John Smyth wrote:
> New research on Trump voters: They're not the sharpest tools in the box
> Now there's proof: Trump's voters lack "cognitive sophistication," often
> believe Bible is literal word of God
> By Chauncey DeVega
> Senior Writer
> Published March 23, 2022 6:00AM (EDT)
> Supporters gather at a rally by former President Donald Trump at the
> Canyon Moon Ranch festival grounds on January 15, 2022 in Florence,
> Arizona. The rally marks Trump's first of the midterm election year with
> races for both the U.S. Senate and governor in Arizona this year. (Mario
> Tama/Getty Images)
> Supporters gather at a rally by former President Donald Trump at the
> Canyon Moon Ranch festival grounds on January 15, 2022 in Florence,
> Arizona. The rally marks Trump's first of the midterm election year with
> races for both the U.S. Senate and governor in Arizona this year. (Mario
> Tama/Getty Images)
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> The United States is experiencing an existential democracy crisis, with
> leading Republicans and millions of their voters and supporters either
> tacitly or explicitly embracing authoritarianism or fascism. Democrats,
> for the most part, have not responded with the urgency required to save
> America's democracy from the rising neofascist tide.
>
> American society was founded on white settler colonialism, genocide and
> slavery. This unresolved birth defect at the foundation of the American
> democratic experiment meant that the country was racially exclusionary by
> design, from the founding well into the 20th century. At present,
> American politics is contoured by asymmetrical political polarization, in
> which Republicans have moved so far to the right that the party's most
> "moderate" members are far more extreme than the most "conservative"
> Democrats. This makes substantive compromise and bipartisanship in the
> interests of the common good and the American people almost impossible.
>
> Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Trump supporters
> and Trump-loathers, increasingly do not live in the same neighborhoods or
> communities. In all, they largely do not socialize with each other, or
> have other forms of meaningful interpersonal relationships in day-to-day
> life.
>
> To the degree that "race" is a proxy for political values and beliefs,
> the color line functions as a practical dividing line of partisan
> identity and voting. Religion is also a societal space that is divided by
> politics. For example, public opinion research shows that white right-
> wing evangelical Christians have increasingly embraced authoritarian
> views, conspiracy theories and other anti-democratic and antisocial
> values.
>
> As the new Faith in America survey by Deseret News & Marist College
> highlights, the basic understanding of the role of religion in a secular
> democracy has become so polarized that 70% of Republicans believe that
> religion should influence a person's political values, where as only 28%
> of Democrats and 45% of independents share that view.
>
> RELATED: Who were the Jan. 6 attackers? Isolated white folks, searching
> for meaning — and enemies
>
> Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, also do not
> consume the same sources of information about news and politics.
> Conservatives now inhabit their own self-created media echo chamber,
> which functions as a type of lie-filled and toxic closed episteme and
> sealed-off universe. The creation of such an alternate reality is an
> important attribute of fascism, in which truth itself must be destroyed
> and replaced with fantasies and fictions in support of the leader and his
> movement.
>
> America's struggle for democracy and freedom against authoritarianism is
> taking place on a biological level as well. Social psychologists and
> other researchers have shown that the brain structures of conservative-
> authoritarians are different than those of more liberal and progressive
> thinkers. The former are more fear-centered, emphasizing threats and
> dangers (negativity bias), intolerant of ambiguity and inclined to
> simple, binary solutions. Conservative-authoritarians are also strongly
> attracted to moral hierarchy and social dominance behavior.
>
> Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer?
> Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.
>
> Recent research by Darren Sherkat, a professor of sociology at Southern
> Illinois University, demonstrates that America's democracy crisis may be
> even more intractable than the above evidence suggests. In his recent
> article "Cognitive Sophistication, Religion, and the Trump Vote," which
> appeared in the January 2021 edition of Social Science Quarterly, Sherkat
> examined data from the 2018 General Social Survey and concluded that
> there are substantial negative differences between the thinking processes
> and cognition of white Trump voters, as shown in the 2016 presidential
> election, as compared to other voters who supported Hillary Clinton or
> another candidate, or who did not vote at all.
>
> Sherkat observes that Trump support has been linked to religion and level
> of education, but until now not to "cognitive sophistication," which was
> found "to have a positive effect on voting, but a negative effect on
> choosing Trump." He notes that "philosophers and political elites have
> debated the potential effects of mass political participation" for
> generations, concerned "about the unsophisticated masses coming under the
> sway of a demagogue." In effect, this debate was always about the quality
> he calls cognitive sophistication, since citizens who lack it "may not be
> able to understand and access reliable and valid information about
> political issues and may be vulnerable to political propaganda":
>
> Low levels of cognitive sophistication may lead people to embrace
> simple cognitive shortcuts, like stereotypes and prejudices that were
> amplified by the Trump campaign. Additionally, the simple linguistic
> style presented by Trump may have appealed to voters with limited
> education and cognitive sophistication. Beginning with [T.W.] Adorno's
> classic study of the authoritarian personality, empirical works have
> linked low levels of cognitive sophistication with right-wing
> orientations....
>
> Trump's campaign may also have been more attractive to people with
> low cognitive sophistication and a preference for low-effort information
> processing because compared to other candidates Trump's speeches were
> given at a much lower reading level…. While much of the Trump campaign's
> rhetoric and orientation may have resonated with the poorly educated and
> cognitively unsophisticated, those overlapping groups are less likely to
> register to vote or to turn out in an election.
