Why Are Conservatives More Susceptible to Believing Lies?
Why Are Conservatives More Susceptible to Believing Lies?
It's not just misinformation gained from too many hours listening to Fox News, either.
Many conservatives have a loose relationship with facts. The right-wing denial of what most people think of as accepted reality starts with political issues: As recently as 2016, 45 percent of Republicans still believed that the Affordable Care Act included “death panels” (it doesn’t). A 2015 poll found that 54 percent of GOP primary voters believed then-President Obama to be a Muslim (…he isn’t).
Why are conservatives so susceptible to misinformation? The right wing’s disregard for facts and reasoning is not a matter of stupidity or lack of education. College-educated Republicans are actually more likely than less-educated Republicans to have believed that Barack Obama was a Muslim and that “death panels” were part of the ACA. And for political conservatives, but not for liberals, greater knowledge of science and math is associated with a greater likelihood of dismissing what almost all scientists believe about the human causation of global warming.___
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I note that they state their thesis--conservatives are more susceptible to believing lies--but they only talk about lies conservatives believe, without anything to compare to. That is, they state specific misinformation that conservatives are likely to believe, but they don't say anything about whether they're actually more likely to believe lies, overall, than liberals/progressives/leftists. Everything that they seem to be citing is anecdotal; they have specific lies that are believed, but don't talk about the over rate of believe of lies.
I dunno, feels low like low-effort dunking rather than actually dissecting the why.
"Conservatives are dumb, not like us liberals" is a coping mechanism liberals rely on to displace blame for failed policy. Its never the fault of the Democratic establishment when a liberal initiative fails. Its never the fault of a bloc of moderate voters, prone to selecting the most conservative voices in their own policy for fear of upsetting the Swing MAGA Voter, for backing conservative Democrats during a primary. Its never the fault of party Mega-Donors for squashing legislation inside a Dem legislative committee or bright-blue state legislature.
The lies liberals tend to believe live somewhere between "We're helplessly outnumbered by conservatives even in states we dominate" and "Don't trust the Radical Left, their views are too extreme and will never work!" It is the lie of impotency relative to the conservative lie of hubris. Republicans believe they can Do As Thou Wilt and mold the world to their reactionary beliefs. Democrats believe they need permission from the billionaire class and their media troglodytes before they can impose any kind of policy change.
The first two years of Biden are roughly equivalent to what Trump has now in terms of power and support, but there's a massive difference in results.
Trump is completely sidestepping the legislative branch. Congress passed more anti-trans legislation back in December, under Biden, than it has since Trump took office.
So much of the spotlight has been on DOGE running around the Treasury Office and hijacking servers, and rightfully so. Trump's plan to get around the legislature appears to be to pipe his cronies directly into the hardware that handles payment processing.