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How Conservative Brains
Are Wired Differently and What This Means for Our Politics

Would the conservative brain respond to populist
messages about Wall Street villains?

By David
Atkins / AlterNet

December 4, 2014

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Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

President Obama has famously declared that Americans are not as divided as
our politics suggest. But recent discoveries about the political brain seem to
indicate that liberals and conservatives may be divided from one another by
intrinsic brain chemistry.

Over a dozen different studies have come to the same
conclusion: liberals and conservatives are simply wired differently. The
differences are numerous, from sleep patterns (liberals have zanier dreams and more
fitful sleep) to conflict resolution (progressives are more likely to
alter their behavior in response to cues) to social judgments (conservatives show more brain
activity in making complex social evaluations.)

But by far the biggest and most often-studied difference between the
conservative and liberal brain is their response to stimuli invoking fear and
disgust. Conservatives tend to react much more viscerally to negative stimuli
than do liberals, and they are likelier to interpret new information as having a negative or
dangerous effect on their lives.

The latest of these studies, conducted by researchers at Virginia Tech,
indicated that the predictive effect is so strong that they could accurately
determinate a person's politics by their brain's reaction to even a single disturbing image:

P. Read Montague and his coauthors wrote in the study that their results
"invite the provocative claim that neural responses to nonpolitical stimuli
(like contaminated food or physical threats) should be highly predictive of
abstract political opinions (like attitudes toward gun control and abortion)."
Indeed, watching the brain's reaction to a single disgusting image was
sufficient to guess each subject's political orientation. Montague said in the
press release, "I haven't seen such clean predictive results in any other
functional imaging experiments in our lab or others."

This information has a variety of distressing implications. We already know
that conservatives tend to have culturally different moral reasoning than
progressives, and that even supposedly simple words like "freedom" have deeply different meanings to people depending on their
political perspective.

But if our politics is also hardwired in our genes, then our familiar
red-blue/urban-exurban geographic divisions may not just be a cultural gulf, but
a separation between two different types of people whose minds function in
fundamentally different ways. For whatever reason, a high number of Americans
seem to be intrinsically responsive to messages that rely on judgmentalism, fear
and disgust as primary motivators. Not much is likely to change that, because
those responses aren't simply a cultural overlay but hard-coded into the
brain.

It is a truism of liberal politics that progressives appeal to people's hopes
and dreams, while conservatives appeal to their fears. But if the brain science
is right, it may simply be that, no matter what people's policy
preferences might be, the voters to whom fear appeals most outnumber those
who base their vote on more aspirational emotions.

Some historians might be inclined to contest this premise. After all,
political fault lines in America were more muddled prior to the Reagan era.
Today's highly conservative Deep South was an integral part of FDR's progressive
coalition that famously rejected "fear itself" and expanded the social safety
net.

But the New Deal and the decades that followed only masked America's internal
divisions by glossing over racial and gender injustice with a Leave It to Beaver
smile. Conservative whites were, in essence, happy to strengthen the country's
infrastructure and social protections as long as the benefits didn't accrue to
people that activated their amygdalan fight-or-flight responses. Fear and
loathing were mostly reserved for Nazis, Communists and decadent wealthy elites.
The Civil Rights era changed all that: with the empowerment of minorities and
women who didn't fit the traditional mold, conservative fear and anger turned
toward domestically oppressed groups--and the do-gooder coastal liberals who
were, in essence, forcing a Second Reconstruction on them against their will.
America has been stuck in a politically divided rut ever since.

The path forward for liberals isn't to try to deactivate conservative
fear-based responses by using more powerful frames based on hope and change.
That seems nearly impossible. Would it be possible instead to reorient the
target of their anger and fear toward the very wealthy elites on Wall Street who
are actually damaging their economic well-being by hollowing out the American economy in favor of the
asset class?

An economic populist approach has the advantage of being right on
policy and on politics. The aspirational liberalism championed by
President Obama is destined to disappoint in an era of rampant political
obstruction designed to deflate hope and blockade real change. The rhetoric of
the Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party, by contrast, is unafraid to
make sharp contrasts and define villains. The instinct of the neoliberal wing of
the Democratic Party is to pretend that there are no villains in the economy,
only temporary obstacles to inclusive growth; the instinct of the more economic
populist elements is to clearly define the perpetrators of the decline of the
middle class. Their very "divisiveness" is what allows voters motivated more by
anger and fight-or-flight instincts to identify with political warriors who will
solve problems by taking down the real bad guys.

This is not to say that decades of cultural coding will go away overnight or
radically reshape the electorate. For most of the public, entrenched
sociological assumptions about who is scary and who isn't will endure. But it
would not take more than a minor shift in the attitudes of some swing
voters—particularly combined with an upsurge in progressive turnout inspired by
a more muscular brand of economic messaging—to seriously change the electoral
calculus.

Polling shows that the vast majority of voters, including many conservative
ones, distrust large corporations and Wall Street financiers. Republicans
themselves have adapted to this anti-corporate populism within their own party
by railing about "crony capitalism," essentially
deflecting the blame for corporate misbehavior onto government collusion. Part
of the challenge for Democrats is that many of these voters might be inclined to
vote against Big Money, but they don't trust the Democratic Party to actually
stand up against it instead of (supposedly) take their tax dollars to support
people they culturally fear and resent. These voters must hold their nose to
vote for either party at the moment. Winning a significant share of them back
can be accomplished not by reducing the Democratic Party's commitment to social
welfare, but rather by increasing its credibility as the champion of the middle
class.

FDR provides a working historical precedent for this approach. While his
administration did admonish directly against fear itself, it also pulled no punches in channeling the anger of
dispossessed Americans toward the plutocrats who opposed him in ways that are
strikingly sharp in tone to a modern ear, but find echoes in the language of
combative moral authority we typically only see from conservatives today.
Consider FDR's 1936 Madison Square Garden speech, and how little in common it
has with the neoliberal rhetoric of modern Democrats:

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial
monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war
profiteering. they had begun to consider the Government of the United States
as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by
organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never
before in all our history have these forces been so united against one
candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I
welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first Administration
that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I
should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these
forces met their master."

That was a speech designed not for the more rational parts of the brain, but
straight for the amygdala, the so-called "lizard brain." FDR used rhetoric like
this in combination with aspirational speeches to build a large and broad
coalition that appealed to Americans across the aisle.

Obviously, practical challenges lie ahead with any move toward economic
populism. Money has never talked as loudly in American elections as it has
today, and the prospect of facing off against the combined power of both
conservative groups and Wall Street is daunting. No one seems more aware of this
than probable Democratic frontrunner for the 2016 presidential nomination
Hillary Clinton, whose neoliberal economic messaging and coziness with Wall Street are no secret.

Even so, America has seen its share of corrupt Gilded Ages and irrationally
exuberant greed before. We have responded each and every time by strengthening
middle-class economic protections without sacrificing progress on social
equality. That sort of approach can yield dividends for progressives again.

In short, it will be easier to convince conservative-leaning brains that Wall
Street plutocrats are more to be feared than minorities or empowered women, than
to convince them that there are no enemies to be feared at all.

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