The Republican Brain

by is Mooney

  165 “strongly suggests they were actually getting the information from Fox” Interview with Steven Kull and Clay Ramsay of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, July 7, 2011.

  165 annual TV News Trust Poll Public Policy Polling, “PBS the most trusted name in news,” January 19, 2011. Available online at http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/PPP_Release_National_0119930.pdf

  166 ‘Fox-only” behavior among conservatives Shanto Iyengar and Kyu S. Hahn, “Red Media, Blue Media: Evidence of Ideological Selectivity in Media Use,” Journal of Communication, Vol. 59, 2009, 19–39. See also Shanto Iyengar and Richard Morin, “Red Media, Blue Media,” The Washington Post, May 3, 2006. Available online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/03/AR2006050300865_pf.html.

  Part Four

  The Truth: Who’s Right, Who’s Wrong, and Who Updates

  Chapter Nine

  The Reality Gap

  It was precisely the opposite of how science-based decision-making, by elected representatives, is supposed to go.

  In February of 2010, while onlookers wore badges reading “Abortion Hurts!” two scientists appeared before the Nebraska legislature to testify in favor of the “Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.” It was a bill to restrict a woman’s right to have an abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, thus pushing well past prior abortion limits, which have been based on a standard of fetal viability.

  Both of the scientists were from out-of-state. Both of them testified in support of a position that is contrary to medical consensus—that fetuses are capable of experiencing pain at about 20 weeks into their gestation and development.

  One of the scientists, Dr. Ferdinand Salvacion, is an associate professor at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. He has now testified in at least two states, Nebraska and Idaho, in favor of the same piece of pro-life legislation. The other, Dr. Thomas Grissom, works at the Advanced Pain Centers of Alaska. As he put it when pressed about his personal beliefs: “I am pro-life from the perception that I do not know when life begins and I have chosen that it begins at fertilization because, from my religious viewpoint, that does not put me at odds with my maker.”

  Both Salvacion and Grissom testified that by 20 weeks of gestation, fetuses have developed the physical structures involved in pain sensation: specialized nerve endings, the brain stem, the cortex. They therefore inferred that fetuses could likely feel pain at this stage. But that’s misleading. What’s not fully developed at 20 weeks are the connections between regions of the sub-cortex, which relay sensory information, and the cortex, which interpret and experience it. And without those connections, conscious awareness of pain could not exist.

  Scientific reviews conducted in the U.K. and at the University of California-San Francisco concur in this conclusion. These find that the neural connections necessary to the experience of pain are not present before about 24 weeks of gestation, and the pain experience as we know it probably arrives considerably after that. So the testimony delivered by Drs. Salvacion and Grissom was, at minimum selective—but it was, nonetheless, critical to ensuring that the Nebraska bill sailed through and became law.

  We don’t live in the universe the Christian Right seems to think we do. But if you live in Nebraska—and, more recently, Kansas and Idaho, where “fetal pain” bills became law in 2011—there’s a partial exception. These states didn’t change the laws of nature; but they did legally codify their delusions about them.

  The fetal pain story is just one tiny example of today’s American right rallying behind incorrect information—whether about science, economics, history, the law, or simple policy facts like whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and whether the health care bill created “death panels.” The examples of this occurring are so numerous that they are, effectively, uncountable. I filled a whole book with case studies in 2005—The Republican War on Science—but those were only about science, and even then I had to leave many out. And since that time, I’ve seen many new cases arise and none really vanish (though for some issues, like embryonic stem cell research, the political salience of the subject has certainly declined).

  There is no precise way to quantify how wrong the right is today. There’s no standard measurement, no meter or angstrom or hectopascal for error or delusion.

  There is, however, such a thing as a consilience of evidence. Consilience is a word originally coined by the 19th century British scientist and philosopher William Whewell, who defined it thus:

  The Consilience of Inductions takes place when an Induction, obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an Induction obtained from another different class. This Consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs.

  That’s a bit of a musty read, so let’s bring Whewell up-to-date. What I mean in invoking him is that even if there is no single accepted measure or approach that proves a point definitively—in this case, that U.S. conservatives are uniquely misaligned with reality—the compilation of evidence in support of this idea, using a variety of approaches, adds confidence to the validity of the overall conclusion. How does it do so? By building an impressive weight of evidence across domains (or areas) and approaches. By showing that no matter how you slice it, you get the same answer.

  In the next three chapters, I will demonstrate by a consilience or weight-of-the-evidence approach that by any reasonable standard, the modern U.S. right is strongly misaligned with reality—and much worse in this respect than anything you will find today among Democrats or the “left.” Then, in chapter 12, I’ll show you three issues where you might expect liberals or progressives to err with respect to reality—hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” the safety of nuclear power, and alleged connections between vaccines and autism. You do indeed find some delusions on these issues, but you also find something very different than what you find in cases of conservative reality denial.

  But before proceeding, let me reiterate my present understanding of why the right now appears so disconnected from the truth.

