The Republican Brain (23 page)

111
the amygdala
Again, see Andrea Kuszewski, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Liberals and Conservatives,” online at
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2011/09/07/your-brain-on-politics-the-cognitive-neuroscience-of-liberals-and-conservatives/
.

111
“conflict monitoring”
Matthew M. Botvinik et al, “Conflict Monitoring and Cognitive Control,”
Psychological Review
, 2001, Vol. 108, No. 3, pp. 624–652. See also Matthew M. Botvinick et al, “Conflict Monitoring and Anterior Cingulate Cortex: An Update,”
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
, Volume 8, Issue 12, 539–546, 1 December 2004.

111
a recent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study
Kanai et al, “Political Orientations are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults,”
Current Biology, 21
, 1–4, April 26, 2011.

112
“I took this on as a fairly frivolous exercise”
Quoted in Joe Churcher, “Brain shape ‘shows political allegiance,'”
The Independent
, December 28, 2010.

112
“hardwired not to be hardwired”
Interview with Darren Schreiber, July 28, 2011.

112
brains of musicians
Tom Jacobs, “The Musician's Brain,”
Miller-McCune
, March 17, 2008. Available online at
http://www.miller-mccune.com/science-environment/the-musician-s-brain-4698/
.

112
that brain then responds differently than an unskilled brain
See Darren Schreiber, “From SCAN to Neuropolitics,” in
Man is By Nature a Political Animal
, edited by P. K. Hatemi and R. McDermott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Also online at
http://dmschreiber.ucsd.edu/Publications/FromSCANtoNeuropolitics.pdf
.

113
“it's almost a lifestyle”
Interview with Marco Iacoboni, May 31, 2011.

113
a more pronounced startle reflex
Douglas R. Oxley et al, “Political Attitudes Vary With Physiological Traits,”
Science
, September 19, 2008, Vol. 321, No. 5896, pp. 1667–1670.

114
“That's obviously what's in the back of people's minds”
Interview with John Hibbing, September 9, 2011.

114
a risky gambling task
Darren Schreiber et al, “Red Brain, Blue Brain: Evaluative Processes Differ in Democrats and Republicans,” working paper available online at
http://dmschreiber.ucsd.edu/Publications/RedBrainBlueBrain.pdf
.

114
“reacting to the outside world”
Interview with Darren Schreiber, July 28, 2011.

115
“the amygdala also lights up for positive emotions”
Interview with Darren Schreiber, July 28, 2011.

115
definitely a fear and threat center
As Joseph LeDoux puts it, “the amygdala seems to do the same thing—take care of fear responses—in all species that have an amygdala. This is not the only function of the amygdala, but it is certainly an important one. The function seems to have been established eons ago, probably at least since the dinosaurs ruled the earth, and to have been maintained through diverse branches of evolutionary development. Defense against danger is perhaps an organism's number one priority and it appears that in the major groups of vertebrate animals that have been studied (reptiles, birds, and mammals), the brain performs this function using a common architectural plan . . . When it comes to detecting and responding to danger, the brain just hasn't changed much. In some ways we are emotional lizards.”
The Emotional Brain
, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 174.

115
“heart and soul of the fear system”
LeDoux,
The Emotional Brain
, p. 172.

115
“that association between the amygdala and fear holds very well”
Interview with Marco Iacoboni, May 31, 2011.

115
there is still general scientific consensus that it is involved in error detection and conflict monitoring
Interview with Marco Iacoboni, May 31, 2011. See also Matthew M. Botvinik et al, “Conflict Monitoring and Cognitive Control,”
Psychological Review
, 2001, Vol. 108, No. 3, pp. 624–652.

115
a “Go-No Go” task
David M. Amodio et al, “Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism,”
Nature Neuroscience
, September 9, 2007.

116
This study was subsequently replicated
David Amodio, email communication, November 8, 2011. The study in question appears to be only available online as a scientific poster. It is Meghan J. Weissflog et al, “Sociopolitical Ideology and Electrocortical Responses,” Poster presented at the 50th Annual Meeting for the Society for Psychophysiological Research, Portland, OR, September 2010. See:
http://www.brocku.ca/psychology/people/Weissflog%20SPR%20poster%20Sept23%202010.pdf
.

116
“fear dispositions”
Peter K. Hatemi et al, “Fear Dispositions, Attachment, and Out-Group Political Preferences,” paper presented at the International Society of Political Psychology, Dublin, 2009.

