XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh

New research on Trump voters: They're not the sharpest tools in the box
Now there's proof: Trump's voters lack "cognitive sophistication," often >believe Bible is literal word of God
By Chauncey DeVega
Senior Writer
Published March 23, 2022 6:00AM (EDT)
Supporters gather at a rally by former President Donald Trump at the
Canyon Moon Ranch festival grounds on January 15, 2022 in Florence,
Arizona. The rally marks Trump's first of the midterm election year with >races for both the U.S. Senate and governor in Arizona this year. (Mario >Tama/Getty Images)
Supporters gather at a rally by former President Donald Trump at the
Canyon Moon Ranch festival grounds on January 15, 2022 in Florence,
Arizona. The rally marks Trump's first of the midterm election year with >races for both the U.S. Senate and governor in Arizona this year. (Mario >Tama/Getty Images)
Facebook
24.5K
Twitter
Reddit
32.4K
Email
283
save

The United States is experiencing an existential democracy crisis, with >leading Republicans and millions of their voters and supporters either >tacitly or explicitly embracing authoritarianism or fascism. Democrats,
for the most part, have not responded with the urgency required to save >America's democracy from the rising neofascist tide.

American society was founded on white settler colonialism, genocide and >slavery. This unresolved birth defect at the foundation of the American >democratic experiment meant that the country was racially exclusionary

by

design, from the founding well into the 20th century. At present,
American politics is contoured by asymmetrical political polarization,

in

which Republicans have moved so far to the right that the party's most >"moderate" members are far more extreme than the most "conservative" >Democrats. This makes substantive compromise and bipartisanship in the >interests of the common good and the American people almost impossible.

Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Trump supporters
and Trump-loathers, increasingly do not live in the same neighborhoods

or

communities. In all, they largely do not socialize with each other, or
have other forms of meaningful interpersonal relationships in day-to-day >life.

To the degree that "race" is a proxy for political values and beliefs,
the color line functions as a practical dividing line of partisan
identity and voting. Religion is also a societal space that is divided

by

politics. For example, public opinion research shows that white right-
wing evangelical Christians have increasingly embraced authoritarian
views, conspiracy theories and other anti-democratic and antisocial
values.

As the new Faith in America survey by Deseret News & Marist College >highlights, the basic understanding of the role of religion in a secular >democracy has become so polarized that 70% of Republicans believe that >religion should influence a person's political values, where as only 28%
of Democrats and 45% of independents share that view.

RELATED: Who were the Jan. 6 attackers? Isolated white folks, searching
for meaning � and enemies

Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, also do not
consume the same sources of information about news and politics. >Conservatives now inhabit their own self-created media echo chamber,
which functions as a type of lie-filled and toxic closed episteme and >sealed-off universe. The creation of such an alternate reality is an >important attribute of fascism, in which truth itself must be destroyed
and replaced with fantasies and fictions in support of the leader and

his

movement.

America's struggle for democracy and freedom against authoritarianism is >taking place on a biological level as well. Social psychologists and
other researchers have shown that the brain structures of conservative- >authoritarians are different than those of more liberal and progressive >thinkers. The former are more fear-centered, emphasizing threats and
dangers (negativity bias), intolerant of ambiguity and inclined to
simple, binary solutions. Conservative-authoritarians are also strongly >attracted to moral hierarchy and social dominance behavior.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? >Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Recent research by Darren Sherkat, a professor of sociology at Southern >Illinois University, demonstrates that America's democracy crisis may be
even more intractable than the above evidence suggests. In his recent
article "Cognitive Sophistication, Religion, and the Trump Vote," which >appeared in the January 2021 edition of Social Science Quarterly,

Sherkat

examined data from the 2018 General Social Survey and concluded that
there are substantial negative differences between the thinking

processes

and cognition of white Trump voters, as shown in the 2016 presidential >election, as compared to other voters who supported Hillary Clinton or >another candidate, or who did not vote at all.

Sherkat observes that Trump support has been linked to religion and

level

of education, but until now not to "cognitive sophistication," which was >found "to have a positive effect on voting, but a negative effect on
choosing Trump." He notes that "philosophers and political elites have >debated the potential effects of mass political participation" for >generations, concerned "about the unsophisticated masses coming under

the

sway of a demagogue." In effect, this debate was always about the

quality

he calls cognitive sophistication, since citizens who lack it "may not

be

able to understand and access reliable and valid information about
political issues and may be vulnerable to political propaganda":

Low levels of cognitive sophistication may lead people to embrace
simple cognitive shortcuts, like stereotypes and prejudices that were >amplified by the Trump campaign. Additionally, the simple linguistic
style presented by Trump may have appealed to voters with limited
education and cognitive sophistication. Beginning with [T.W.] Adorno's >classic study of the authoritarian personality, empirical works have
linked low levels of cognitive sophistication with right-wing >orientations....

Trump's campaign may also have been more attractive to people with
low cognitive sophistication and a preference for low-effort information >processing because compared to other candidates Trump's speeches were
given at a much lower reading level�. While much of the Trump campaign's >rhetoric and orientation may have resonated with the poorly educated and >cognitively unsophisticated, those overlapping groups are less likely to >register to vote or to turn out in an election.