  The evidence already presented in these pages suggests that on average, conservatives—especially authoritarians—are probably less open to new information, more selective in heeding friendly media sources, and perhaps more defensive about their beliefs. So conservatives, more than liberals, should be expected to seek out ideologically friendly information and cling to it. And, especially if they are sophisticated, to engage in motivated reasoning when challenged so as to defend their positions.

  But at the same time, conservatives would have a much harder time doing this without conservative institutions, and friendly media outlets, churning out congenial information and backing them up—and without sophisticated conservative elites egging the process on. In the past two chapters, I’ve shown that from the mobilization of the Christian Right, to the development of think tanks, talk radio, and Fox News, conservatives have created many ideologically reinforcing information sources. They have also fielded an army of experts like Drs. Salvacion and Grissom, who are more than equipped to tell them what they want to hear and to argue back against mainstream scientists and scholars.

  This combination has produced a staggering amount of political misinformation. So let me now attempt to survey its true scope—proving that it is uniquely and squarely located on the right.

  The first way of documenting the right’s unreality involves canvassing the work of respected academic institutions, pollsters, and fact checkers—all of whom have consistently shown that conservatives today, much more than liberals, simply get it wrong.

  I’ve already sampled one such strand of evidence, and a very powerful one at that: studies documenting the Fox News effect. As shown in chapter 8, Fox’s viewers are much more misinformed than other news watchers about the Iraq war, about global warming, about health care, and about an array of other matters. No comparable media-misinformation effect has been documented on the other side of the aisle. So this is one powerful piece of evidence suggesting t
hat conservatives today are simply much more wrong—often willfully so—than their ideological opponents.

  But it isn’t the only evidence. Another proof emerges from examining the leading public policy issues at a given point in time, and what liberals and conservatives believe about them. That’s precisely what was done in the run up to the 2010 election by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA).

  I’ve already shown how PIPA’s 2010 election study demonstrated that Fox News viewers believed more political misinformation on that election’s leading issues. But not surprisingly, the study also showed the same of Republican voters. Out of eleven factual questions pertinent to the 2010 election, Republicans were more incorrect, by ten or more percentage points, about seven of them—including whether it was “clear” that President Obama was born in the U.S., whether most scientists agree that global warming is happening, whether economists think the health care law would increase the deficit (it would not), and whether “most economists” think the stimulus bill created or saved a few million of jobs (they do). (One question—whether the GM and Chrysler bailout occurred under both Bush and Obama; the answer was yes—was nearly a wash, with Republicans only slightly more wrong than Democrats.)

  Once again, it’s tough to argue that the eleven questions posed in this study were selected in a biased way, to yield this particular answer. Rather, the questions were picked because these were factual disputes about issues that voters said they most cared about, like health care and the economy. And identifying the issues that mattered most to voters was itself part of the study. What’s more, the question in the poll that voters cared about the least was a rare case in which Democrats proved to be more misinformed (involving the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its alleged receipt of foreign donations to run political ads). In other words, if PIPA had thrown this question out, it would have made Republicans look still worse.

  Yet another survey examined in chapter 8 also supports this analysis. In early 2011, the Kaiser Family Foundation released an examination of mistaken beliefs about the newly passed healthcare law. Misperceptions were certainly rampant, and some of them were clearly politicized errors: Fifty-nine percent of citizens wrongly thought the law creates a government-run healthcare plan; 40 percent believed it creates “death panels” (another 15 percent were “unsure”); and 45 percent thought the law cuts benefits to those on Medicare. Not only were Fox News viewers more likely to believe these misperceptions—so were Republicans, and the last two falsehoods in particular. Indeed, just 18 percent of Republicans came up with the right answer for at least seven of the 10 factual questions the survey posed, compared to 32 percent of Democrats.

  Thus, we have nationally representative survey evidence showing that 1) Conservatives are more misinformed when identified by the leading media outlet that they watch, especially on critical issues like the Iraq war and climate change; 2) Republican voters were more misinformed than Democratic voters about the leading policy issues in the last major election; and 3) this was especially true of health care. That’s already enough to grab your attention. But to show that this finding is “robust,” so to speak—and to pursue my consilience strategy—I want to prove the point in as many different and overlapping ways as possible. So are there any other metrics that can document the right’s wrongness?

  The answer is that there certainly are.

  I was rather hard on PolitiFact a few chapters back—and deservedly so. But I do respect fact-checkers, in general, for their dedication to accuracy. And I certainly believe that overall, their occasional quirks and failings notwithstanding, they are vastly more accurate than those they are checking!

  What this means is that PolitiFact’s archive of fact-checks provides yet another opportunity for independent validation of my argument. If Republicans do significantly worse than Democrats when put to the test by PolitiFact, that surely tells us something.