117
ultimately attributable to genetic influences
A number of scientific papers have now been published using twin studies to estimate the heritability of political ideology. And while they reach different estimates about the degree to which the variability in political outlooks can be explained by genes (in different populations), in all cases the estimate is substantial. For one classic paper, see Alford JR, Funk CL, Hibbing JR. 2005. “Are political orientations genetically transmitted?”
American Political Science Review
, Vol. 99, No. 2, May 2005:153–67. For further elaboration see John R. Alford et al, “Beyond Liberals and Conservatives to Political Genotypes and Phenotypes,”
Perspectives on Politics
, Volume 6, Issue 02, Jun 2008, pp. 321–328. I have also been influenced by a number of published and unpublished papers on the same subject by Peter K. Hatemi.

118
a much smaller percentage of the variability in one's political party affiliation
Peter K. Hatemi et al, “Is There a Party in Your Genes?”
Political Research Quarterly,
Vol. 62, No. 3, September 2009, p. 584–600.

118
being “born again”
Matthew Bradshaw and Christopher G. Ellison, “Do Genetic Factors Influence Religious Life? Findings from a Behavior Genetic Analysis of Twin Studies,”
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
, 2008, Vol. 47, No. 4, pp. 529–544.

118
Openness may not cause liberalism
Verhulst, B, Eaves, LJ, and PK Hatemi, “Causation or Correlation? The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies,”
American Journal of Political Science
(forthcoming).

118
“The basic state of who we are, that's inherited”
Interview with Peter Hatemi, June 22, 2011. All quotes from Hatemi in this chapter are from the same interview.

119
once we leave the nest
Peter K. Hatemi et al, “Genetic and Environmental Transmissions of Political Attitudes Over a Life Time,”
The Journal of Politics
, Vol. 71, No. 3, July 2009, pp. 1141–1156.

120
polymorphisms or markers . . . that are related to politics
Peter K Hatemi et al, “A Genome-Wide Analysis of Liberal and Conservative Political Attitudes,”
The Journal of Politics
, Vol. 73, No. 1, January 2011, pp. 1–15.

120
DRD4
Jaime E. Settle et al, “Friendships Moderate an Association Between a Dopamine Gene Variant and Political Ideology,”
Journal of Politics,
Vol. 72, No. 4, October 2010, p. 1189–1198.

121
“science of human nature”
See James H. Fowler and Darren Schreiber, “Biology, Politics, and the Emerging Science of Human Nature,”
Science
, Vol. 322, November 7, 2008.

121
what centrally separated the future conservative children from the future liberal ones
Block, J., & Block, J. H., “Nursery school personality and political orientation two decades later,”
Journal of Research in Personalit
y, Vol 40(5), Oct 2006, 734–749. Available online at
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2006/03/block.pdf
.

122
100 trillion connections
Carl Zimmer, “100 Trillion Connections: New Efforts to Probe and Map the Brain's Detailed Architecture,”
Scientific American
, December 29, 2010.

122
“If you had called me four years ago”
Interview with Darren Schreiber, July 28, 2011.

123
“Random stuff happens in evolution”
Steven Pinker, “The Evolutionary Psychology of Religion,” lecture to the Freedom from Religion Foundation, October 29, 2004. Available online at
http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~ras2777/relpol/pinker.htm
.

124
Homo sapiens
“Homo sapiens,” Institute on Human Origins, available online at
http://www.becominghuman.org/node/homo-sapiens-0
.

124
male strength
Aaron Sell et al, “Formidability and the logic of human anger,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
, September 1, 2009, Vol. 106, no. 35, 15073–15078.

125
“intuitive gut feelings about whether or not force works”
Interview with Aaron Sell, August 12, 2011.

125 a
society fares better when it has both “liberal” and “conservative” tendencies in it
Everett Young, “Why We're Liberal, Why We're Conservative: A Cognitive Theory on the Origins of Ideological Thinking,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Stony Brook University, December 2009.

125
group selection
David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson, “Evolution ‘for the Good of the Group,'”
American Scientist
, Vol. 96, September-October 2008, available online at
http://evolution.binghamton.edu/dswilson/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/American-Scientist.pdf
.

Part Three

Enter the “Environment”: Turning Against Change

Chapter Seven

A Tale of Two Republicans

In March of 2011, it was Kerry Emanuel's turn to do what so many of his colleagues have done before: defend their knowledge and expertise against congressional Republicans.

