Liberal or Conservative? Reactions to Disgust are a Dead Giveaway

29 October 2014
ScienceDaily

The way a person's brain responds to a single disgusting image is enough to reliably predict whether he or she identifies politically as liberal or conservative. As we approach Election Day, the researchers say that the findings reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on October 30 come as a reminder of something we all know but probably don't always do: "Think, don't just react."

P. Read Montague of Virginia Tech says he was initially inspired by evidence showing that an individual's political affiliation is almost as heritable as height. Montague and his colleagues also recognized that those political ideologies summarize many aspects of life -- attitudes associated with sex, family, education, and personal autonomy, for instance -- and have deep connections to the way our bodies respond to threats of contamination or violence.

To find out just how fundamental those connections are, Montague and his colleagues asked whether functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI) of the brain taken as people passively looked at a series of disgusting, pleasant, and neutral images was enough to give away their political leanings, as measured on a standardized test. (The Wilson Patterson inventory produces a score from 0 to 1, from extremely liberal to extremely conservative.)

The researchers applied a machine-learning method to all of those pictures together with the test scores in search of a predictable relationship between the two. And, indeed, they found it. Disgusting images, and the mutilated body of an animal especially, generated neural responses that were highly predictive of political orientation. That was true even though the neural predictors didn't necessarily agree with participants' conscious rating of those disturbing pictures.

It's not clear from the study exactly how or why liberal versus conservative brains differ from each other, Montague explains, only that they do. In fact, the researchers were especially surprised by the strength of the response.

"A single disgusting image was sufficient to predict each subject's political orientation," he says. "I haven't seen such clean predictive results in any other functional imaging experiments in our lab or others."

Perhaps the new findings can help us find a way to a less-polarized political future. People really do differ from one another in fundamental ways, but we also have the unique ability to make up our own minds and to change them.

"The results do not provide a simple bromide, but they do suggest that important foundational parts of political attitudes ride on top of preestablished neural responses that may have served to defend our forebears against environmental threats," Montague says. "In the same sense that height is highly genetically specified, it's also true that it's not predetermined by genetics; nutrition, sleep, starvation, dramatic physical injury, and so on can serve to change one's ultimate height. However, tall people have tall children, and this is a kind of starting point."

"In the same vein, if we can begin to see that some 'knee-jerk' reactions to political issues may be simply that -- reactions -- then we might take the temperature down a bit in the current boiler of political discourse."

Journal Reference:

1. Ahn et al. Nonpolitical images evoke neural predictors of political ideology. Current Biology, October 2014

Chait Reacts to Brooks

by Jonathan Chait---There are millions of Americans who think it’s okay to deny legal citizens their voting rights or force them to go without health insurance. Those people live in a different moral universe than I do. They’re not necessarily bad people. (Lord knows the people who agree with me on those things are not all good.) But, yes, I believe their political views reflect something unflattering about their character.r

Among Modern Ills

Among modern ills is the pervasive playing of Christmas music on the radio and in stores in OCTOBER.  Do you have no decency, people?

Republicans No Longer Care About Governing

Thursday, Oct 30, 2014 12:46 PM CST

David Brooks’s dumbest column yet: Fighting the scourge of “partyism”

The real problem is "Brooksism" -- Republicans ignoring that their party has moved so far right it won't govern

Joan Walsh Follow

David Brooks (Credit: PBS)

As the clock winds down on another midterm election that will likely reward Republicans for their policy-free, Obama-hating obstruction, trust David Brooks to identify an allegedly crippling social disorder, which he calls “partyism.” In a country still riven by race, Brooks has the nerve to brand Americans who may disdain people of another political party as indulging a “prejudice” akin to racism.
“To judge human beings on political labels is to deny and ignore what is most important about them,” he writes, “It is to profoundly devalue them. That is the core sin of prejudice, whether it is racism or partyism.”
See what he did there? We already had a functional word for this condition — it’s “partisanship” — but call it “partyism” and you’ve got another loathsome “ism,” so easily twinned with racism. I would argue that someone’s political views and values are at the top of “what is most important about them” – and we have every right to choose not to befriend or marry people whose politics we abhor.
We don’t have the right to harm or harass them or refuse to hire them (except in certain jobs where political values and opinions are intrinsic to the job duties), but that’s not what Brooks is talking about here. He’s preaching a bizarre conservative version of the right’s caricature of the liberal nanny-state nightmare: Everybody just be nice to everybody! He’s a parody of a young women’s studies major discovering the concept of “looksism,” which he would no doubt mock.
This is Brooks at his dumbest. Which is, sadly, saying a lot. You can be forgiven if you stopped reading when he claimed “In fact, the best recent research suggests that there’s more political discrimination than there is racial discrimination.” Is Brooks aware of “recent research” showing that black people without criminal records are less likely to get a job than a white applicant with a criminal record? That African Americans face persistent discrimination in hiring, wages, bank lending, criminal prosecution and so much more?
The cancer of partyism is likely to become a cause for the tiresome folks who can’t believe we haven’t chucked democracy and turned the country over to the Simpson-Bowles commission, with a Supreme Court made up of No Labels folks. Of course, it’s also a great discovery for purveyors of “both sides do it” false equivalence, because Brooks makes the case it afflicts liberals and conservatives alike – even though the 2010 poll he cites shows that Republicans are much more likely to be “partyist” than Democrats. Half of Republicans compared with a third of Democrats say they’d be “displeased” if a child married someone from the other party. It was 5 percent and 4 percent respectively.