  As it turns out, the Smart Politics blog at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs analyzed PolitiFact’s work during the period from January 2010 through January 2011, surveying over 500 stories that checked facts. And sure enough, it found that while the site fact checked roughly as many statements by current or former Democratic elected officials as from current or former Republican officeholders during this period (179 vs. 191), Republicans were overwhelmingly more likely to draw a “false” or “pants on fire” rating (the worst one of all). Out of 98 politician statements receiving these dismal ratings, 74 were made by Republicans—or 76 percent of them. Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann did the worst, with 8 and 7 PolitiFact slams, respectively.

  In fairness, I should note that the Smart Politics blog went on to use this statistical analysis to suggest PolitiFact is biased against the right. That’s typical—and typically naïve. As I showed in the last chapter, if anything PolitiFact bends over backward to find ways of bashing the left, even when PolitiFact itself must get the facts wrong in order to do so.

  PolitiFact’s statistics thus provide still more compelling evidence that Republicans, more than Democrats, are just wrong.

  After learning of the Smart Politics analysis of PolitiFact’s work, it occurred to me that it would lend strength to my interpretation of this finding—and weaken the contrary interpretation—if it were possible to replicate the result by conducting a similar analysis of another fact-checking organization’s ratings. To that end, and with invaluable and dedicated data gathering and statistical analysis from an assistant, Aviva Meyer, we analyzed the work of The Washington Post’s “Fact-Checker,” currently authored by Glenn Kessler and Josh Hicks, and before that by Michael Dobbs. This was relatively easy to do in an objective and quantitative manner, because the Post bestows “Pinocchios” for false or misleading claims, giving out one to four of them based on the egregiousness of the error. Thus, getting “four Pinocchios” from the Post is comparable to getting a “Pants on Fire” rating from PolitiFact.

  From the inception of the Post’s Fact-Checker column in September of 2007, up through the end of September of 2011 (when this book was due!), our analysis found that Republicans were given ratings on the Pinocchio scale 147 times, and Democrats were given ratings 116 times, for a total of 263 ratings overall. (Ratings of “liberal” or “conservative” interest groups, like MoveOn.org or the National Rifle Association, were about 3 percent of the total and were not included in the analysis; nor were those by “neutral” individuals or groups—about 4 percent of the total.)

  Already, then, Republicans were flagged for many more misstatements by the Post. And indeed, totaling up the net Pinocchios given, Republicans received 361 while Democrats received just 243. This means that about 60 percent of all Pinocchios went to Republicans, and about 40 percent went to Democrats. In a sense, the left-right “reality gap” is captured right there.

  One might argue, though, that this is misleading: If Republicans were rated more times overall, then of course they got more total Pinocchios. That’s a fair point, but it turns out that the average Republican rating (2.46 Pinocchios) was also much worse than the average Democrat rating (2.09 Pinocchios). What’s more, the difference between the two was highly statistically significant, meaning that it was unlikely to be the result of mere chance.

  In other words, not only were Republicans rated more frequently by the Post, but whenever they got rated they tended to do worse than Democrats, and by a significant margin.

  Looking a little more closely at these data, Republicans got nearly three times as many Four Pinocchio ratings as Democrats—27 versus 11. And even that is being charitable to Republicans, because our analysis could be argued to have understated their real Four Pinocchio total.

  In a number of cases, the Post fact-checker devoted a single entry to debunking multiple false claims by Republicans like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Donald Trump, and Newt Gingrich, and then bestowed a single Four Pinocchio rating. We were careful to only count these entries once, simply because any other approa
ch would have caused the Republican Four Pinocchio tally to skyrocket. What’s more, for some reason the Fact Checker failed to bestow a rating after debunking one of Sarah Palin’s most infamous flubs: Her claim (discussed further in chapter 11) that Paul Revere “warned the British” on his famous Midnight Ride. This presumably would have garnered Palin four Pinocchios (especially since she stood by her incorrect claim), but the item wasn’t officially rated, so we did not include it in our analysis. Again, then, our analysis can only be called charitable to Republicans.

  Republicans were also significantly higher than Democrats in the Three Pinocchio ratings category (33 versus 24) and the Two Pinocchio ratings category, the most frequent category used (67 to 46). But interestingly, this trend did not hold up in the One Pinocchio category, where Democrats bested Republicans by a considerable margin (35 to 20). What this suggests is that the Post was giving Democrats a lot of wrist-slaps for relatively minor sins, even as the more egregious falsehoods were clearly clustered at the Republican end of the distribution. Indeed, the Post fact-checker even acknowledged that one of President Obama’s statements was such a minor infraction that it might deserve a “half-Pinocchio,” if there was such a thing.

  We therefore reiterate that our interpretation of these data is, if anything, charitable to Republicans.

  In conclusion, and much like PolitiFact, it appears the Post was trying its best to be balanced, even though Republicans falsehoods overall were considerably more egregious than Democratic ones. Yet at the end of the day, when the Post’s experienced journalists played referee and adjudicated a large body of facts over a significant time period, Republicans fared significantly worse in their judgment.