Yes this post is about the cognitive dissonance among conservatives and Republicans specifically. No this is not to say that cognitive dissonance is not a widespread phenomenon among all human beings, regardless of their political affiliation. But, yes, the the way in which many conservatives and Republicans are dealing with cognitive dissonance right now is, well, worrying to say the least...
source: Wikimedia Commons
Cognitive dissonance is the mental stress associated with processing contradictory information. That is information that goes against a person's actions, beliefs, feelings ideas and values. Those things are core to the person we are and are built on our life's experiences, which is why it's difficult to take in new information that, if true, would have us change the actions, beliefs, feelings ideas and values that have become such a part of our personality. This is the cause of the psychological stress associated with cognitive dissonance. That's why most of us will simply not accept the conflicting new information right away. And because our political and ideological affiliations are tightly intertwined with our ideas and values, and the way we strongly feel about them, political and ideological debates almost never succeed in convincing either side. No, this takes time because of the way we usually deal with cognitive dissonance.
We do so in two ways. We either "explain away" (rationalize) the new information that doesn't align with our built in set of morals, ideologies and values, or we simply avoid avoid circumstances and information likely to increase the magnitude of the cognitive dissonance (confirmation bias). The latter is of course turbo-charged by the algorithms of the popular search engines and social platforms online that create the infamous confirmation-bias-bubbles. All this goes for all of us, it's not exclusive to conservatives or Republicans. Although I have to add that being a conservative puts you in greater danger, so to speak, of falling victim to rationalization or confirmation bias, purely based on the fact that as a conservative you want things to remain the same in general.
I'll use myself as a life example of cognitive dissonance. I've smoked cigarettes and weed since my very early teens. Back then I wasn't really aware of how insanely unhealthy smoking is. But when I was 16 or 17 years old I knew all about the deadly habit. Still, it took me until I was 49 years old to quit smoking weed, and when I decided to quit, I just quit. But I still occasionally smoke one of those electrical cigarettes that contains only water and nicotine; so I'm still in the process quitting the cigarettes. But for years I was a cognitive dissonant jerk. I'd defend my smoking with stupid statements like "my grandfather smoked until his death at 93 years old" or "my mother never touched a cigarette in her life and she died in her sixties". Those aren't lies, they're just rationalizations of my bad habit. They're anecdotal truths that fly in the face of statistical evidence. And it took me until I started to notice, really notice my physical health declining, becoming short of breath, to stop doing what I knew all along was bad for me. Now I just think it was weak of me to not give up, or at least try to give up on those addictions much earlier, so this explanation of cognitive dissonance is in no way meant to excuse myself. And neither is it to shame conservatives and Republicans. It's just an attempt to understand the world and the people in it.
Now, to the Republican conservatives of America. It's safe to say that, generally speaking, they pride themselves on their country, heritage, democracy and freedom. I'm not saying Democrats don't, just that pride of country, and everything implied, is more readily and visibly present among conservatives. That also has a lot to do with wanting everything to remain the same by the way; it's conservatives who are more inclined to say things like "America First" and "America is for Americans", mush like conservative Brits would say the same about their country.If you want an easy example of this basic difference between progressives and conservatives, you have to look no further than the slogans used by Obama and his successor Trump; Obama used things like "Change We Can Believe In", "Forward" and "Yes We Can", all implying progress and change, while Trump used "Make America Great Again", where the last word, "Again", implied a return to some previous state of affairs, and his recent slogan "Keep America Great", an open invitation to change nothing. According to Trump's supporters change has gone too far already.
But I digress. Our mental toolkit for alleviating the psychological stress, rationalization and confirmation bias, are working overtime in the post Trump Republican grey mass. One way this shows itself is in the amount of Trump loyalists who are willing to blindly believe obvious lies. Their man had won long before the elections began, and their man had made sure they knew that mail-in ballots as well as the USPS itself aren't to be trusted. So when their man didn't win, that was new information for them that conflicted with the misinformation they'd become to believe after months of Republican propaganda against the mail-in ballots and the U.S. Postal Service. And many of them, being conservatives and wanting their man to remain in power, were, and still are, immune to commonsense arguments like the fact that mail-in ballots aren't new but have been used for as long as the country exists, or the fact that every court has ruled against the countless baseless accusation of widespread voter-fraud. In their efforts to explain away the reality of Trump's defeat, they then sought refuge in the voting-machine conspiracies which even involved a dead president from Venezuela. And let's not even talk about the QAnon conspiracy that originated during Trump's presidency in 2017, which says that Trump is the heroic defender of traditional American values and morals against a Satanic conspiracy involving baby-blood-drinking communists and Cultural Marxists in the Democratic Party. I know, saints they are not, but minions of Satan? Again, I'll remind you all of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s which is all but revived, now through QAnon: America's Satanic Panic Returns — This Time Through QAnon...
We all know what happened next: the storming of the Capitol on January 6, which was nothing short of an attempt to end democracy, it WAS an attempted coupe. I'll give you an interesting quote from the book "Trumpocracy" by David Frum:
Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.
source: GoodReads
Or this one:
The main benefit of controlling a modern bureaucratic state is not the power to persecute the innocent. It is the power to protect the guilty.
source: GoodReads
Or how about this:
The Republican Party was built on a coalition of the nation's biggest winners from globalization and its biggest losers.
source: GoodReads
That last one is a true gem of insight. Think about it; Trump, a self-proclaimed billionaire managed to unite the country's disgruntled conservative masses, many of them middle class and working class, using populist rhetoric while enacting policies that benefited the country's top 1 percent. Yes, he DID build a coalition of globalization's biggest winners and losers.
Anyhow, conservatives will reject democracy rather than in any way reevaluate their ideology in the face of democratic defeat. This is the ultimate danger of the way Trump loyalists deal with their particular case of cognitive dissonance. Please watch this short video on this subject, dealing with two recent polls among Republicans, one of which concluded that 67 percent of Republicans believe that voting is not a right, but a privilege...
Let's talk about Republicans rejecting democracy....
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