The Republican Brain (25 page)

It's clear that the rise of the New Right was characterized by strong psychological elements of conservatism (and authoritarianism), as epitomized by Schlafly. But what's less clear is why the establishment Republican Party—which the New Right eventually either overthrew, or successfully occupied, depending upon your interpretation—did not contain these elements already, or cater to them adequately, such that a conservative “revolution” became necessary.

After all, presumably they were always present in America in some form. So why were the 1960s and 1970s the era that unleashed them upon mainstream politics—leading to a transformation of the Republican Party into something much more sharply conservative, and a much more dramatic and polarized split between the two parties over cultural and moral issues?

For our purposes, the most convincing explanation of this occurrence is found in the book
Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics
, by the political scientists Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler. It's precisely the kind of account I'm seeking, because it melds together political history with underlying psychological dynamics, and uses a wealth of social science data in order to do so. Hetherington and Weiler argue that coming out of the New Deal in the U.S., the political parties were not actually very much divided over the kind of issues that tend to rile up authoritarians (race, foreign threats, women's and gay rights, immigration, being tough on crime and supporting harsh punishments, and so on). So in effect, we had a period in the United States where the left and the right, relatively speaking, were not fully split by the psychological dynamics that we've come to expect, based on the research of Jost and his colleagues.

To be sure, the parties were generally characterized by basic left-right tendencies. These were clearly present, for instance, in the battle over the New Deal. But there were also many, many cultural traditionalists within the ranks of the Democratic Party.

Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, however, the kinds of issues that motivate authoritarians—racial difference, religion in public life, the death penalty, abortion—came to the fore. And here again, decisions made by conservative political elites were crucial. The U.S. Republican Party, standing in the opposition and the minority, launched a campaign to pick off these voters (sometimes called the Southern Democrats, though of course not all of them were Southern) and pull them into the GOP column by exploiting precisely these types of divisive and polarizing topics. This was the famous “Southern Strategy” hatched by Richard Nixon's consultants. The ploy was, by any measure, a stunning political success, and built a much stronger allegiance between those natural allies—economic and social conservatives—within the GOP.

And here we are living in a political world, decades later, where this shift has dramatically defined the difference between the parties.

The consequence is that authoritarianism is now very unequally distributed in American politics. According to Hetherington's and Weiler's data, it is increasingly clustered in the GOP. So we find ourselves with a much more traditional breed of left-right politics than we once had, and a society strongly polarized along ideological lines.

Phyllis Schalfly played a central role in training her conservative Christian flock in politics, in how to make an argument, and in how to defend their own. But she wasn't the only one doing so.

This same thing was happening across the political right, in reaction not only to social and cultural change, but also to a new political atmosphere in which corporations and business leaders (the economic right) feared an overactive government “regulatory state” interfering in their affairs and the free market. They too wanted to block change, albeit change of a different type.

In 1971, the conservative attorney—and later Supreme Court Justice—Lewis Powell wrote a famous letter to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, decrying the lopsidedness of liberalism in “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, [and] the arts and sciences.” Business leaders, he argued, should fund intellectual institutions of their own that could argue back against liberal intellectual dominance and defend capitalism. And that's precisely what happened.

Beginning in the 1970s, Republicans and conservatives forged a fleet of think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, whose clear task was to hit back against liberal expertise and frame conservative policies in an intellectually persuasive way. Indeed, writes Columbia historian Mark Lilla, many conservative elites in the 1970s and 1980s began to operate as “counterintellectuals,” consciously dedicated to fighting back against the “intellectuals” as a class. In some cases, Lilla continues, they became “counterintellectuals without ever having been intellectuals—a unique American phenomenon.”

The influence of this trend has been dramatic. In 1950, the American cultural critic Lionel Trilling wrote that “in the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.” Sixty years later, conservative ideas are everywhere, as are intelligent and talented conservative experts and elites who make careers out of advancing them—engaging in increasingly sophisticated and convincing forms of politically motivated reasoning, and in effect, helping conservatives to construct their own reality.

Conservatives are not, however, dominant in academia. For even as the New Right emerged and created its sources of counter-expertise, academia itself shifted
further to the left
, and advanced degrees overall became more concentrated among Democrats and liberals.

Dwight Eisenhower was a remarkably pro-science president. There were also many Republican professors, and Republican scientists, in the academe of the 1950s and 1960s.

But more and more, that has changed. In part, this is surely the consequence of constant conservative attacks on universities and intellectuals, going back to Buckley's
God and Man at Yale.
These would have cemented the idea that liberals hang out on the campuses and read Sartre, while conservatives go into the business world. Due to the importance of the Open personality in generating new research and ideas, we can probably assume that academia will always be a liberal-leaning haven. But U.S. cultural and political change, including right-wing attacks on intellectuals and facts alike, has clearly helped make matters much more lopsided.

