When you need adrenaline to stay awake on the flat, boring drive between Urbana and St. Louis, the right-wing talk radio shows deliver the goods: the generic-sounding country song whose lyrics wax nostalgic about lynchings, the old lady dying in poverty who calls in to Bob on Theological Thursday for reassurance that there won't be any Catholics in Heaven. Listen to enough of this, and you may find yourself wondering about the psychology of the Right.
There are four big themes of these shows. One is religion, specifically one that's at least called Christianity. Another is aggressive nationalism, often focusing on taking more violent measures against some foreigners. A third is extreme capitalism, denying any government role in helping the poor or patching any cracks in the market. A fourth is law-and-order harshness. You may start to wonder how these fit together.
As nearly as we can tell, the founder of Christianity stood out from other Jewish rebels against the Roman state by explicitly dismissing the whole national question. As for his relation to the market, his execution seems to have been triggered by an episode of civil disobedience against money changers. He repeatedly disparaged the rich and urged aid to the poor. He advised against throwing the first stone at transgressors. So the religious element doesn't seem to fit with the others. The fit between aggressive nationalism and pure markets is also notoriously uneasy, since nationalism is intrinsically a big government project, and typically involves interference in free trade. Likewise hatred of government interference doesn't fit well with support for harsh and intrusive law-and-order measures.
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to assume that these disparate elements are just thrown together from convenient propaganda memes, a purely cynical construct of big capital. The people spouting them clearly have the subjective conviction that they form a coherent unified world view. Furthermore, they generally are dripping with a sense that they are deeply moral, not just mean bastards. I want to suggest that they have a point, and that understanding it may help us to craft political messages more effectively, e.g. in guiding the writing of"99%" leaflets for Occupiers.
*[A version of this was previously posted but failed to appear on the "recent" list due to a DK3/DK4 transition glitch. I apologize to those very few who accidentally stumbled on it then- there's only a little new here.]
The common element running through this worldview is punitiveness. It's the explicit content of the law-and-order talk. The intrusive state is needed e.g. to punish abortion because otherwise women will be getting away with sex. As for Christianity, those who seek can find plenty of New Testament texts (Romans,...) with strong punitive messages, and when reserves are needed they can always call on the Old Testament. The nationalism often takes the form of simplistic calls to attack somebody who has given us trouble or looked at us funny. The pro-market talk also repeatedly turns to the fear that somebody somewhere is getting away with being a free-rider, when we should have let them suffer the punishments of the market. This terror of free-riders seems to be particularly dominant recently, as discussion focuses on economics.
My first reaction on realizing that punitiveness constituted the core value of these folks was to think "trash is trash". That reaction, however, does not give the devil his due. For one thing, conservatives actually do about as well or better than liberals at giving to charity. For another, we have to face that punitive themes sell very well, even when the people pushing them are unimpressive. These themes seem like the cultural equivalent of fats, sugar, and salt- people like even carelessly prepared fast-food versions.
Although the adrenaline from disgust with the radio shows helps keep a driver awake, in the long run it's hard to avoid wondering why some ideas are, like junk-food, easy sells. Maybe they have something in common. The evolutionary speculations that follow may be dangerously dull if you're behind the wheel, but a post-New-Years snooze can't hurt if you're not driving.
One of the core questions for evolutionary psychology concerns the evolution of altruism, the willingness to do things for the good of others. Some tendency toward self sacrifice for kin is no surprise in any evolutionary picture, since the kin are fairly likely to carry the same genes. J. B. Haldane's quip that he would sacrifice his life for "two brothers or eight cousins" was based on the simplest model of that effect. Still, we seem to go beyond that. People even volunteer for wars.
It's obvious that groups whose members are willing to sacrifice for the good of the group, if needed, have an advantage over groups whose members won't. That's particularly true for groups in direct violent conflict with each other. Nevertheless, evolutionary modelers have a hard time finding ways for those group selection effects to overcome the individual advantages of free-riding, e.g. of letting somebody else get within spear-range first. On the other hand, when modelers add some short-term negative consequences to free-ride attempts, they can get altruism to evolve rather easily. In other words, the co-evolution of altruism and punitiveness is easier to understand than that of pure altruism. Maybe punitiveness really does have something in common with our appetite for fats, an ingrained tendency out of balance with current needs. (I won't clutter this with footnotes, but this article and this very recent free abstract are good places to start reading up, leading to other articles.)
It would be premature to take the current status of those models as being the last word. Nevertheless, there are some interesting supportive results. The chemical oxytocin is well-known for its ability to induce caring behavior. It also induces a tendency to "out group derogation [which] signals to in-group members who should be excluded from in-group resources and exchanges". (See this paper.) That doesn't prove those behaviors co-evolved, but it is significant that nature uses the same chemical knob to adjust the intensity of these superficially very distinct behaviors.
Yeats wrote, on the anatomy of personal love, "Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement." It's starting to seem that something like that applies to the biochemistry of more diffuse, political love, i.e. charity in the broad old meaning of the word. Charity is not as far removed from nasty parochialism as we might hope.
Should we then tentatively say that punitiveness, like many of our appetites, is a leftover trait, useful in our past but irrational in our current circumstances? Partly yes, but it's not so simple. In various games testing people's tendencies to cooperate or to slip into less productive non-cooperative behavior, a key element is trust in the good intentions of the other players. Allowing cheating can lead to steady erosion of that trust, since there are always a few bad apples. Allowing punishments, even ones where the punisher has to sacrifice to do it, can stabilize these games at a much higher level of cooperation. (See this paper.) Punishment is part of any cooperative group life, although how big a part can obviously vary enormously between different cultures.
If punitiveness is likely to be part of the core of who we all are, and part of the core of how any society operates, progressives need to be selective and thoughtful in disparaging it. A movement urging people to show indiscriminate turn-the-other-cheek love, ignoring signs of group membership, was started two thousand years ago, albeit not quite consistently. We opened this story by mentioning how many of the followers of that movement have turned it into just another label to define an in-group, harshly punitive toward outsiders.
What is the practical import for us? Partly, we should acknowledge that when politicians describe the beneficiaries of their policies as those who "work hard and play by the rules" they are not just pandering to some momentary propaganda meme. They're acknowledging that more or less the first reaction of most people to any proposal to share resources with anyone else is "are they part of the group? Are they free-loaders?" It's always hard to get people to expand group identities, but to get them to expand without any exchanges of signs of reciprocity may be nearly impossible. I think we need to keep this background in mind as we try to frame questions favorably to progressive goals.
The thoughts here are just intended to get a conversation going on figuring out what our core message is and how to say it. So here's an exercise. Here's a leaflet (see side two) which has been handed out to 2000+ people by a local Occupy group. (Side one is one of a variety used for different occasions.) What do you think?