Armchair psychology gets worse
A psychologist who never met or interviewed Trump wrote a book about him on why he was mentally unfit for office. Of course, in doing that, she broke just about every ethic in the canon. This didn’t stop a small group of Trump hating psychologists from abusing their medical authority and marching for the removal of Donald Trump.
After that, how much worse could the abuse of psychology be in the Trump era.
A lot.
Forget diagnosing one person as mentally unstable, despite never talking with him. Trump era psychology allows tens of millions of people to be dismissed for political reasons under the guise of medicine.
From Slate:
Psychology helps explain how it took off.
Lay it on me.
Why has support for gun rights become a hallmark of the Republican Party? There is nothing inevitable about the combination of economic and foreign policy conservatism with social conservatism. As late as the mid-1980s, conservative icons including Ronald Reagan supported gun control measures such as the Brady bill and a ban on assault weapons. Support for gun control legislation actually increased among Republicans in the 1980s. Unambiguous support for gun “rights” didn’t appear in the Republican Party platform until 1988. Even the National Rifle Association did not become fanatically opposed to any and all gun regulations until the late 1970s.
Well, after the slow erosion of our civil rights with little pushback, the Conservative movement pivoted and decided gun rights were worth protecting. For most people we’d call that a policy shift. Bill Clinton signed “work for welfare” into law with welfare reform. Obama ended that reform. Was that a policy shift or a sign of aberrant psychology?
During his 2008 primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama famously proposed a crude psychological explanation for why traditionally Democratic-leaning groups of voters were being drawn to Republican positions on social issues. Industrial jobs had disappeared from the small towns of Pennsylvania and the Midwest, he noted, and Republicans and Democrats alike had failed to address the distress of these communities. So, he said, it’s not surprising that “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion.”
That wasn’t amateur psychology. That was pure Liberal bigotry against Conservatives. Know the difference.
Obama’s explanation was superficially plausible (and has been widely adapted to explain the appeal of Donald Trump), but the facts provide little support for it. For one thing, the increase in attachment to guns that Obama lamented never actually happened. The percentage of American households owning a gun has declined steadily since the mid-1970s. For another, support for gun “rights” is actually stronger among more affluent Americans than among poorer Americans, the very ones who are supposed to be “bitter.”
I don’t know where this “declined steadily” comes from. I have a feeling people don’t admit that they own guns to NPR. We have month after month record NICS checks. I have a feeling these polls are as skewed as CNN polls.
A more workable psychological explanation begins by noting that psychologists have found consistent differences between conservatives and liberals in personality traits, attitudes, and moral stances. To summarize some of the research findings, conservatives tend to be more likely than liberals to accept or even embrace authority that is perceived to be legitimate. Conservatives tend to be more moralistic and more conventionalthan liberals. They tend to have a stronger need for order and control and stability and a greater dislike of change.
Jonathan Haidt does a wonderful presentation on this topic. I trust him because is a good psychologist and not a partisan hack.
Unlike Slate, Haidt doesn’t dismiss Conservative values and their psychological roots as bad, and actually explains why they are good an necessary for society.
Conservatives also tend to value equality less than liberals. They have less empathy and are more likely to see human nature as bad. Compared with liberals, their moral sense is less centered on fairness and kindness and more on loyalty, deference to authority, and moral and sexual purity. Conservatives also show a greater tendency than liberals toward dichotomous thinking and have a stronger need for certainty and cognitive consistency. (“I don’t do nuance,” George W. Bush famously told Joe Biden. )
Yes, I know, Liberals are “better people” than Conservatives. We hear this all the time. Except… like everything Slate does, this is wrong or slanted. Conservatives do “value equality less” when we discuss equality of outcome. Conservatives value equality of opportunity. For example, everyone has the right to a public school education. If one student drops out, one gets all “C” grades, and one is valedictorian, their career paths and income levels will all be different. A liberal will want the valedictorian to be taxed on his six figure job to give more benefits to the dropout. The Conservative will say “they all had the same access, each chose their own path and now they have to live with the consequences of their actions.” The former opinion is not objectively better than the latter, and it may actually be worse.
As per empathy, empathy makes bad policy. When you craft policy based on empathy – say severely curtailing gun rights for law abiding citizens because of a bunch of mewling high school kids on TV, that’s bad policy. Empathy for “poor migrants” has turned Sweden into the rape capital of Europe. Empathy for illegals was what got Kate Steinle killed in a sanctuary city.
Personally, I don’t believe that Liberals think people are good and Conservatives think people are bad. Conservatives know that evil exists. We don’t blame the gun, we blame the shooter. We know it isn’t a lack of jobs but some awful tenants of Islam that is the reason there is so much terrorism from the Middle East. If Liberals thought that people are good, than why is it that Liberals love to micromanage people’s lives? Shouldn’t inherently good people deserve the most freedom?
Lastly, only a true Liberal would consider “loyalty, deference to authority, and moral and sexual purity” to be bad. A lack of Loyalty is what made Chelsea Manning a hero to the Left for treason against the US. A lack of sexual and moral purity is what leads to the normalization of pedophilia and pubescent drag queens. Liberal values have resulted in the wide spread number of fatherless home and the resulting destruction to children that has occurred. The Liberal lack of traditional morality is more responsible for gang shootings, toxic masculinity, and school shootings than any Conservative argument for gun rights.
