Grand Outrage Party

The GOP, not able to offer any policies aimed at actually helping the American working and middle class, has resorted to campaigning almost exclusively on fear, disgust and outrage. Here's a short explanation why "feelings don't care about your facts" should be the GOP's slogan.

There exists a reasonably long history of studies and experiments examining the relationship between political affiliation and psychology as well as biology, that strongly suggests that conservatives tend to attach negative emotions to moral judgments. Disgust is an emotion that's essential to our survival, as it helped us determine if a plant or fruit is edible by invoking repulsion when smelling something that's harmful. The same goes for fear; these emotions are deeply rooted in our lizard brain or reptilian brain, the most primitive part of our brain. We all have these necessary primal emotions, but research suggests that conservatives rely on them for making moral judgments, and consequently political choices.

I'm over 50 years old and, as hard as it is for me to admit, I'm rather old-fashioned at that; I hold doors open for ladies and, this is the part I'm not too proud of, seeing two men kissing intimately makes me feel discomfort. That doesn't make me judge these men negatively however, I'm not attaching any moral value to their act of loving each other; that's the difference between conservatives and progressives suggested by an ever larger body of research. Conservatives attach a moral judgement to their feeling of disgust, even though they have no other rational explanation for that judgement. Other than pointing to fist century scripture, that is.

Liberals and conservatives disagree about whether disgust has a valid place in making moral judgments, Pizarro argues. Some conservatives think there is inherent wisdom in repugnance, that feeling disgusted about something — gay sex between consenting adults, for example — is cause enough to judge it wrong or immoral, even lacking a concrete reason, Pizarro explains. Liberals tend to disagree, and are more likely to base judgments on whether an action or a thing causes actual harm, he said.
_{source: Live Science}

But we don't even have to resort to science to confirm the veracity of this phenomenon. We can see it in the political agenda of almost every right wing political party in existence. A 2003 meta-analysis of 50 years of research by John Jost et al suggests that conservatives are more easily threatened, more likely to perceive the world as dangerous, and less trusting in comparison with liberals. Distrust of those outside the in-group, fear of immigrants and immigration, disgust towards gender non-conformity, they're all part of the propaganda strategy of conservative parties and they all play on our most basic emotions. Like I said: "feelings don't care about your facts". Here's a snippet from the above mentioned meta-analysis:

In summary, then, we argue that fear and uncertainty are centrally linked to the core convictions of political conservatives to resist change and justify inequality, especially to the extent that the status quo breeds inequality. Whereas a plethora of motives (discussed earlier) might prompt individuals to embrace a specific form of conservative ideology, the core aspects of conservatism seem especially appealing to people who are situationally or dispositionally prone to experience fear or to find uncertainty aversive.
_{source: Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition}

It's an old right-wing strategy to accuse political opponents of the things they are guilty of themselves. "Leftists are the real fascists", or "progressives are the real racists" are accusations often made by the reactionary far-right. Another accusation from the political right is that leftists are the ones motivated by their emotions; I hope this short post has refuted that notion. It's the GOP, and other right-wing parties around the world, who lean on the outrage invoked by playing on emotions of fear and disgust. I'll leave you with a video that shows various other ways conservatives distort reality, and how they don't actually believe in the ideals they rhetorically propagate. Also, watch this video by Vaush; it was the direct inspiration for this post.

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