Emanuel is a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an expert not only on global warming but on hurricanes. In the 1990s, he coined the term “hypercane” to describe a theoretical storm that, according to his equations, could have occurred in the wake of the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs. But as the sole Democrat-invited witness before the House Committee on Science—the GOP majority had five of them, one a marketing professor who testified that “global warming alarm is an anti-scientific political movement”—Emanuel's task was more like climate science 101. He merely had to stand up for what MIT teaches its students.

As Emanuel explained in his written testimony, today's MIT atmospheric sciences students can do “hand calculations or use simple models” to show why global warming is a serious concern. Such calculations show that the planet will warm somewhere between 2.7 and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit if we allow carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere to double. It's a result, Emanuel observed, that scientists have understood at least since 1979, when the U.S. National Academy of Sciences released the first in what are now shelves of studies on the subject. You don't get an atmospheric sciences degree at MIT—with a climate focus, anyway—if you can't show on the back of an envelope what much of Congress now calls into question.

If Emanuel's testimony was at times cutting, it was also impassioned. Addressing the alleged “ClimateGate” scandal—which he'd served on a British Royal Society committee to investigate—Emanuel noted that “there is no evidence for an intent to deceive” on the part of climate researchers. He continued, his voice rising: “Efforts by some to leverage this into a sweeping condemnation of a whole scholarly endeavor should be seen for what they are.”

All of which is what you'd expect to hear from a frustrated climate scientist these days—except, Emanuel is a proud, lifelong Republican. Or at least he was until recently, when he voted for Barack Obama, the first time he's ever backed a Democrat. In 2008, Emanuel says, he was a “single issue” voter concerned about science and climate change. “I don't like it when ideology trumps reason, and I see that the Republicans are guilty of that in spades at the moment,” he says.

“I've been toying with the idea of officially switching to Independent status,” he adds.

How does a personal political shift like this one come about? Let's hear the rest of Kerry Emanuel's conversion story, because it says a great deal about the transformation of our politics over the past several decades.

In the early 1970s as an undergraduate at MIT, Emanuel recalls feeling surrounded by the “liberal excesses” then prevalent in the “People's Republic” of Cambridge, Massachusetts. “I remember hearing fellow students defending Pol Pot and Mao Zedong and Stalin, and I was so horrified,” he says.

In the context of the era, reacting against such left-wing extremes made Emanuel a Republican. In particular, he was an admirer of the thoughtfulness and eloquence of William F. Buckley, Jr., a genteel conservative leader who had worked hard to make the movement more mainstream by, in Emanuel's words, “ejecting the crazies”—like members of the John Birch Society. In 1962, Buckley had described Birch Society founder Robert Welch as a “likeable, honest, courageous, energetic man”—but one whom “by silliness and injustice of utterance” had become “the kiss of death” for conservatives.

“So by the time the 1980s rolled around,” Emanuel continues, conservatism “was kind of respectable. There weren't nutcases, people were reasonable and civilized, and it was a coherent philosophy that seemed a good way to get around the excesses of the 60s and 70s.” And indeed, while Reagan moved the country significantly to the right, he was also considerably more politically pragmatic and compromising than much of the GOP today. For instance, Reagan supported a global environmental treaty, the Montreal Protocol, to curtail emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which at that time posed an enormous threat to the stratosphere's protective ozone layer. It's hard to imagine the Tea Party going along with such a thing.

But the GOP moved farther to the right in subsequent years, from the Gingrich Revolution of 1994, to the George W. Bush presidency, to the 2010 election—and today, Emanuel perceives the political situation as largely reversed. The extremes, as he sees them, are now to be found not on the left and on campuses, but rather, on the Tea Party right. By comparison, the Democrats these days are a bunch of centrists and pragmatists. Thus, Emanuel—who really, it appears, was always a moderate—finds not so much that he has moved but that his party did.

“Psychologically, I associate it with the death of William F. Buckley,” he says. “I'm turned off by those people for exactly the same reasons I was turned off by the ideologues of the 1970s.”

As Emanuel's story indicates, while psychological factors clearly play a role in explaining the difference between the left and the right today—and while we can perhaps see such factors in Emanuel's own resistance to extremism (which lacks nuance) and in his contrasting of “reason” with “ideology” (Enlightenment values)—they cannot provide a full account on their own. Psychology interacts with our political culture, with personal history and experience, with contingent historical events, and much else.