As part of his research, Sherkat evaluated the political decision-making
and cognition of Trump's voters, using a 10-point vocabulary exam. In a
guest essay at the website Down with Tyranny, he explains what this >vocabulary test revealed about white Trump voters:

Overall, the model predicts that almost 73% of respondents who

missed

all 10 questions would vote for Trump (remember, that is controlling for >education and the other factors), while about 51% who were average on

the

exam are expected to vote for Trump. Only 35% of people who had a

perfect

score on the exam are predicted to be Trump supporters.

Notably, this very strong, significant effect of verbal ability can
be identified within educational groups. While non-college whites
certainly turned out more heavily for Trump, the smart ones did not �
only 38% of those with perfect scores are expected to go for Trump, and
only 46% of non-college graduates who scored a standard deviation above
the mean. The same is true for college graduates � low cognition college >graduates were more likely to vote for Trump. ...

What is really depressing isn't just the poles of the vocabulary
exam, it's the average. The mean and median of the scale is 6 � so half
of white Americans missed 4 of the easy vocabulary questions.

Sherkat's research also explored how religion impacted support for

Donald

Trump among white voters: "This study confirms that white Americans with >fundamentalist views of the Bible and those who embrace identifications
with sectarian Protestant denominations tended to vote for Donald Trump
in the 2016 election."
"Hysteria and shame": P.J. O'Rourke on what Trump's presidency gave
America
Progress Bar
00:04/ 02:27
Volume Bar

RELATED: Christian nationalism drove Jan. 6: Now it's embraced the Big
Lie, and wants to conquer America

Belief that the Bible is the literal "word of God" also impacted Trump >voting: "Viewing the Bible as a book of fables is also significantly >predictive of vote choice, with secular beliefs reducing the odds of a
Trump vote by 80 percent when compared to literalists, and reducing the
odds of a Trump vote by 52 percent when compared to respondents who view
the Bible as inspired by God."

In an email to Salon, Sherkat offered additional context and implication
on the relationship between white Christianity, American neofascism and >cognition:

The problem of the contemporary American fascist right is rooted in
education and information. And this problem is not simply about
attainment of some quantity of education, but of the quality and content
of education, how that leads generations of white Christian Americans to >process information about a wide range of issues. The segregation
academies that proliferated in the mid-1960s and accelerated in the

1970s

have taught millions of Americans a radically skewed version of American
and world history and encouraged a continued segregated society. The >homeschooling movement augmented this division, and further denigrated
the value of knowledge.

White fundamentalist Christians have always segmented their
communities from the rest of America, and even exert considerable

control

over public educational institutions, particularly in rural areas and in
the states which embraced slavery. White fundamentalist Christians
distrust mainstream social institutions like education and print media,
and they actively seek to eliminate public education and to provide >alternative sources of information. As a result, people who identify

with

and participate in white Christian denominations and who subscribe to >fundamentalist beliefs have substantial intellectual deficits that make
them easy marks for a wide variety of schemes � from financial fraud to >conspiracy theories.

If you can't read the New York Times, you're going to believe
whatever you hear on talk radio or on television. It's simply impossible
for people with limited vocabularies and low levels of cognitive
functioning to make sense of the complex realities of the political
world. And we now have a population where for 55 years substantial
fractions of white people have gone to private fundamentalist Christian >schools that leave them both indoctrinated in Christian nationalism and >ill-prepared to process any additional information. Worse, we now have
over a million children in a given year who are homeschooled by parents
who are uneducated white fundamentalists � and that total has been

pretty

constant for three decades since the homeschooling movement blossomed.

What does this mean for the present and future of American democracy in
this time of crisis? Sherkat cited the "disturbing ... influence of

anti-

intellectualism on American public life," which lends "performative

power

to ignorant elites":

Spouting off obvious untruths is no longer a mark of shame, because
even basic historical and contemporary truths are not recognized. We

seem

to have a stable set of about 30% of Americans, 35% of white Americans,
who are oblivious to political realities and incapable and unwilling to
come to terms with any of our key social problems. The increasing

control

over public education by right-wing fanatics is entrenching ignorance

and

intellectual laziness in future generations. It does not bode well for
the future of American democracy.

Donald Trump and his movement did not create all these American >authoritarians and aspiring fascists. Such people have long been a
feature of American society. What Trump and the Republican-fascists and
their movement have accomplished in recent years is to empower and
normalize a dangerous set of antisocial, anti-human, retrograde and

anti-

democratic values and beliefs.

Saving America's democracy will require a moral and political reckoning
and acts of critical self-reflection on a nationwide scale about the
American people's character and values, and about how their leaders and >governing institutions have failed them.

Changes in laws and institutions are necessary. But on their own, such >interventions will not stop the spread of fascism. A lasting remedy will >demand that the country's political, cultural, and educational
institutions be renewed, re-energized, and reimagined. The questions >Americans must ask themselves are simple yet enormous: Who are we? What
are we to become? How can we unite in defense of democracy, the common
good and the general welfare? Without real answers to those questions,
there will be no democratic renewal in the 21st century -- and fascism
wins.

You got it!

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)