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Disdaining someone for their politics has nothing in common with racial prejudice, which is irrational and ugly and imputes intrinsic inferiority, even evil, to another group. “Political discrimination,” another Brooks phrasing, is part of democracy. It’s certainly what we do when we vote. Politics is a way of living our values, and sadly for the country, the Republican Party’s core values have become skewed in a way that many of us find morally disturbing – and more to the point, in ways that lead conservatives to label liberals the enemy, not merely the loyal opposition.
It’s true: if my daughter came home and announced she was marrying a Republican, I would be concerned, until I got to know his values. Does he support lower taxes and less regulation? Well, so do a lot of my friends. That’s not a problem for me. But what about women’s equality? Voting rights for everyone? Marriage equality and LGBT rights? Is he sharing racist email chains showing President Obama dressed like a witch doctor, or the First Lady as a chimp? Or the jokes comparing welfare recipients to dogs that made their way around Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s office?
Does he poison himself by listening to Fox News every night? I’d worry about that the same way I’d worry if I learned my daughter’s intended sat on the sofa and consumed a fifth of vodka every night. The anger of Bill O’Reilly is corrosive and addictive.
And if my daughter didn’t pass muster with her (theoretical) Republican future in-laws — and remember, polls say that’s more likely than my, as a Democrat, objecting to their son — I’d say that was fine, and remind her that she could, and certainly would, do better. They obviously have terrible values.
I say this as someone who has Republicans in my family, and even a few in my close circle of friends.  I used to have more Republican friends, but they realized how far right their party had moved and either became independents or Democrats.
It makes perfect sense that there’s much more political friction between Americans than there was in 1960. The Republican Party of 1960 was led by Dwight Eisenhower; today its loudest voice is Rush Limbaugh. Its northern flank was crucial to passing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid 1960s. Then came the Southern Strategy (and its northern component), which relied on stoking white fear and backlash and convincing the “silent majority” that Democrats were Communist baby-killers who coddled black criminals and aimed to turn the country over to the Viet Cong.
The GOP has moved steadily to the right since the mid-1960s, turning its back on its civil rights legacy and on its commitment to women’s rights too. There are libraries full of research showing that the Republican “center” has moved right, while Democrats have actually moved to the center.
There’s so much wrong politically right now; having a leading national opinion columnist invent a fictional malady called “partyism” is just another example of it. The real problem is Brooksism: Ignoring that your party has moved so far right it no longer cares about governing.

Fog

The fog machine is in high gear this morning as in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." I can barely see out my front door and my brain has yet to clear if in fact it does clear today. Foggy with a chance of meat balls is the forecast. Toto is over behind that curtain talking to some man. Maybe things will clear up dreckly.

Another Bush?

Word is that Jeb Bush is gearing up to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.  Say it ain't so, Jeb!  The last thing this country needs is another Bush in the White House.

Ole Miss

'Ole Miss' Debates Campus Traditions With Confederate Roots

by Sandra Knispel

As the South tries to balance past and present, perhaps the greatest drama is playing out on the campus of the University of Mississippi.

 

October 25, 2014 6:04 PM ET

fromMPB

Mississippi Rebels fans cheer for their team prior to their game on October 18. The University of Mississippi has been in an ongoing effort to distance the state's flagship academic institution from its segregationist history.

Michael Chang/Getty Images

University of Mississippi football is riding high these days; they're undefeated and one of the top three teams in the nation.
But as Ole Miss fans come together to root for their team, many other traditions are coming under scrutiny. The school's been engaged in a long-running effort to remove potentially divisive, and racially charged symbols, to try and make the campus more "welcoming."
At the corner of Fraternity Row, a short lane that runs past a chapel used to be called "Confederate Drive." Newly painted over, the unassuming white street post now reads "Chapel Lane."
"Obviously the name Confederate Drive can be seen as divisive by some people and could be seen as an effort by the university to embrace an ancient idea," says university spokesman Danny Blanton.

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A state historical sign marks the Confederate Soldiers Cemetery on the University of Mississippi campus in Oxford, Miss.

