . . You. Raise your right hand, will you? . . . Okay, any hand will do. Thanks. Yes, it’s you I sometimes think of in these remarks–you can put your hand down now– yes, you, the one with the . . . is that a wart?
Okay, I was just having a little fun with you there. Of course you know I wasn’t talking to you. So let’s get back on point.
I’m going to reprint here in the entire abstract from a recent article in the Canadian journal Psychological Science, “Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact,” by Gordon Hodson and Michael A. Busseri.
Despite their important implications for interpersonal behaviors and relations, cognitive abilities have been largely ignored as explanations of prejudice. We proposed and tested mediation models in which lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice, an effect mediated through the endorsement of right-wing ideologies (social conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism) and low levels of contact with out-groups. In an analysis of two large-scale, nationally representative United Kingdom data sets (N = 15,874), we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology. A secondary analysis of a U.S. data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact. All analyses controlled for education and socioeconomic status. Our results suggest that cognitive abilities play a critical, albeit underappreciated, role in prejudice. Consequently, we recommend a heightened focus on cognitive ability in research on prejudice and a better integration of cognitive ability into prejudice models.
These are data that confirm suspicions built upon contact and intuition going all the way back to the beginning of the Reagan era, and the inexorable devolution of the Republican Party into political idiocy. Now we can deconstruct some of its components. Starting out with lower cognitive ability inclines one toward prejudice and greater racism in adulthood. Dimwittedness gets reinforced by exposure to right-wing ideologies, social insularity, and lack of intergroup exposure. As these groups become more suspicious and fearful of contact with people exhibiting open minds to a broader range of ideas their prejudices compound one another.
There is ample evidence for this in the babblings of the current prophetic candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, a process that panders to the lowest common denominator, to the dumbing down of political discourse and cranking up of the prejudices compounded by right wing ideology and religious fundamentalism. The Republican Party has become a captive of its subservience to the far political right such that it has become a contest of who can win the approbation of some fool festooned with flags and teabags that you wouldn’t let wash your car much less choose your political leadership. There is no specificity in the discussion of public policy only illusions, charged references, labels, claims of patriotism, piety, and of course ultra conservatism. These wannabe presidents somehow believe that they are keeping their racism camouflaged behind oblique references that maintain the dual necessities of signaling to the base and maintaining plausible deniability. They think we are as stupid as they are.
There is also a degree of comic relief provided by such stupid people. Take, for example, the fact that much many of the Republicans cannot abide Mitt Romney as their presidential nominee. This is the same party that does everything it can to favor the rich, and Romney is a guy they have to deal with because he is so rich he can stay in the race as long as he pleases. The problem with the philosophy that the end justifies the means is that sometimes the means becomes the end.
There is an almost pathetically amusing side to the stupidity of Republicans these days. Their inexorably rightward sliding notion of retro-conservatism wistfully imagines those bygone days when families went out for Sunday drives in big Detroit–built sedans that guzzled $.33/gallon American fossil, when John Wayne never used the F word in any of his movies, homosexuals weren’t the stars of sit-coms, when Coke came in glass bottles shaped like a woman, and minorities knew their place (and it wasn’t the White House), among a myriad of other “bygones” they summon when they screech “I want my country back.” They retreat to their all-adult, social-zombies Florida retirement communities, Montana survivalist camps, and other enclaves for small, inferiority–complexed minds, strapping on their Second Amendment rights in wait for the onslaught of armies of immigrants, Muslims, and liberals. If only they would only confine themselves to nurturing their fantasies and not attempt to impose their values upon the rest of us. But no, they want us to be stupid, too.*
Finally, we know that the Republicans are stupid because we have had eight years of a certified stupid guy (and certified chicken hawk military shirker) in the White House. Certainly we are not going to repeat his policies that not only brought us to the brink of another Great Depression.
You know who I am talking about, right? Huh? C’mon, c’mon, c’mon [finger snaps, Jeopardy jingle]. You forgot!? Yah, sure.
So, maybe you are the “you” I was talking about.
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© 2012, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 2.11.2012)
*This is how stupid they think we are. On religious-based employers must provide contraception coverage for their employees issue right-wing religious fundamentalists are making the claim that this provision takes away their religious rights. When, in fact, if you have a brain that can process fairly simple logic, it is obvious that the reverse is the case: the employers, by refusing to do so, would be foisting their values upon their workers, abridging their rights. Of course, this problem would be obviated by a single-payer health assurance system that takes both the employer an insurance companies out of the equation.