Are Right-wingers Crippled by Fear?

Paul Rosenberg writes in Salon about a fascinating new academic study that suggests conservatives are prone to see a different, rather more hostile world around them than liberals do. The study, written by John R. Hibbing of the University of Nebraska, appears in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. As Rosenberg explains,

It advances three successive waves of evidence, which combine to show that conservatives differ from liberals by having stronger, more intense reactions to negative aspects of the environment--such as physical threats, or potential sources of disease--which are ultimately physiological. At the same time, with multiple forms of mass hysteria going on at once, American conservatives seem dead set on proving the scientists right, and underscoring the importance of the work they’re doing.

But here’s the twist: The scientists themselves insist that “citing differences in the psychological and physiological traits of liberals and conservatives is not equivalent to declaring one ideology superior to the other.” While this may be true in an abstract sense, and a mix of psychological tendencies makes a society more robust in the long run--balancing needs for caution and self-preservation with needs for exploration, innovation and renewal--in 21st-century America, things look strikingly different.

Conservative fears of nonexistent or overblown boogeymen--Saddam’s WMD, Shariah law, voter fraud, Obama’s radical anti-colonial mind-set, Benghazi, etc.--make it hard not to see conservatism’s prudent risk avoidance as having morphed into a state of near permanent paranoia, especially fueled by recurrent “moral panics,” a sociological phenomenon in which a group of “social entrepreneurs” whips up hysterical fears over a group of relatively powerless “folk devils” who are supposedly threatening the whole social order. Given that conservatism seems to be part of human nature--just as liberalism is--we’re going to need all the help we can get in figuring out how to live with it, without being dominated, controlled and crippled by it.

Hibbing posits that these conservative anxieties could be provoked by a combination of genetic as well as environmental factors. Indeed, children reared to fear the world and to think of themselves as potential victims of both change and the unexpected might well grow up to impart those same qualms to their offspring.

You will find all of Rosenberg’s post here.