And some of these differences appear to be directly expressed in divergent beliefs relevant to the gun control debate. For example, conservatives’ greater need for social order and greater acceptance of aggression as intrinsic to human nature may lead to their taking a more punitive stance with respect to crime, including support for longer prison sentences and for capital punishment. Similarly, the lower value placed by conservatives on empathy and on equality, combined with their greater resistance to change, may lead to their having less sympathy toward the argument that inequality and poverty are breeding grounds for crime and gun violence.
We don’t coddle criminals. Liberals do, which is why a person deported five times comes back and shoots someone in California.
But the connection between personality and political beliefs and beliefs about gun control is not entirely straightforward. If conservatives respect authority and rules more than liberals and have a greater need for order, why wouldn’t they demand gun control rather than gun rights?
A more complex exploration of the relationship between personality characteristics and political beliefs begins with the observation that all human beings, conservative and liberal alike, feel anxiety. And both conservatives and liberals have plenty of things to be anxious about, including financial worries, conflicts in interpersonal relationships, and concerns about physical health or mortality.
Good question. If Liberals believed people are good, why not trust them with guns?
Concern about violent crime, terrorism, and school shootings is legitimate, of course. Crime and terrorism are real sources of potential danger, and individual cases of “illegal immigrants” committing crimes are not fiction. But people tend to wildly exaggerate the frequency of crime and of terrorism, and the costs and dangers posed by immigrants. The exaggeration stems from several factors. First, we all overattend to especially salient events (and what could be more salient that school children getting mowed down?). We also all tend to overexaggerate the frequency of dangerous events. Second, the media have a profit-based incentive to sensationalize, and social media tends to amplify the panic.
Maybe banning AR-15s is a panic caused by the over sensationalism of mass shootings.
We all exaggerate risk, but conservatives are especially prone to exaggerate risks. For one thing, conservatives generally tend to see the world as a more dangerous place than liberals do, so they are especially vulnerable to these distortions. They also tend to repress their own aggressive and sexual impulses more and to identify with aggressors. These forbidden impulses may be projected onto others, justifying the decision to see others as a source of danger and legitimizing aggressive responses.
Anxiety about personal danger may resonate with other sources of anxiety. Conservatives are disproportionately concentrated in rural areas and small towns. These are the places that have been most hit by the decline in industrial and agricultural employment of recent decades, with concomitant economic insecurity and community disruption and breakdown. A brooding sense of grievance over no longer being central to American society and culture and a pervasive sense of disempowerment add to the feelings of anxiety.
Ah yes, Podunk Conservatives are scared of minorities. That’s not a bigoted argument if I’ve ever heard one. Why is it that Liberals freak out everytime national CCW is mentioned. Seems you are scared of Conservative law abiding gun owners.
Regardless of whether or not the sense of threat is realistic, intense feelings of anxiety are intolerable, so people use various overlapping and intersecting strategies to assuage these feelings, to soothe themselves. The healthiest response to realistically based anxieties and other negative feelings would be to address the external sources of the uneasy feelings. As the Injury Control Research Center’s director David Hemenway wrote in his book Private Guns, Public Health, “Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community leads to more homicide.” Contrary to widespread public belief, the high rate of gun violence in the U.S. has little to do with mental illness. Conversely, an enormous body of evidence shows that gun control—serious, sustained gun control, not merely banning bump stocks or closing the “gun show loophole”—effectively and quickly reduces the rate of gun violence of all kinds.
No they won’t. The AWB and waiting periods did nothing to reduce crime or shootings. Criminals do not buy guns at gun shows. The big problem in Chicago is older gang members getting girlfriends or people without convictions to straw man purchase guns for the gang. Chicago doesn’t prosecute those who straw man for the gangs.
Others, as NYU social psychologist John Jost and his co-authors have pointed out, adoptbeliefs that soothe. The beliefs any particular individual adopts must meet several criteria: First and foremost, they must be consistent with the individual’s own particular personality structure, which, in turn, has been shaped by genetics and by the individual’s upbringing and experiences of the world.
And then, when that same government that can’t be relied on for protection seems about to remove our right to protect ourselves, it becomes yet another source of pseudorealistic anxiety. Anger and commitment to “gun rights” are a sure way to soothe oneself, and it becomes quickly fused with the rest of the conservative agenda.
It would seem then that Liberals are the one with physiological issues about guns. Liberals love to impose gun control measures that feel good but don’t work to reduce gun crime.
They love banning things that look or sound scary but are used in very few crimes.
Liberals use bans to soothe themselves. They can’t solve a problem, but they know how to ban things they don’t like.
But, if you want to understand the real underlying believe here, there are two reasons we love gun rights.
First, they are a litmus test for other rights. Notice how the groups that want gun bans also want NRA TV banned. It is always guns first, then speech codes and bans of Conservative public speakers. It is drowning out non-Liberal opinions on college campuses. If you can’t respect gun rights, you don’t really respect any right.
Second, we want to be left alone. We don’t want to force guns on anybody. We want to buy what we want to buy and carry concealed where we feel the need to carry concealed and after that be left alone.
It is Liberals who feel the need to meddle in our lives, tell us what we can and can’t buy and where and when we can have our guns. Liberals are obsessed with control. Our fight for gun rights is a fight for rights. Guns are just what that happens to coalesce around most frequently. Occasionally it is something else like when the gun-banner-in-chief Bloomberg wanted to ban 20 oz sodas, we same gun rights people fought him on that. The same impulse that said “no more than 10 rounds” made him say “no more than 20 ounces.”
Gun rights are the first steps over the line and we won’t let you have them, because once you have taken gun rights, there is no limit to the rights you will take. History has shown us that.
It’s not our obsession with guns, it is yours.
