Chris Jepson: How to explain conservatism

I’ve been researching theories on why people are conservative. One of the most promising possibilities was actually presented in Woody Allen's 1996 movie, "Everyone Says I Love You.” It deals with oxygen. The brain not getting enough oxygen makes you conservative. In the movie, a vulnerable teenager’s brain recovers upon receiving sufficient oxygen after an artery blockage is removed. The grateful father is overjoyed when his now lucid son drops his Young Republican Party membership.

Dr. Seuss presented an interesting theory on why conservatives are pinched and reactionary in his classic, “How The Grinch Stole Christmas.” The Grinch as you may recall is a resentful, embittered being because his heart is “two sizes too small.” Either reason — insufficient oxygen or a crippled heart — is a plausible explanation on how one could possibly vote Republican. Another physiological explanation (vision impairment?) was offered by Franklin Roosevelt, “A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward.”


The issue of questioning Republican intellect is not a new phenomena as Walter Lippman (considered by some the father of modern journalism) observed, “Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.”


Years before, esteemed British political philosopher John Stuart Mill opined that, “Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.”


So far though, all we have are unsupported (by science) theories to explain why some human beings are conservative while others not so much. Ah, but that is changing. Chris Mooney of Mother Jones magazine reported in the July 16, 2014 edition on a study conducted by a University of Nebraska researcher and published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences that (as summed-up by Mooney), “A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics.”

Genetic explanations for conservative behavior? According to the Nebraska researcher John Hibbing, political conservatives have a “negativity bias.” And here, foolish me, I thought it was strictly an IQ deficiency. Hibbing and his fellow researchers argue (according to Mooney), “that they [conservatives] are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments.”

Why would a “negativity bias” occur in the first place? From an evolutionary perspective, such a bias would help one from being killed. The authors hypothesize that such a bias developed during the Pleistocene epoch, which lasted nearly 2.5 million years, ending approximately 12,000 years ago.

If important brain functions created to respond to millions-of-years-ago external threats are operational in the 21st century mind, is it any wonder conservatives demand a “strong” military, unregulated guns or that they find immigration threatening? Their brains are fear-wired that way; it’s a predictable biologically driven fear response. Reality is often irrelevant.

What’s the take-away from all this? I end with Chris Mooney’s quite lucid assessment, “All of this matters, of course, because we still operate in politics and in media as if minds can be changed by the best-honed arguments, the most compelling facts. And yet if our political opponents are simply perceiving the world differently, that idea starts to crumble. Out of the rubble just might arise a better way of acting in politics that leads to less dysfunction and less gridlock…thanks to science.” I say good luck with that hope.

Now to determine the explanation for conservative selfishness.