How Newt Gingrich Shamelessly Feeds the Fears and Egos of White Conservatives -- and Why That May Win Him the GOP Nomination

From http://www.alternet.org/news/153876/how_newt_gingrich_shamelessly_feeds_the_fears_and_egos_of_white_conservatives_--_and_why_that_may_win_him_the_gop_nomination

If Gingrich does manage to pull off an unlikely victory, it will be the result of running a picture-perfect right-populist campaign.

January 24, 2012  |  

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

"More American families went on food-stamps during George W. Bush's term in office than under any other president in history – almost a half-million more than under Barack Obama. Facts don't matter much in a GOP primary contest, however; and Newt Gingrich catapulted himself to victory in South Carolina in large part by calling Obama “the foodstamp president” and then picking a fight about it with Fox News pundit Juan Williams during a January 16 debate.

Gingrich had set a brilliant trap for a Republican primary contest. Most people understood the foodstamp president line to be a classic example of the racist “dog-whistle” – the kind of rhetoric that has long been at the heart of the GOP's “Southern Strategy” -- and Newt was confident that he'd be called on it.

Williams obliged. “My e-mail account, my Twitter account, has been inundated with people of all races who are asking if your comments are not intended to belittle the poor and racial minorities,” he said.

Gingrich's response was practiced, and perfectly tuned for the Republican base. “Well, first of all, Juan, the fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history. I know, among the politically correct, you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable... and if that makes liberals unhappy...I’m going to continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and learn, some day, to own the job.”

Newt earned a standing ovation from the audience, and immediately after the debate Team Gingrich turned the exchange into an online ad titled, “The Moment.” Five polls taken in South Carolina in the days leading up to the debate had Mitt Romney up by an average of 11 points. Six polls in the following three days found Gingrich up by an average of just under three points, and a week later – after another testy exchange with CNN's John King – Gingrich beat the former Massachusetts governor by 12 percentage points in the Palmetto State's primary.

Newt Gingrich is a deeply flawed candidate. But fresh off his South Carolina trouncing of Romney, who has long been anointed the GOP front-runner, the political establishment is beginning to wonder – with horror or enthusiasm, as the case may be – if the veteran pol actually has a shot at becoming the Republicans' standard-bearer in 2012.

He does, although Romney still has formidable advantages in fundraising and organization on the ground. If Gingrich does manage to pull off an unlikely victory in the nominating contest, it will be the result of running a picture-perfect, almost archetypical right-populist campaign that is perfectly suited to this moment, with the ascendancy of the hard-right Tea Party among Republican primary voters.

The right-populist storyline is simple, and compelling for many at a time when Americans have seen an unprecedented loss of economic security. According to the right-populist narrative, the working class – especially the white working class -- is caught in a vice between two pernicious forces: an elite festering with corruption at the top and a legion of undeserving freeloaders at the bottom.

Sandwiched between these two forces is the “real America,” as Sarah Palin put it during the last election cycle. Gingrich defines the “middle-class” broadly enough to include white-collar professionals and all but the most affluent “entrepreneurs.”

Whereas traditional populism pits working people against corrupt bankers and the titans of big business, Gingrich's brand of right-populism is directed at cultural elites – intellectuals, the media and “latté liberals.”
During his exchange with CNN's John King, Gingrich was again happy to have the media serve as his foil. “I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country,” he said to King, who'd had the temerity to ask about Gingrich's past marital infidelities, before adding: “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans.” Again, the crowd went wild.

Later, during his victory speech, Gingrich drove the point home: “The American people,” he said, “feel that they have elites who have been trying for a half century to force us to quit being American and become some other kind of system.” At the same time, Gingrich said that the “African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps."

It's an updated version of Ronald Reagan's mythical “welfare queens” – suggesting that those receiving nutritional assistance are “undeserving” blacks content to live off the public teat. Never mind the fact that almost 60 percent of food-stamp recipients are children and the elderly – people who can't be expected to “demand paychecks” – or that only 8 percent of beneficiaries receive welfare. Never mind that whites make up the largest share of food-stamp households. In the right-populist view, lazy people of color are living high
on the hog on an average benefit of $287 per month.

While he heaps scorn on those families that require some nutritional assistance during the worst economy America has seen for 70 years, warning that we are fast becoming an “entitlement society,” Newt's other big selling-point is his promise to bring Obama down to size in a series of unmoderated “Lincoln-Douglas-style” debates. It's a pitch that taps directly into the Right's sense of being talked down to by liberals – specifically, by a smartypants president with a degree from Harvard Law School. The GOP base wants nothing more than to see the elitist food-stamp president humbled intellectually – it lies at the heart of their bizarre obsession with the fact that he uses a teleprompter like every other pol -- and Gingrich is offering them an opportunity to do it vicariously through his bulldog campaign.

Conservatives have come to believe that their grievances are universally held by the American people. One of the most interesting tidbits from the South Carolina exit polls is that among those voters who said that the ability to defeat Obama in November was the most important characteristic in a candidate, Gingrich won by 14 points. That, despite the fact that Obama is leading Romney by less than two points in head-to-head polling but crushing Gingrich by 11 percentage points.

