A reader asked me the question above, to which I reply:
Our brains seem to be “wired” in such a way that our political philosophies and other aspects of our character and belief systems are not entirely under our control.
About 10 years ago, I heard a presentation on the results of a university study in which subject participants were hooked up to electronic sensors that monitored the activity in various parts of their brains while they were shown photographs of innocuous things like kittens, puffy white clouds, and the beach, along with occasional photos of things that are potentially dangerous, perhaps an angry dog, a rattlesnake, or a tarantula.
There was a profound difference in brain response between self-described “liberals” and “conservatives.” In particular, the amygdalas, the part of the brain that deals with “fight or flight,” emotional responses including fear, anxiety, and aggression, in the latter group were far more active in response to potential danger than the former group, suggesting that conservatives are somehow “programmed” to have more violent responses to potential harm than liberals.
Additionally, we all naturally gravitate toward data points that corroborate what we already believe.
To me, this explains why conservatives, especially those of the present day, stir themselves into a frenzy with Fox News and Newsmax, while the rest of us content ourselves with the New York Times.
The novel of author/philosopher Ian McEwan “Saturday,” albeit fiction, takes this subject on in a deep and fascinating way.
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I’m not sure it’s as simple as this, insofar as Bush 41 and 43 weren’t criminal sociopaths.
I happened to be driving through Manhattan on the very day that Colin Powell was addressing the United Nations just a few miles away and claimed, and I think honestly, that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction,” and must be stopped by a U.S. military invasion.
Contrast that against what we’re doing in Iran. Fifteen years ago, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), included Iran, the P5+1 nations (the United States, China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany), alongside the European Union made an agreement in which most of the developed world agreed that Iran must not have a nuclear weapon.
That stood firmly in place until Trump’s latest war crime, which is costing lives and choking the world economy, solely to defend our president’s neuroses.
The Brennan Center at NYU’s seminal report on this issue, The Truth About Voter Fraud, found that most reported incidents of voter fraud are actually traceable to other sources, such as clerical errors or bad data matching practices. The report reviewed elections that had been meticulously studied for voter fraud and found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent.
Does that stop liars like Mike Lee from spreading disinformation of the subject? Of course not.
There is no judgement day. There is no Saint Peter standing in front of the Pearly Gates discerning good from evil and acting according.
That’s a lucky break for Mike Lee.
For most of our lives, many of us boomers have believed that the biggest threat to the United States was our president, starting with Tricky Dick Nixon, the inventor of the “trickle-down economics,” liar Ronald Reagan, and GW (the moron) Bush.
But yes, none of us was prepared for the cold, calculating criminal who is Donald Trump.
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