Emily Wagster Pettus/AP

The sign change is part of the latest effort to improve the public image of Mississippi's flagship state school, and with it the ability to recruit and retain more minorities. Last year, freshmen were for the first time required to learn about Mississippi history and race relations.
Next, the school will place signs adding historical context to potentially controversial sites, like a statue of the Confederate soldier in the middle of campus. These changes come after a series of ugly race incidents; one egregious event happened in February, when a noose was hung around the neck of the statue of James Meredith, the first African American to attend the university.
"I did actually have a pretty big emotional breakdown. I came to campus and I, in all honesty, didn't want my feet to even touch the pavement," says Courtney Pearson.
Two years ago, Pearson was voted the university's first black homecoming queen. That's at a university where blacks make up 14 percent of the student population in a state where the overall black population is nearly 40 percent. Many black families remain hesitant about sending their children to the state's flagship university. Despite the noose incident, Pearson stayed.
"What I appreciate is that we didn't allow the actions of three students to take three steps back. We're still moving forward," she says.
Pearson is now a graduate assistant for the newly-created Center for Inclusion and Cross-Cultural Engagement. Still, becoming more inclusive means the university must go head-to-head with groups like the Mississippi Division Sons of Confederate Veterans, an ultraconservative history group that sued the school over the sign change.
Some students, too, are uncomfortable with the changes.
"I'm all about tradition and I think that it should remain Confederate Drive. It's just part of the history of the South," says W.T. Bailey, an accounting and finance student.
One tradition that's not changing is the university's nickname, "Ole Miss." The phrase was how slaves once addressed the mistress of the plantation. It's ubiquitous on campus, on signs, sweatshirts and in the football cheer.
"Ole Miss has been here since I can remember, it needs to stay," says Tommy Lee, a 1982 Ole Miss grad. "That is our slogan: We are Ole Miss."
University chancellor Dan Jones also defends the "Ole Miss" name against its critics, saying that the "vast majority of people associated with the university — that includes our faculty, our staff, our students, our alumni — think that the term 'Ole Miss' is a term of endearment."
And even many black students here say they like the name, and see it as just a name.
"If we are going to be in the football stadium, and the announcer says first down, the first things out of my mouth are going to be 'Ole Miss,' " says Courtney Pearson.
Pearson does admit to having reservations, but she says she supports the administration and whatever changes it deems necessary to make the university a better place.

Society's Child

Society has made some things easier over the years. These days you seldom have to watch your language in mixed company though it's still taboo to make tacky remarks at funerals. My crudeness and lack of social graces aren't as troublesome as they used to be. Greater acceptance seems to come with age. Dirty jokes aren't as dirty as they used to be. Birmingham welcomes the Dalai Lama this weekend. I have a feeling this wouldn't have happened in 1958. Back then a KKK rally would have drawn more people. The future is not what it used to be, but at least when the time comes for knee replacement maybe there will be walk-in service.

The Country's Disfunction

America’s modern political nightmare: Two electorates, separate and unequal

The glee with which the GOP relies on Obama-hate to turn out its base shows the disturbing racial reality of 2014

Joan Walsh Follow

• George W. Bush, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell (Credit: Reuters/AP/Jonathan Ernst/J. Scott Applewhite/Jason Reed/Photo montage by Salon)

When I first heard President Obama’s remarks on the 2014 midterms to Rev. Al Sharpton on Politics Nation Monday — insisting he’s fine with the red state Democrats who are distancing themselves from him because they “are all folks who vote with me” — I had two contradictory thoughts. Either Obama was being awfully gracious, or else he was mad as hell, and happy to bear-hug cowardly red state Democrats so hard it might hurt them.
Republicans certainly thought they hit political gold. Right away Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus Tweeted gleefully: “All of the Dem candidates running from Obama ‘are all folks who vote with’ & ‘have supported’ his agenda.” The mud-slinging right-wing Washington Free Beacon pounced: “President Obama dealt another blow to red state Democrats on Al Sharpton’s radio show Monday.”
But the reaction to Obama’s remarks, as well as to his earlier comment that “my policies are on the ballot” in November, underscored the extent to which we now have two electorates, separate and very unequal. The Republican Party is relying on Obama-hate to turn out its 96-percent-white, middle-class-to-wealthy base, while the Democrats, still trying to be a multi-racial party in a multi-racial country, are trying to court voters of every race and class. It can be a tough sell.
It’s amazing the extent to which the mainstream media accepts that the GOP’s personalized, deeply disparaging campaign against Obama is just politics as usual – even as reporters note that the campaign is tailored to reach white voters, including white red state Democrats. Southern white Democrats have particularly turned on the party under Obama: In 2012 Obama lost 40 percent of the white vote Al Gore won in the South in 2000.

