jawfish

Why Karl Rove Will Always Be With Us
john posted in other on September 12th, 2007

This week’s On The Media, from WNYC and NPR, had a story on the nature of remembering facts The Truth of False.

Also a science story on the brains of Liberals and Conservatives ran all over, showing that Conservatives are less able than Liberals in managing habitual responses. Put plainly, they tend to be knee-jerk rather than thoughtful.

Janus

The On The Media story was fairly detailed and thorough. The columnist being interviewed, Shankar Vedantam , stated that studies show the way people remember declarative statements is asymmetrical and inherently biased. He says that people are not good at remembering where they heard a statement, and that they easily confuse repetition with hearing something from multiple sources. Hence Lenin’s famous statement, ” a lie told often enough becomes the truth.” People also are better at remembering an association, than a negation. So if a candidate proclaims, “Joe Schmoe hates women” and repeats it over and over, it’s actually worse if Joe Schmoe responds, ” I do not hate women.” His response just adds repetition ( by associating Joe Schmoe with hating women ) to the original without effectively negating it. See the infamous Swift Boat allegations, “there you go again” and a host of other lies and perfidy. So the lesson here is make negative statements early, repeat them endlessly and treat the opponent’s denials as further proof of the original statement. Having a network of paid flacks, columnists, bloggers, and henchmen who also repeat whatever the fax machine spits out in the morning helps too. It’s a good piece from one of the best shows on NPR.

Edit: Just today the LA Times reports that the Director of National Intelligence McConnell lied when he told Congress last month that the new Patriot Act had helped the Germans arrest a terrorist ring. In fact, the spooks used the old, more restrictive rules effectively. Now I can’t help saying I am shocked, shocked, that an intelligence chief should lie to Congress about legislation he promoted. The relevant point here is the original piece ran on P1 and the correction on page twenty-something. So what will readers remember?

The political brain story was met with predictable glee and sourness, and to be fair, the science behind it was pretty lame, but since it confirmed our prejudices, let’s run with it. Seriously, though it lacked gravitas, its findings matched keen observation of the neo-conservative followers, particularly the talk-show fans and evangelicals. At Science Daily the story ran,

Liberals are more likely than are conservatives to respond to cues signaling the need to change habitual responses, according to a new study by researchers at New York University and UCLA.
The findings, which show that self-rated liberalism is associated with the type of brain activity involved in regulating conflict between a habitual tendency and an alternative response, appear in the online edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience….

The notion that Conservatives are inherently less likely to change ( duh!), also strongly implies they are more impervious to argument, and unable to handle the messy details of the modern world. It dovetails all too well with the the principle of Rove: hit ‘em early, hit ‘em dirty, hit ‘em hard and keep hitting ‘em. It doesn’t seem far-fetched to me to think that the right-wing is more susceptible to the first statement on a subject and less willing to listen for later nuances. Look no farther then the history of invading Iraq with no plan to govern, to find a clear example.

Of course I might be grasping at a statement and ignoring follow-up qualifications.