I am a business/marketing consultant specializing in neuropsychology and how consumers make decisions. I believe this is an appropriate forum for a discussion such as this. I ask for your consideration of the premise.
Gaslighting works. Trump doesn’t have a lot of skills but he is a master of gaslighting. He would have used the chaos in the streets narrative no matter what. That is a staple of Republican election politics. Whether it’s the communists, the terrorists, caravans or black people coming for your homes, Republicans have effectively used a boogeyman to scare their voters. Here’s a piece I wrote for a magazine recently.
“Always campaign like you are two points behind”
-James Carville
In studies conducted on the psychological profiles of liberals and conservatives back in the early 2000s at the University of Nebraska and another at UCLA it was discovered that people who tended to vote for Republican candidates were more security minded and had a very fixed sense of right and wrong, preferring social conformity. Using FMRI brain scan technology subjects viewed images of black people, protests and urban violence. As they did, the amygdala part of the brain, which among other functions is responsible for the fight or flight response, lit up more dramatically than people who said they voted for Democratic candidates.
What we now know is that the narrative of law and order in times of racial unrest is soothing to the brains of people who call themselves conservative. There needs to be a sense of order because it simply feels safer and with it comes a better chance of survival. The conservative brain craves safety and security above all else. A leader who comes across as tough, uncompromising and even a bit ruthless is the only choice they want in perilous times. Unconsciously, after all this is where most important decisions are made, they don’t care as much if their leaders lie, cheat on their wife and cage children as long as they can keep them safe.
Democrats have never done a good job of counteracting this because according to these studies, their brains and those of their voters are not as susceptible to fear based rhetoric. Their amygdala plays a lesser role in decision making per the two university studies.
Democratic politicians seem to overestimate the ability of voters to see through these tactics. Democrats tend to be more cerebral, they like smart Presidents who enlightened them. Republicans want someone who they feel will protect them, their tribe and their stuff.
The irony is that Republican policies don’t make people safer, in any conceivable way. Instead every metric for real life safety impacting people’s real lives like the economy, social welfare and wellness suffer under Republican administrations and these failures then get blamed on Democrats. There will be a depression sized recession coming in 2021 due to current circumstances and the time bomb left ticking by the Trump tax cuts. Republicans will be blaming that on Biden and the Democrats. That inevitability must get preempted right now. Biden and all Democrats have to make a priority this election cycle to warn Americans what is coming. If not they will find themselves back in the same situation they experienced in 2010 when Obama took the hit for the Bush economic disaster in 2008.
Joe Biden and the Democrats must constantly co-opt the safety argument and interrupt that facade. They have started to do it I noticed with Joe saying and Tweeting about the chaos is already here under Trump’s presidency. There needs to be stronger versions of this every day. Democrats have an advantage in selling the rationale of this narrative because we are actively living through it and it’s not anywhere near an overstatement that Trump is the cause of most of it. They have to scare Trump’s base more than Trump himself even can by hammering home that not only is this shit show Trump’s doing, but it is going to get much much worse. Make it graphic, make it real for them. It’s not some hypothetical reach. It’s not hyperbole, it is as real as the events they are living through right now.
People have natural biases, yet getting them to be aware of them is not something that is likely to happen. We don’t like to feel that we have animus toward another group, that we house prejudices. We need a reason that builds upon a rationale to psychologically validate the negative feeling about another group.
Stereotypes can serve to assist with to some extent but over time these lose their effectiveness as the culture becomes more diverse and our day to day encounters with other groups become more prevalent. I suspect the Trump campaign has a team well versed in neuropsychology advising them on how to keep the anger stoked around Black Lives Matter by weaponizing the language of violence to help their base, and people they hope to get back living in the suburbs, feel better about their anger and disgust around the protests. To separate the two would require more nuanced thinking than most people are willing to do. Our brains are designed by default to adopt the simplest answer. It will be difficult for voters to separate the peaceful protests from the violence, especially in the presence of existing implicit biases.
If I were to give Joe Biden’s campaign advice it would be this; there will be time to calm the nation and bring people together and healing after the election. This is no time for the arrival of the reasonable man or a political Mr. Rogers. Be harder and tougher than Trump, your cause is righteous so own it. His base will crumble and feel more secure with you as their leader after the election. Visceral righteous anger is interpreted as strength. It looks like resolve. It looks like order.
