Chris Mooney's latest piece on the fundamentally different thought patterns of liberals and conservatives is the starting point for this essay. His well-researched conclusion is that:
There’s now a large body of evidence showing that those who opt for the political left and those who opt for the political right tend to process information in divergent ways and to differ on any number of psychological traits.But, IMHO, Mooney is way too kind to the only kind of conservatives that matter - the ones that take their marching orders from hate radio and the rest of the corporate propaganda media. They are zombies who are beyond reason. They are hypnotized by corporate/theocrat propaganda to the point of harming themselves and America in furtherance of an anti-democratic ideology. I would say that Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas" has the same shortcoming - it legitimizes these zombies as rational human beings who merely rank their social "values" higher than having a first world country. Both authors imply that you can reason with these lunatics.
Instead, you need to reason with people who haven't yet been captured by this dangerous, anti-common sense cult. You need to teach them just what is at stake here (the end of the the Middle Class, and democracy, and the Enlightenment; followed by the return to brutal, impoverished, ignorant theocracy for the benefit of corporate aristos). You need to point out, as Eugene Robinson or Bill Maher have done recently, that the GOP is bat-shit crazy, armed, and dangerous. You need to go further and point out that this cult has the tacit, if not open, support of large segments of the growing American police state (NYPD, TSA, fundamentalist cadres in the military). The problem is that the society is so dumbed down and drowning in "its cool to be an ignorant, violent thug" propaganda that the argument in favor of thinking is very hard to make.
So, I'm not even going to try to make it. Below the fold, I'm going to present some far-out cognitive psychology ideas about the zombification of the right. Be forewarned; its not lowbrow stuff. It will never convince Joe Sixpack, but it may get some intelligent people thinking of ways to deal with the threat.