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While it’s true that dissatisfaction with President Bush helped Democrats ride back to controlling Congress in 2006, I’m hard-pressed to remember examples of Democrats campaigning against Bush so personally and gleefully. Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey, Virginia’s Jim Webb and Montana’s Jon Tester, three Democratic Senate victors that year, weren’t exactly wild-eyed lefties relying on Bush Derangement Syndrome to reach voters.
It’s also beyond a doubt that Democrats were running on a platform of winding down the Iraq war and fixing the increasingly broken, pro-rich Bush economy, as the housing bubble was just starting to burst. Unlike the 2014 GOP, they campaigned on actual policies. It’s one thing to run against Bush’s war, and another to run against Obama’s America.
There’s another big difference: Republicans who fled the embrace of their unpopular president in 2006 weren’t hampered by any perceived need to balance criticism of Bush with efforts to keep favor with his most loyal supporters, as red-state Democrats are when it comes to black voters and Obama. It was a painful irony when the New York Times announced Kentucky is one state where Democrats’ hopes may hinge on black voter turnout, just as Mitch McConnell opponent Alison Lundergan Grimes was working overtime to avoid saying whether she voted for our first black president.
Lovers of false equivalence will say that Democrats work hard to turn out black voters, so why complain that the GOP is concentrating on whites? There’s really no comparison between the two strategies. Democrats rely on the fact that black voters overwhelmingly support the policies they promote, while Republicans still rely on white fear, if not white racism, as they promote a generalized Obama-phobia rather than specific counter-policies. Large majorities of Republicans back an increase in the minimum wage and paid family leave, policies that are mostly supported by Democrats. A slight majority of Republicans even say they trust the federal government to handle the Ebola challenge – only Tea Party and rural voters say they don’t.
And Democrats haven’t written off white voters, not even in the South. That’s what’s behind the sometimes craven efforts of red state Democrats to distance themselves from our first black president – with said president’s blessing, however ambivalent he may be.
There are also policy implications for the country in the racial balkanization of the two parties. House Republicans don’t have to get a single Latino vote, and they will still keep their majority, given the way districts have been carved up to concentrate white voting power and dilute that of so-called minorities. So even though the Senate mustered a tough, bipartisan agreement on comprehensive immigration reform, House Speaker John Boehner can block it indefinitely without worrying about his hold on power.
Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to serve the interests not only of Latino voters but of fearful whites in red states, too – which is why the president decided to put off an executive order deferring some deportations until after the election. That’s led to some calls for Latinos to boycott Democratic candidates, which could also hurt the party in November. There’s some evidence that the continuing sluggishness of the economy for low and middle income folks might also dampen turnout. The enthusiasm gap in this election – only 9 percent of likely 2014 voters say they’re “enthusiastic” about Obama — stems in part from voters’ disappointment that he hasn’t been able to enact his promised agenda.
So one party struggles to represent the emerging American majority, while the other ignores or even suppresses it. Your ability to motivate your base is compromised when you’re still trying to appeal to a demographic cross-section of the country – and that’s a disadvantage right now only for Democrats.
It’s the overlay of voter suppression that makes the GOP’s reliance on an anti-Obama strategy particularly disturbing. There are lots of differences between America’s two electorates, but one thing is clear: Only one electorate, that of the GOP, works to suppress the votes of the other electorate.
That’s why for the foreseeable future, we have gridlock: The larger, diverse electorate chooses the president, very likely a Democrat. Then the smaller, older, wealthier white electorate elects Republicans to Congress and state houses in the midterms, to thwart that president, to deny the policy agenda backed by the larger presidential electorate, and also to restrict its ability to vote. That’s a dismal feedback loop of dysfunction, and there’s little reason to expect it to change any time soon.

Voter ID = Poll Tax

October 24, 2014

How Conservatives Justify Poll Taxes

By Jonathan Chait Follow @jonathanchait

Photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

During the Obama era, the Republican Party has made the modern revival of the poll tax a point of party dogma. Direct poll taxes have been illegal for 50 years, but the GOP has discovered a workaround. They have passed laws requiring photo identification, forcing prospective voters who lack them, who are disproportionately Democratic and nonwhite, to undergo the extra time and inconvenience of acquiring them. They have likewise fought to reduce early voting hours on nights and weekends, thereby making it harder for wage workers and single parents, who have less flexibility at work and in their child care, to cast a ballot.
The effect of all these policies is identical to a poll tax. (Indeed, a study found that the cost they impose is considerably greater than existing poll taxes at the time they were banned.) It imposes burdens of money and time upon prospective voters, which are more easily borne by the rich and middle-class, thereby weeding out less motivated voters. Voting restrictions are usually enacted by Republican-controlled states with close political balances, where the small reduction in turnout it produces among Democratic-leaning constituencies is potentially decisive in a close race.
The simple logic of supply and demand suggests that if you raise the cost of a good, the demand for it will fall. Requiring voters to spend time and money obtaining new papers and cards as a condition of voting will axiomatically lead to fewer of them voting.
It is precisely because the effect is so obvious that conservatives must labor so strenuously to deny it. National Review editor Rich Lowry, writing in Politico, scoffs at arguments against the Republican poll tax agenda. Lowry offers three arguments for voter identification laws. The first is that we can’t prove that they reduce voting (“its effect can’t reliably be detected by the tools of social science”).