Ultimately, if Newt Gingrich does manage to claw his way to the nomination on the back of grievance politics, it could swing the election decisively to Obama. A poll released January 17 (PDF) found that Gingrich had a net positive favorability rating of 5 points among Republicans, but Americans as a whole view him unfavorably by a whopping 60-26 point margin."

Note: Great article btw -Rob

Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice

"There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.

"Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood," he said.

Controversy ahead

The findings combine three hot-button topics.

"They've pulled off the trifecta of controversial topics," said Brian Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the study. "When one selects intelligence, political ideology and racism and looks at any of the relationships between those three variables, it's bound to upset somebody."

Polling data and social and political science research do show that prejudice is more common in those who hold right-wing ideals that those of other political persuasions, Nosek told LiveScience. [7 Thoughts That Are Bad For You]

"The unique contribution here is trying to make some progress on the most challenging aspect of this," Nosek said, referring to the new study. "It's not that a relationship like that exists, but why it exists."

Brains and bias

Earlier studies have found links between low levels of education and higher levels of prejudice, Hodson said, so studying intelligence seemed a logical next step. The researchers turned to two studies of citizens in the United Kingdom, one that has followed babies since their births in March 1958, and another that did the same for babies born in April 1970. The children in the studies had their intelligence assessed at age 10 or 11; as adults ages 30 or 33, their levels of social conservatism and racism were measured. [Life's Extremes: Democrat vs. Republican]

In the first study, verbal and nonverbal intelligence was measured using tests that asked people to find similarities and differences between words, shapes and symbols. The second study measured cognitive abilities in four ways, including number recall, shape-drawing tasks, defining words and identifying patterns and similarities among words. Average IQ is set at 100.

Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as "Family life suffers if mum is working full-time," and "Schools should teach children to obey authority." Attitudes toward other races were captured by measuring agreement with statements such as "I wouldn't mind working with people from other races." (These questions measured overt prejudiced attitudes, but most people, no matter how egalitarian, do hold unconscious racial biases; Hodson's work can't speak to this "underground" racism.)

As suspected, low intelligence in childhood corresponded with racism in adulthood. But the factor that explained the relationship between these two variables was political: When researchers included social conservatism in the analysis, those ideologies accounted for much of the link between brains and bias.

People with lower cognitive abilities also had less contact with people of other races.

"This finding is consistent with recent research demonstrating that intergroup contact is mentally challenging and cognitively draining, and consistent with findings that contact reduces prejudice," said Hodson, who along with his colleagues published these results online Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Science.

A study of averages

Hodson was quick to note that the despite the link found between low intelligence and social conservatism, the researchers aren't implying that all liberals are brilliant and all conservatives stupid. The research is a study of averages over large groups, he said.

"There are multiple examples of very bright conservatives and not-so-bright liberals, and many examples of very principled conservatives and very intolerant liberals," Hodson said.

Nosek gave another example to illustrate the dangers of taking the findings too literally.

"We can say definitively men are taller than women on average," he said. "But you can't say if you take a random man and you take a random woman that the man is going to be taller. There's plenty of overlap."

Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that strict right-wing ideology might appeal to those who have trouble grasping the complexity of the world.

"Socially conservative ideologies tend to offer structure and order," Hodson said, explaining why these beliefs might draw those with low intelligence. "Unfortunately, many of these features can also contribute to prejudice."

In another study, this one in the United States, Hodson and Busseri compared 254 people with the same amount of education but different levels of ability in abstract reasoning. They found that what applies to racism may also apply to homophobia. People who were poorer at abstract reasoning were more likely to exhibit prejudice against gays. As in the U.K. citizens, a lack of contact with gays and more acceptance of right-wing authoritarianism explained the link. [5 Myths About Gay People Debunked]

Simple viewpoints

Hodson and Busseri's explanation of their findings is reasonable, Nosek said, but it is correlational. That means the researchers didn't conclusively prove that the low intelligence caused the later prejudice. To do that, you'd have to somehow randomly assign otherwise identical people to be smart or dumb, liberal or conservative. Those sorts of studies obviously aren't possible.

The researchers controlled for factors such as education and socioeconomic status, making their case stronger, Nosek said. But there are other possible explanations that fit the data. For example, Nosek said, a study of left-wing liberals with stereotypically naïve views like "every kid is a genius in his or her own way," might find that people who hold these attitudes are also less bright. In other words, it might not be a particular ideology that is linked to stupidity, but extremist views in general.

"My speculation is that it's not as simple as their model presents it," Nosek said. "I think that lower cognitive capacity can lead to multiple simple ways to represent the world, and one of those can be embodied in a right-wing ideology where 'People I don't know are threats' and 'The world is a dangerous place'. ... Another simple way would be to just assume everybody is wonderful."

Prejudice is of particular interest because understanding the roots of racism and bias could help eliminate them, Hodson said. For example, he said, many anti-prejudice programs encourage participants to see things from another group's point of view. That mental exercise may be too taxing for people of low IQ.

"There may be cognitive limits in the ability to take the perspective of others, particularly foreigners," Hodson said. "Much of the present research literature suggests that our prejudices are primarily emotional in origin rather than cognitive. These two pieces of information suggest that it might be particularly fruitful for researchers to consider strategies to change feelings toward outgroups," rather than thoughts."

Note: This was a very interesting study. I believe it is accurate and correct on a number
of things. -Rob