It’s all about our brains. Yes, I know you’ve always suspected as much, but there is actual evidence that liberals and conservatives make decisions based on completely different criteria.
Cognitive scientist George Lakoff in his 2008 book, The Political Mind, wrote that conservatives understand that most functions of the brain are grounded not in logical reasoning, but emotionalism, and they use this knowledge in wooing voters. He wrote that Democrats repeatedly fail to win elections because they make their case with logic, instead of emotion.
Lakoff assumed that Democrats do this because they see decision-making as a rational process of the brain. But it goes deeper than this; the brains of liberals and conservatives seem to actually be hard-wired differently.
Brain scans of 90 students at University College London=s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in 2010 discovered a strong correlation between the size of the amygdala C a primitive part of the brain associated with emotion C and those who said they held right-wing political beliefs. The thicker the gray matter in this area was in a person, the greater the likelihood that they’d describe themselves as liberal or left wing. And (as you’d expect) the thinner it was, as conservative or right wing. When the gray matter is thinner in this part of the brain associated with emotion, people are guided more by emotion; when thicker, by logical reasoning.
A study published in NeuroImage in 2006 that wasn’t concerned with political beliefs but IQ, found that the thicker this area, the higher the IQ. Whether thickness causes higher IQ, or higher IQs result when individuals are more drawn to mental activity, this study also seems to bear out the idea that more liberal people respond to reasoned argument, while more conservative people respond to emotional appeals.
Which brings us to elections:
Liberals try to convince voters with rationality and facts. This is because liberals are, themselves, inclined to be convinced by rationality. While conservatives use the methods that they find most convincing: emotions.
Democrats, when they see a choice between “head” and “heart,” vote with their head. Republicans, when they see that same choice, vote with their heart.
This is why we saw debates like the ones between Al Gore and George W. Bush in October of 2000, where Democrats were convinced Gore had won hands-down, with his command of facts and detailed policy plans. While Republicans were equally convinced that Bush had won, because he connected better emotionally with his audience with his simpler message: I will lower taxes.
In this current electoral climate, when populism has returned to the United States as we haven’t seen since the 1930s, two people are perceived as authentic representatives of this new populism: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Each is lauded for his honesty and (surprisingly, in the case of Donald Trump, the “blue-collar billionaire”) representing the concerns of the working class.
Andrew Jackson may be targeted for removal from the $20 bill by 2030 (don’t count on it) but Jackson was actually America’s first populist president. The Jacksonian era oversaw the “rise of the common man” in the 1820s.
The disconnect between the establishment elite and the common man was even more obvious back then. Massive, enthusiastic crowds attended Jackson’s inauguration to the horror of people like Noah Webster who wrote that, “A monstrous crowd of people is in the city. I never saw anything like it before. Persons have come five hundred miles to see General Jackson, and they really seem to think that the country is rescued from some dreadful danger.”
It is Trump and Sanders who are attracting these kinds of enthusiastic and emotional crowds in 2016. Today’s (despite appearances at times, still smarter than average) journalists seem as unable to comprehend the phenomenon as Webster.
But the evidence that we have entered into another period of populism supporting the rise of the common man is still the same.
Bernie Sanders resembles Andrew Jackson in his humble beginnings and the platform Jackson ran on. Jackson was the first of our presidents to be born in a log cabin and to rail against the corruption of the wealthy elite and their banking system. (He broke up the national bank, as promised, once elected.)
Donald Trump resembles Jackson in his scapegoating of minorities. Andrew Jackson is today most remembered for his policy of Indian removal. In 1830, Jackson pushed the Indian Removal Act through Congress. It was this policy that led, in time, to the forced removal of the Cherokee from their lands, as 7,000 troops marched the Cherokee at gunpoint along what has become known as the Trail of Tears; 4,000 died along the way.
Democrats appear ready to accede to the logic of the establishment’s case: that they should vote with their heads, not their hearts, despite all the signs pointing to this being an election where such a strategy will fail. (Ask Jeb Bush.)
But that’s what liberals are hardwired to do. To be persuaded by rational arguments, instead of emotional appeals. To look to the evidence of the immediate past, instead of to rely on our instincts.
Which is why the nation will most likely, in 2017, see a President Trump in the White House.