04 Jun 1968, Los Angeles, California, USA --- Original caption: Los Angeles: Gov. Ronald Reagan, accompanied by his wife, Nancy votes in the California primary election. Reagan, the favorite son candidate who is unopposed on the Republican ballot, said he believed it was a "good thing" for the GOP to have a favorite son delegation rather than an open primary. "It helps bring unity to the party," he said. --- Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

It is indeed difficult to prove the impact of vote restrictions, because we cannot run natural experiments. If you could hold an election with vote restrictions in place, and then go back in time and hold it again without them, you could reliably measure the effect. In real life, no two elections are ever identical, which makes it impossible to “reliably” pinpoint the magnitude of the impact.
The Government Accountability Office surveyed ten studies of the effects of voter-identification laws, only four of which found decreases in turnout. Lowry trumpets this finding. The GAO also studied the impact of vote restrictions in Kansas and Tennessee and found significant reductions in the African-American vote. Lowry says that the Republicans in those states “dispute the methodology,” and takes their side. What the dispute over methodology really shows is that the impact of one change in voting laws is extremely hard to prove. A natural response would be to fall back on the intuitive premise that raising the cost of voting reduces voting. But conservatives seem reluctant to apply their normal beliefs in markets to this question.
Lowry suggests that a better measure of the effect of voter-identification laws is “How many voters are showing up to vote, only to realize that they have been denied their rights by the ID requirement?” Not many, it turns out, prompting Lowry to sneer:

That means in Kansas and Tennessee, altogether about 1,000 ballots weren’t counted (and perhaps many of them for good reason), out of roughly 3.5 million cast. There you have it ladies and gentlemen, voter suppression! It is of such stuff that Jim Crow was made.

Is it possible that some of the prospective voters who lacked the requisite identification did not show up at the polls at all? Lowry does not consider the possibility.
Lowry’s final argument compares voting rights to the right to obtain a gun, stay at a hotel, and purchase a marriage license. “No one goes around complaining that these requirements infringe on the rights of minorities to own a firearm, get married, or avail themselves of public accommodations,” he argues.
But these other activities confer a direct and tangible benefit: You get a gun or a spouse or a hotel room. People are more willing to endure cost and inconvenience if they get something out of it in return. Voting does not offer concrete benefits. It is an abstract expression of civic engagement. There’s a limit to the inconvenience and cost a person will undergo to do it, especially when their life is already stressed. People make marginal decisions about voting all the time, balancing their generalized desire to fulfill a civic duty against the hard demands of a day-to-day schedule. The entire purpose of the new poll taxes are to tilt that calculus away from voting for a small but hopefully decisive bloc.
It is revealing that Lowry, like most conservative defenders of modern poll taxes, does not defend the Republican Party’s fervor for reducing early and weekend voting. It is easier to defend voter identification laws independently as a necessary inconvenience to ward off the mostly theoretical problem of voter impersonation. Restrictions on early voting cannot be defended in these terms. And if you consider them together, it makes it all too obvious that both these things serve the identical purpose of raising the inconvenience of voting for a small chunk of Democratic voters.
There is something even more revealing about Lowry’s comparison between voting and other licenses: It proves too much. To drive home the equation, Lowry suggests that marriage, gun ownership, and staying in a hotel are “important rights,” just like voting. But those are also rights that you have to pay for with money. That is to say, if voting is simply a right on par with buying a gun or renting a hotel room, why should one cost money and the other be free? Why should people have to pay the government directly for marriage or gun licenses, and get to vote for free?
Lowry repeatedly scoffs at the idea that vote restrictions amount to a poll tax. But the poll tax is precisely what he is advocating.

Political Polarization is Real

Friday, Oct 24, 2014 06:00 AM CST

Why conservatives prefer propaganda to reality

A new Pew study on America's media consumption offers a window into the right's collective mindset

Amanda Marcotte, AlterNet

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

Pew Research set out to find what’s behind what it considers the increasing political polarization of the United States; why the country is moving away from political moderation and becoming more and more divided between liberals and conservatives. Its first report on the phenomenon, which examines where people are hearing news and opinion in both regular and social media, shows that this is happening for very different reasons among people moving to the right than for people moving to the left.
Or that’s the charitable way to put it. The less charitable way is to say Pew discovered that conservatives are consuming a right-wing media full of lies and misinformation, whereas liberals are more interested in media that puts facts before ideology. It’s very much not a “both sides do it” situation. Conservatives are becoming more conservative because of propaganda, whereas liberals are becoming more liberal while staying very much checked into reality.
That this polarization is going on isn’t a myth. Previous Pew research shows the percentage of Americans who are “mostly” or “consistently” conservative has grown from 18% in 2004 to 27% in 2014. During that same period, the percentage of Americans who are “mostly” or “consistently” liberal stayed a little more consistent, growing from 33% to 34% in 10 years. (These statistics don’t measure what you call yourself, but what you rate as on a scale of beliefs about various issues.) While liberals became more liberal, conservatives both became more numerous and more rigidly conservative over time. What gives?
Enter right-wing media, which has a nifty trick of convincing audiences it’s the other guys who are the liars, all while actually being much less trustworthy in reality. From conservative screaming about the “media elite” to Fox News’s old slogan “Fair and Balanced,” conservative media is rife with the message that everyone is out to get you, conservative viewer, and only in the warm blanket of right-wing propaganda will you get help.