Today, then, we find the parties vastly divided over expertise—with much more of it residing among liberals and Democrats, and with liberals and Democrats increasingly aligned with the views of scientists and scholars. I've already shown that most college professors today are Democrats, as are most scientists. Indeed, according to the aforementioned body of research by the University of British Columbia's Neil Gross, American professors have been drifting steadily to the left since the late 1960s.

Something similar appears to be happening with advanced degrees in general. Gross and his fellow researchers find that nearly 15 percent of U.S. liberals now hold one, more than double the percentage that did in the 1970s. The percentage of moderates and conservatives with advanced degrees has also increased, but lags far behind the saturation levels of expertise among liberals. In fact, conservatives are about where liberals were back in the 1970s. As a result, Gross and his colleagues write, “more so than ever before the highly educated comprise a key constituency for American liberalism and the Democratic Party, one that may have surpassed a crucial threshold level in size.”

But while Democrats may have considerably more experts in their ranks today than Republicans, Republicans have more total experts than they used to as well, many of them hanging out at think tanks. The whole society has more experts, thanks to the expansion of higher education generally, as well as the growth of a conservative ideas infrastructure to rival academia.

And these conservative experts and elites are not giving in. They're carrying on the tradition of counterexpertise in as many disciplines as they can, with dedication and with purpose. For every PhD, there's an equal and opposite PhD—or so it can often be made to appear.

To be sure, in many of these battles conservative experts don't really end up faring very well. Sniping at climate science from a few D.C. institutes, citing a few sympathetic scientists, may turn friendly ears in Congress, but it does nothing to seriously undermine the conclusions and legitimacy of virtually every scientific society that can claim expertise in the subject, or the national academies of nations around the world.

For a truly amusing example of the current left-right expertise imbalance, consider something called “Project Steve.” This is a clever ploy by the pro-evolution National Center for Science Education (NCSE) to undermine conservative sign-on letters boasting large numbers of experts who question the theory of evolution. Project Steve goes one better—it finds scientists whose names are “Steve” who support evolution. To date, over a thousand Steves have signed on. And, as the NCSE boasts, Steves are only about 1 percent of scientists.

That's a staggering expertise balance. And it's important to appreciate how the average conservative thinker—who knows that he or she is smart and competent—must feel when staring it down.

David Frum, the apostate Republican and former George W. Bush speechwriter who has increasingly fallen out with its party as it has turned more and more to the right, stresses the importance of what he calls “conservative self-consciousness of being a minority in the world of ideas.” As he explains:

That's got a little bit of a connection to the world of conservative religiosity, because if you are an intensely committed Christian and especially an evangelical Christian, you do feel yourself kind of beleaguered in an intellectual world that's not hospitable to you, and that feeling of isolation and victimization is then spread through the tone and style of the whole conservative world. . . . because of the historic weakness of the conservatives in getting positions in universities, and other tenured positions of intellectual life, they are much more economically dependent on places where their livelihoods are much more volatile and unpredictable, like the think tank world. There's no tenure at think tanks—which is potentially a good thing, if the think tanks have a strong sense of intellectual integrity in their mission. But if they don't, it's potentially a bad thing.

This spoken by a conservative who was cut from his post at the American Enterprise Institute, the premier conservative think tank, after criticizing the Republican strategy on health care reform.

Thus, the growth of conservative think tanks, and the leftward shift of academics and intellectuals, are two more critical factors in the “oven” of our politics that sharply drive our war over expertise and fact today.

For once you have liberal experts squaring off against conservative experts and wielding liberal and conservative “science” and “facts,” motivated reasoning tells you exactly what to expect. As we've seen, among the more intelligent, knowledgeable, and sophisticated among us, there are reasons to think the process is even more advanced, not less. Precisely because of their training and ability—their power at selectively constructing arguments—the politically or intellectually sophisticated are better able to justify themselves, and also to convince themselves that they're right.

Thus, we would expect to see liberal and conservative experts constantly arguing with each other, each sounding reasonable and articulate—and each becoming more convinced they're right the more they argue and the more they research the issues. As this process plays out, it has numerous pernicious effects. One is that many onlookers to these debates are left confused and frustrated about where reality lies on any contested issue. Another is that partisans on either side wind up with lots of handy arguments to carry into their own belief-affirming and confidence-bolstering intellectual battles.

The result is polarization over the nature of reality itself.