Someone with the same personality and psychological needs will have different political views in the modern U.S. than during the Russian Revolution of 1917. And if one is living in a totalitarian society where a range of political views aren't on offer or can't be expressed, then a psychologically congenial and appealing ideology may not even be available to you. Similarly, if cultural and political contexts change enough within the same society, someone like Kerry Emanuel can change political parties.

So in no sense am I arguing that it's all “nature”—that psychology and personality can account, on their own, for all of our political identities and all of our rifts, across individuals and time periods. After all, such factors alone clearly cannot explain Kerry Emanuel. He was a Republican in one political context but not in another. There's no gene for that.

A more reasonable account, of the sort that this book seeks to advance, would map political and societal changes on top of more deeply rooted psychological tendencies in the population.

Consider a helpful analogy put forward by political scientist James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego: Think about baking a cake. The cake's core “nature” lies in its basic ingredients—flour, eggs, sugar, and so on. These vary, to some extent, based on the recipe and how well you follow it—which would be analogous to people's different natures or genotypes. But then there's everything that happens once you put the cake into the oven of
experience
or
nurture
—and here, you'll see very different outcomes depending on the temperature, how long the cake is cooked, and what kind of oven is used.

On this account, then, we'd have a range of basic tendencies or dispositions in the population—cakes with different ingredients—even as shifting political winds, contingent events, technological changes, and so on would provide the metaphorical “oven.” And it was in the oven of growing conservative attacks on scientific knowledge that someone like Kerry Emanuel veered from Republicanism. (He's hardly the only thinker to do so, and I'll soon introduce two others, David Frum and Bruce Bartlett.)

My challenge in this chapter and the next, then, will be to provide a historically accurate, and yet also psychologically informed account of the rightward shift of U.S. politics—the shift that turned Kerry Emanuel into an Obama voter—and the partisan gulf over reality and expertise that resulted. I will have to merge both nature and nurture in order to fully capture the influence of a world-changing movement—modern American conservatism.

At the outset, it's important to recall once again the existence of a rival account—one in very widespread popular circulation. Call it the “environmental” story. This narrative assumes, either implicitly or explicitly, that the core psychological differences between us either don't exist, or aren't significant enough to really have any meaningful influence—at least not in comparison to the overwhelming power of the “oven.” It's the sort of account you might find in a typical historian's narrative of the rise of the American right, of which there are many. But it's a storyline I'll continue to resist. There is too much scientific evidence suggesting that, whatever the environment, nature still shines through as well.

Why resist the strictly “environmental” account? To show as much, let's examine the conservative revolution in the United States, this time as glimpsed through the story of a Republican who couldn't be more different from Kerry Emanuel—indeed, precisely the kind of conservative who is pushing people like Emanuel out of the Republican Party. I've chosen her because she's the mother of the consummate create-your-own-reality conservative whose example I used to begin this book—
Conservapedia
founder Andrew Schlafly. I'm referring to the anti-feminist and Christian conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly—the woman to whom feminist leader Betty Friedan famously declared, “I'd like to burn you at the stake!”

Through Schlafly's story—the account that follows is based on a recent, excellent biography by historian Donald T. Critchlow—we'll encounter the political rise of the “New Right” and, at the same time, its underlying psychological tendencies—authoritarian, hierarchical, traditionalist, and deeply dedicated to its own version of what counts as the truth.

Schlafly, née Phyllis Stewart, was born to a Catholic St. Louis family in 1924. The Stewarts educated their daughters as well as their sons, and Phyllis excelled—attending Washington University and graduating in just three years, Phi Beta Kappa. Before long, she was off to Radcliffe College—which meant studying at Harvard—for a fellowship. Just a year later she had her Master's, having earned all A's. Phyllis Schlafly is a highly educated and very intelligent woman—one who denies the reality of human evolution.

Schlafly had always been a Republican—the GOP was the party of her family—but she didn't become a
conservative
until she took a job in Washington, D.C., at the foundational conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Association (later the American Enterprise Institute) in 1945. The organization had been launched just two years earlier by Lewis H. Brown, president of the Johns Manville Corporation and a New Deal critic. Working as a researcher at the AEA, Schlafly encountered real conservative writers like Friedrich von Hayek, and something was activated. It was like a switch was thrown. “Her religious faith, now combined with a well formed conservative ideology, created a formidable political outlook,” writes her biographer, Critchlow.