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The message, the Pew research suggests, has really taken hold. Pew researchers gave respondents a list of 36 popular media sources and asked how much they trusted each one. Some were liberal, like The Daily Show or ThinkProgress. Some were conservative, like Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. Most of them are fairly straightforward news organizations with no overt political agenda, like NPR, various network news, CNN, and the New York Times.
The findings were astounding. Out of the 36 news sources, consistent liberals trusted 28, a mix of liberal and mainstream news sources. Mostly, liberal respondents generally agreed, holding out a little more skepticism for overtly ideological sources like Daily Kos or ThinkProgress, but not actually distrustingthem, either. The only news sources liberals didn’t trust, generally, are overtly right-wing ones, such as Fox News, the Blaze, Breitbart, or Rush Limbaugh’s show.
Conservatives, on the other hand, saw betrayers and liars around every corner. Consistent conservatives distrusted a whopping 24 out of 36 outlets and mostly conservative respondents distrusted 15 and were skeptical of quite a few more. The hostility wasn’t just to well-known liberal sources like MSNBC. Strong conservatives hated all the network news, CNN, NPR, and the major national outlets, except the Wall Street Journal.  Respondents who are mostly conservative fared better, but were still hostile to the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as skeptical of mainstream organizations like CBS and NBC News.

The fact that conservatives are this paranoid should be alarming enough, but it becomes even more frightening when you consider who conservatives do trust in the media. Consistent conservatives only trusted 8 media sources–compared to the 28 liberals trusted–and of the eight, only one has anything approaching respectable reporting or reliable information. And that one, the Wall Street Journal, has good straight reporting but has an op-ed page that is a train wreck of right-wing distortions and misinformation. Most conservative people were a little more open-minded, trusting USA Today and ABC News, but still were supportive of openly distorting sources like Fox News or the Drudge Report.

The trust conservatives put in conservative media is utterly misplaced. For instance, both consistent and mostly conservative people love Glenn Beck, though he’s a well-known purveyor of outrageous conspiracy theories that percolate up to him from fringe characters. Breitbart and Sean Hannity also rated high, despite their shared history of championing right-wing fringe characters like Cliven Bundy.
But what is really frightening is the reach of Fox News. Fox News rated as the only real news source for consistent conservatives, with 47% of them citing it as their main source of news. Nothing even came close to touching it, as the second most common answer, “local radio” was cited by only 11% of consistent conservatives. Eighty-eight percent of consistent conservatives trusted Fox News. Mostly conservative and even “mixed” people also liked Fox News.
The problem with this is watching Fox News actually makes you less informed than if you don’t watch any news at all. In a 2012 study, Fox News viewers rated the absolute lowest in ability to correctly answer questions on a quiz about recent news events. People who didn’t take in any news programs at all did better on the quizzes. NPR listeners rated the best. Consistent liberals in the Pew research were big fans of NPR, by the way. It was the second most common outlet cited as a favorite by consistent liberals, topped only by CNN.
Fox News is one of the main factors, possibily the main factor, driving political polarization in this country. Huge chunks of this country listen mostly or solely to a relentless stream of misinformation coming from Fox News, coupled with warnings, implied or even baldly stated, to avoid listening to other, more factually accurate news sources. Unsurprisingly, then, more people are becoming conservatives and people who were already conservative are becoming more hardline about it. If you have any Fox viewers in your family, you probably already suspected this, but now Pew has given us the cold, hard facts to confirm your suspicions.

Krugman on Democracy vs. Plutocracy

Plutocrats Against Democracy

OCT. 23, 2014

Paul Krugman

It’s always good when leaders tell the truth, especially if that wasn’t their intention. So we should be grateful to Leung Chun-ying, the Beijing-backed leader of Hong Kong, for blurting out the real reason pro-democracy demonstrators can’t get what they want: With open voting, “You would be talking to half of the people in Hong Kong who earn less than $1,800 a month. Then you would end up with that kind of politics and policies” — policies, presumably, that would make the rich less rich and provide more aid to those with lower incomes.

So Mr. Leung is worried about the 50 percent of Hong Kong’s population that, he believes, would vote for bad policies because they don’t make enough money. This may sound like the 47 percent of Americans who Mitt Romney said would vote against him because they don’t pay income taxes and, therefore, don’t take responsibility for themselves, or the 60 percent that Representative Paul Ryan argued pose a danger because they are “takers,” getting more from the government than they pay in. Indeed, these are all basically the same thing.

