Decades ago, V.O. Key, then our foremost political analyst, wrote, “The voters are not fools.”
Consider these recent facts:
1) A year ago, FOX News claimed that minority borrowers caused the financial meltdown and great recession. Most Republicans agreed.
2) Even one year ago, the great majority of Republicans and many Independents believed that Barack Obama was born in Africa.
3) Mitt Romney, the Republican frontrunner, is rarely challenged when he says Obama created no jobs and made things much worse.
4)In 2010, the Republicans won a huge victory by promising “jobs,jobs, and more jobs” and not once mentioning the cutting of entitlements. Once in the driver's seat, they do not address jobs but repeatedly insist that cutting spending will produce jobs. They are not held accountable and still have much more support than the Democrat.
Perhaps the Keys dictum should be rewritten to say, “ Maybe the voters are not fools in the long run.” Since the time that Keys wrote, there have been massive advances in cognitive science, communications techniques, and political psychology which make it possible to fool the voters most of the time and even reprogram their thinking.
The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan knew that the unconscious was more important than the conscious mind. But that knowledge did not have a great deal with the politics of his era. For centuries, the philosophers tried and failed to figure out how the unconscious and conscious were related. They hoped that what Moynihan said was not true.
There has been a cognitive revolution that has overthrown old notions of human nature and the power of reason. My fear and dread is that it has made a shambles of the Founders idea that Americans possessed a great deal of civic virtue-- something other peoples in the Eighteenth Century lacked.
Conservatives seem to have learned the lessons of the cognitive revolution all too well. They have learned how to communicate in ways that shape people's unconscious minds, program their notion of group memory, and even influence unconscious cognition that operates when the mind is distracted. They know how to activate the reptilian core of the brain, where dangers are perceived and defense mechanisms and anger and fear are activated. Conservatives have also learned how to create group identities and group memories, wherein actual history can be completely rewritten with a view to programming thought processes and people's “choice architectures.” A key to dominating people's thought is to create identities for them, preferably as virtuous victims. Once someone accept a particular identity he or she begins to take on the group's collective memory, which could be completely inaccurate. That collective memory overwhelms critical thinking and dominates a person's thinking process. These tools are used to some degree by advertisers and others in bringing about the “massification of society,” a process of the administered state in which people turn off their critical thinking processes and follow the herd in making choices. In politics, they no longer think in terms of class or self-interest/
The cognitive revolution provides sociopaths with powerful tools to take control of the thinking of frightened and insecure people who need clear, certain, and easy answers. There are all sorts of studies about people whose psychological make-ups, when subjected to the stresses that mark America today, are ripe for manipulation and activation. But is necessary for twisted, power-hungry people to be there first and to know how to take advantage of the situation. A careful study of the Tea Party movement would probably turn up the names of some of these dangerous people.
Progressives cling to outmoded notions of the sovereign individual who is master of his own fate through the process of making rational choices. There are such people, but in times of crisis great numbers are swept away in irrational mass movements, such as the Tea Baggers.. However, it is theoretically possible that people swept away by irrational movements can be won over to reason because it is known that rational decisions can influence the unconscious. But this is an uphill process. Progressives must continue to put out solid factual information and try to puncture myths. At some point, hopefully sooner rather than later, some people swept away in irrational mass movements might experience paradigm shifts.
The simple, clear, easy answers appeal to people who are most unnerved by the crises of the time. They experience an intense “need for closure,” which childlike ideologies offer. A study done at Ohio State University showed that such people are equally susceptible to simplistic ideologies as to belief in the paranormal. They have serious problems with ambiguity and , at the moment of intense crisis, they are not psychologically secure personalities. Studies show that they are not inclined to be moved by appeals to guilt. It is pointless to tell them that some measure will strip someone else's grandmother of nursing home care. At the time of the Vietnam War, it was shown that these folks did not care to hear about the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. That was a turn-off. It is also known that they prefer very optimistic narratives. Hence, they like to hear that cutting spending will quickly create jobs. They need no proof. Many of them see politics as a spectator sport and have a great need to identify with what appears to be the winning side.
This is not to say that people more rooted in reality do not share some of these characteristics. They too may sometimes indulge too much in group-think. Similarly, there may be an inclination for some progressives to too readily look for Keynesian solutions for all economic problems. But the difference is that they are at least using a product of economic science that has been tested over more than seven decades. It does not always produced desired results, but at least there is detailed reasoning behind it and empirical evidence that can be deployed. It is not simply solgans and ungrounded ideology.
Progressives have a daunting tsk ahead of them. They must get in tune with the cognitive revolution to the extent of learning what they are up against.
While so many frightened souls today now buy the rightist conventional wisdom, there still exists at some level a residual wisdom based on the experiences of our fore-bearers. Most of uys have humble origins and have heard family stories about the oppression of workers and the bilking of consumers. Root around in a family history and one is likely to find people who died in industrial accidents or were permanently injured at work and received little or nothing.
We are now more than ten years into a period when rightist economic policy has prevailed. Obama was unable to change much because there was less than two months when he even had a shot at shutting down Republican filibusters in the Senate. The budget deal and now the debt ceiling “compromise” that was dictated by the GOP guarantees more of the same and higher levels of suffering for little people.
Progressives need to learn to communicate and to regroup around the central question of shoring up the position of the working class. They need to remind people of the painful lessons of the past and connect them to what is going on now. The voters will not immediately snap out of the spell cast by the rightist information machine and ratified by a cowardly mainstream media. In time, with more suffering, many will see the light. We need to hasten that day by talking to everyone we know and putting out as much factual information as possible.