>
> As part of his research, Sherkat evaluated the political decision-making
> and cognition of Trump's voters, using a 10-point vocabulary exam. In a
> guest essay at the website Down with Tyranny, he explains what this
> vocabulary test revealed about white Trump voters:
>
> Overall, the model predicts that almost 73% of respondents who missed
> all 10 questions would vote for Trump (remember, that is controlling for
> education and the other factors), while about 51% who were average on the
> exam are expected to vote for Trump. Only 35% of people who had a perfect
> score on the exam are predicted to be Trump supporters.
>
> Notably, this very strong, significant effect of verbal ability can
> be identified within educational groups. While non-college whites
> certainly turned out more heavily for Trump, the smart ones did not —
> only 38% of those with perfect scores are expected to go for Trump, and
> only 46% of non-college graduates who scored a standard deviation above
> the mean. The same is true for college graduates — low cognition college
> graduates were more likely to vote for Trump. ...
>
> What is really depressing isn't just the poles of the vocabulary
> exam, it's the average. The mean and median of the scale is 6 — so half
> of white Americans missed 4 of the easy vocabulary questions.
>
> Sherkat's research also explored how religion impacted support for Donald
> Trump among white voters: "This study confirms that white Americans with
> fundamentalist views of the Bible and those who embrace identifications
> with sectarian Protestant denominations tended to vote for Donald Trump
> in the 2016 election."
> "Hysteria and shame": P.J. O'Rourke on what Trump's presidency gave
> America
> Progress Bar
> 00:04/ 02:27
> Volume Bar
>
> RELATED: Christian nationalism drove Jan. 6: Now it's embraced the Big
> Lie, and wants to conquer America
>
> Belief that the Bible is the literal "word of God" also impacted Trump
> voting: "Viewing the Bible as a book of fables is also significantly
> predictive of vote choice, with secular beliefs reducing the odds of a
> Trump vote by 80 percent when compared to literalists, and reducing the
> odds of a Trump vote by 52 percent when compared to respondents who view
> the Bible as inspired by God."
>
> In an email to Salon, Sherkat offered additional context and implication
> on the relationship between white Christianity, American neofascism and
> cognition:
>
> The problem of the contemporary American fascist right is rooted in
> education and information. And this problem is not simply about
> attainment of some quantity of education, but of the quality and content
> of education, how that leads generations of white Christian Americans to
> process information about a wide range of issues. The segregation
> academies that proliferated in the mid-1960s and accelerated in the 1970s
> have taught millions of Americans a radically skewed version of American
> and world history and encouraged a continued segregated society. The
> homeschooling movement augmented this division, and further denigrated
> the value of knowledge.
>
> White fundamentalist Christians have always segmented their
> communities from the rest of America, and even exert considerable control
> over public educational institutions, particularly in rural areas and in
> the states which embraced slavery. White fundamentalist Christians
> distrust mainstream social institutions like education and print media,
> and they actively seek to eliminate public education and to provide
> alternative sources of information. As a result, people who identify with
> and participate in white Christian denominations and who subscribe to
> fundamentalist beliefs have substantial intellectual deficits that make
> them easy marks for a wide variety of schemes — from financial fraud to
> conspiracy theories.
>
> If you can't read the New York Times, you're going to believe
> whatever you hear on talk radio or on television. It's simply impossible
> for people with limited vocabularies and low levels of cognitive
> functioning to make sense of the complex realities of the political
> world. And we now have a population where for 55 years substantial
> fractions of white people have gone to private fundamentalist Christian
> schools that leave them both indoctrinated in Christian nationalism and
> ill-prepared to process any additional information. Worse, we now have
> over a million children in a given year who are homeschooled by parents
> who are uneducated white fundamentalists — and that total has been pretty
> constant for three decades since the homeschooling movement blossomed.
>
> What does this mean for the present and future of American democracy in
> this time of crisis? Sherkat cited the "disturbing ... influence of anti-
> intellectualism on American public life," which lends "performative power
> to ignorant elites":
>
> Spouting off obvious untruths is no longer a mark of shame, because
> even basic historical and contemporary truths are not recognized. We seem
> to have a stable set of about 30% of Americans, 35% of white Americans,
> who are oblivious to political realities and incapable and unwilling to
> come to terms with any of our key social problems. The increasing control
> over public education by right-wing fanatics is entrenching ignorance and
> intellectual laziness in future generations. It does not bode well for
> the future of American democracy.
>
> Donald Trump and his movement did not create all these American
> authoritarians and aspiring fascists. Such people have long been a
> feature of American society. What Trump and the Republican-fascists and
> their movement have accomplished in recent years is to empower and
> normalize a dangerous set of antisocial, anti-human, retrograde and anti-
> democratic values and beliefs.
>
> Saving America's democracy will require a moral and political reckoning
> and acts of critical self-reflection on a nationwide scale about the
> American people's character and values, and about how their leaders and
> governing institutions have failed them.
>
> Changes in laws and institutions are necessary. But on their own, such
> interventions will not stop the spread of fascism. A lasting remedy will
> demand that the country's political, cultural, and educational
> institutions be renewed, re-energized, and reimagined. The questions
> Americans must ask themselves are simple yet enormous: Who are we? What
> are we to become? How can we unite in defense of democracy, the common
> good and the general welfare? Without real answers to those questions,
> there will be no democratic renewal in the 21st century -- and fascism
> wins.
>
if you don't like the government in the country you live in , move