For the political right has always been uncomfortable with democracy. No matter how well conservatives do in elections, no matter how thoroughly free-market ideology dominates discourse, there is always an undercurrent of fear that the great unwashed will vote in left-wingers who will tax the rich, hand out largess to the poor, and destroy the economy.

In fact, the very success of the conservative agenda only intensifies this fear. Many on the right — and I’m not just talking about people listening to Rush Limbaugh; I’m talking about members of the political elite — live, at least part of the time, in an alternative universe in which America has spent the past few decades marching rapidly down the road to serfdom. Never mind the new Gilded Age that tax cuts and financial deregulation have created; they’re reading books with titles like “A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic,” asserting that the big problem we have is runaway redistribution.

This is a fantasy. Still, is there anything to fears that economic populism will lead to economic disaster? Not really. Lower-income voters are much more supportive than the wealthy toward policies that benefit people like them, and they generally support higher taxes at the top. But if you worry that low-income voters will run wild, that they’ll greedily grab everything and tax job creators into oblivion, history says that you’re wrong. All advanced nations have had substantial welfare states since the 1940s — welfare states that, inevitably, have stronger support among their poorer citizens. 

But you don’t, in fact, see countries descending into tax-and-spend death spirals — and no, that’s not what ails Europe.

Still, while the “kind of politics and policies” that responds to the bottom half of the income distribution won’t destroy the economy, it does tend to crimp the incomes and wealth of the 1 percent, at least a bit; the top 0.1 percent is paying quite a lot more in taxes right now than it would have if Mr. Romney had won. So what’s a plutocrat to do?

One answer is propaganda: tell voters, often and loudly, that taxing the rich and helping the poor will cause economic disaster, while cutting taxes on “job creators” will create prosperity for all. There’s a reason conservative faith in the magic of tax cuts persists no matter how many times such prophecies fail (as is happening right now in Kansas): There’s a lavishly funded industry of think tanks and media organizations dedicated to promoting and preserving that faith.

Another answer, with a long tradition in the United States, is to make the most of racial and ethnic divisions — government aid just goes to Those People, don’t you know. And besides, liberals are snooty elitists who hate America.

A third answer is to make sure government programs fail, or never come into existence, so that voters never learn that things could be different.

But these strategies for protecting plutocrats from the mob are indirect and imperfect. The obvious answer is Mr. Leung’s: Don’t let the bottom half, or maybe even the bottom 90 percent, vote.

And now you understand why there’s so much furor on the right over the alleged but actually almost nonexistent problem of voter fraud, and so much support for voter ID laws that make it hard for the poor and even the working class to cast ballots. American politicians don’t dare say outright that only the wealthy should have political rights — at least not yet. But if you follow the currents of thought now prevalent on the political right to their logical conclusion, that’s where you end up.

The truth is that a lot of what’s going on in American politics is, at root, a fight between democracy and plutocracy. And it’s by no means clear which side will win.

Brooks and Burke

New post on Corey Robin

David Brooks, Edmund Burke, and Me by Corey Robin David Brooks: Burke is famous for his belief in gradual change....I’m sticking to my Burkean roots. Change should be steady, constant and slow. Society has structural problems, but they have to be reformed by working with existing materials, not sweeping them away in a vain hope for instant transformation. Edmund Burke on the East India Company, a "map of misgovernment" ruling "a territory larger than any European dominion, Russia and Turkey excepted," a territory in which "there is not a man who eats a mouthful of rice but by permission of the East India Company": It is fixed beyond all power of reformation...this body, being totally perverted from the purposes of its institution, is utterly incorrigible; and because they are incorrigible, both in conduct and constitution, power ought to be taken out of their hands; just on the same principles on which have been made all the just changes and revolutions of government that have taken place since the beginning of the world...If the undone people of India see their old oppressors in confirmed power, even by the reformation, they will expect nothing but what they will certainly feel, a continuance, or rather an aggravation, of all their former sufferings...If the Company's government is not only full of abuse, but is one of the most corrupt and destructive tyrannies, that probably ever existed in the world (as I am sure it is) what a cruel mockery would it be in me, and in those who think like me, to propose this kind of remedy for this kind of evil! Me: The other reason I have dwelled so long on Burke is that though he’s often held up as the source of conservatism, I get the feeling he’s not often read....Sure, someone will quote a passage here or a phrase there, but the quotations inevitably have a whiff of cliché about them—little platoons and so on—emitting that stale blast of familiarity you sense when you listen to someone go on about a text he may or may not have read during one week in college. David Brooks: Gail, as you know I have a policy of teaching at colleges I couldn’t have gotten into, and as a result I find myself teaching at Yale....I just got out of a class in which we discussed Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France.” God help us all. Comment

Voter ID is the New Poll Tax

Monday, Oct 20, 2014 10:14 AM CST

Ruth Bader Ginsburg destroys GOP’s lie: Why voter ID is the right’s new poll tax

Justice's devastating critique of Texas voter ID laws shows what they’re really intended to do

Joan Walsh Follow

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Rick Perry (Credit: AP/Cliff Owen/Jacquelyn Martin/photo montage by Salon)

It’s become a cliché that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg issued a “blistering dissent” from a conservative, pro-corporate anti-democracy majority position. We need a new term for what Ginsberg did at 5 a.m. Sunday morning, in a rare public dissent from a SCOTUS decision not to take up a case – this one a challenge to Texas’s harsh and in Ginsberg’s words “discriminatory” voter identification law. Election Law Blogger Rick Hasen called it “a 5 a.m. wake-up call on voting rights.” Let’s hope it wakes more people up to this scandal.
Not only did Ginsberg demand to write a dissent – she was joined by Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor – but she laid out her reasoning in stirring words that echoed a conservative judicial critic of voter identification, Richard Posner, calling it an “unconstitutional poll tax.”
Now that we know what to call it, and we have a legal framework for understanding that voter ID is a direct descendant of Jim Crow laws, will it be easier to fight? I’m not sure, but understanding is always a necessary first step to action.
It can be hard to combat the notion that voter ID is a common-sense requirement. The vast majority of us have driver’s licenses, and we’re used to showing ID to board a plane or enter a major office building. Yet 20 million adults, or 10 percent of eligible voters, don’t have a driver’s license. Voter ID laws disproportionately hurt black and Latino voters, but also elderly people and students. With the exception of the elderly, those voters are the cornerstone of the Democratic coalition.
In Texas, a federal trial court found that Gov. Rick Perry’s voter ID law was intentionally discriminating against minority voters, disenfranchising as many as 600,000 Texans. But the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals overturned that decision last week, so the ACLU and other groups went to the Supreme Court. The court declined to consider the case, in line with earlier decisions not to change the rules for voting so close to an election. Ginsberg challenged her colleagues’ peculiar decision to prioritize orderly election administration over protecting voting rights.
“The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law,” Ginsberg thundered, “one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters.”

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Texas has the worst voter ID law in the country, not even allowing student IDs or veterans administration IDs, unlike other states. Unlike her majority colleagues, Ginsberg took seriously the costs of obtaining public ID, as well as the difficulty of traveling to get it. That’s what makes it a poll tax, comparable to the imposition of voting fees that were used to turn away poor black voters in the Jim Crow south – which were outlawed by the 24th Amendment.
Ginsberg’s reasoning echoes that of Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner, a conservative who’s had a change of heart and mind on the issue of voter ID. Amazingly, Posner wrote the decision upholding Indiana’s voter ID law which the Supreme Court later upheld. In his remarkable dissent from his colleagues’ refusal to take up a challenge to Wisconsin’s voter ID law earlier this month – the Supreme Court actually stepped in and suspended that one – Posner specifically blasted Republicans for hyping the “essentially nonexistent” threat of voter fraud.
“There is only one motivation for imposing burdens on voting that are ostensibly designed to discourage voter-impersonation fraud,” he writes, “and that is to discourage voting by persons likely to vote against the party responsible for imposing the burdens.” He noted that such laws are “highly correlated with a state’s having a Republican governor and Republican control of the legislature and appear to be aimed at limiting voting by minorities, particularly blacks.” Posner specifically mocked right-wing groups like “True the Vote,” which claims Democrats are busing minority voters to the polls “on nonexistent buses.”
Posner also shows how voter ID laws can be a 21^st century literacy test of sorts, although he didn’t use the term — one that penalizes the elderly as well as lower-income, non-Web savvy voters. While his colleagues claimed anyone could “scrounge up” their birth certificate, the 75-year-old jurist admitted he “has never seen his birth certificate and does not know how he would go about ‘scrounging’ it up.” Michael Hitzik points out that Posner attached to his dissent 12 confusing pages of documents given to an applicant whose birth certificate couldn’t be found.  He noted that getting ID could cost $75 to $175, much higher than “the $1.50 poll tax outlawed by the 24th amendment in 1964.”
Between Posner and Ginsberg, we have a rare bipartisan intellectual, political and moral agreement that voter ID laws are a 21^st century descendant of Jim Crow, only now playing nationwide, not just in the south. This should settle the issue, but it’s unlikely to. The Republican Party faces demographic extinction,  on its current course, but it has two powerful weapons in its arsenal: stoking fear – of Ebola, ISIS, immigrants, nearly anybody who isn’t white, our first black president and uppity women – and voter suppression.
It’s sad but true that the GOP has always done what it can to depress turnout, and then the politicians chosen by that smaller, disproportionately white electorate make laws that are explicitly designed to suppress turnout even more. But now Ginsberg and Posner are giving us clear language to describe what’s happening. We fought poll taxes and literacy tests before; we can do it again. Eventually.