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Outgroups, Disgust, and Political Warfare [1]

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Date: 2023-01-11

Disgust (from Expression of the Emotions, by Oscar Gustave Rejlander); source: Wikimedia Commons

I just read a very good DK piece by novapsyche called “Let’s refrain from dehumanizing our opponents...”. A 7-minute video is linked, but don’t be turned off by its length — it is very much worth watching to the end.

The point of that diary was that if we begin to “dehumanize” our opponents (by characterizing them as something disgusting, like certain insects), we launch ourselves onto a path of authoritarianism, no less than if we were adopting Naziism, a little at a time.

As a former Republican voter, I can tell you it’s not easy to leave the milieu to which you spent years adjusting your worldview. And when you encounter members of your new political family who have no empathy for your journey and no patience for your process of adjustment, you begin to question whether your decision to switch groups was right or wrong. Thankfully, I can now attest that I’m here (in the progressive camp) to stay (…assuming our leadership continues to honor democracy and doesn’t slip into autocracy and tyranny).

I’m hopeful that novapsyche and other psychology professionals who are DK members will weigh in on this, because I’m just a dabbler in the human psyche. However, I am a college instructor (in engineering) and a few years ago, when googling news in the area of indoor air pollution, I discovered some psychological research from 2015 that was too important to dismiss. I proceeded to share it with my students, albeit with serious trepidation because its source was not engineering.

The article that caught my attention asserted there were non-trivial associations between body odor disgust on the one side, and authoritarian ideological attitudes on the other. If you feel disgust around an individual whose personal bouquet is pungent, you probably have authoritarian tendencies. Their reasoning for this association:

Social change is minimized in authoritarian societies.

Disgust-prone individuals may feel that authoritarian societal structures help protect them from “contamination” by outgroups.

Consequently, willful shunning of odorous outgroup members by the primary group reinforces the power of the authoritarian leadership.

The researchers found that body‐odor disgust was indeed associated with the degree to which survey subjects embodied authoritarian attitudes (including political favoring of Donald Trump). To measure attitudes, the researchers applied the classic, 4-question test:

SURVEY: In each pair of adjectives, which is the behavior trait that is more important for children to exemplify? (1) respectful or independent; (2) obedient or self‐reliant; (3) well‐behaved or considerate; and (4) well‐mannered or curious.

So all of this background brings me forward to the recent news that House Republicans have created a new committee to investigate the “weaponization of the federal government”. On his program last night, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell labeled this category of propaganda the same way his mentor, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have labeled it — “Semantic Infiltration”. In the quote below, keep in mind that O’Donnell employs the 2nd person pronoun to refer to the propagandists (i.e. Republicans) and the 3rd person plural to refer to the opponents of the propagandists (i.e., Democrats).

The concept of semantic infiltration is to infiltrate your opposition with your language, that forces them to tell the lie that your language tells.

Fresh off their party’s poor showing in the 2022 midterm elections, the House Republicans have decided they need to “weaponize” their constitutionally-authorized power to investigate, by concocting fake threats to individual citizens, allegedly coming from within the Biden administration.

I’m beginning to feel less hopeful about the future when nearly half of voters continue to (irrationally) fear government power more than they (rationally should) fear oligarch power. It’s an age-old Republican tactic to demonize government — even when the current government is objectively working to improve the lives of nearly everyone. Arguably, you could even say the Democrats are improving conditions for literally everyone, when you consider they are spending money on infrastructure and passing laws to defend civil rights. Yes, even wealthy people benefit from good bridges and a right to privacy — but many of them would rather let bridges fall and women become chattel, if that helps them maintain their exorbitant wealth and power.

The sad part is that oligarchs feel the need to deceive the clan members who have a tendency toward authoritarianism (and vague fearfulness) — so they will fear only government power, and cast their lot in with the “anti-government” forces (headed up by the prevaricating oligarchs themselves).

If the oligarchs would only consider their wealth accumulation to be owed more to luck and “providence” than to hard work and “right thinking”, there would be no need for them to defraud their voting base. The concept of “noblesse oblige” has obviously escaped many of them (...exceptions might include Warren Buffet, MacKenzie Scott and Bill Gates).

So my big question in response to novapsyche’s diary is, “Are we in a political war today or are we merely trying to prevent a political war that is simmering on the side burner?”

About war, the late U.S. General George S. Patton is reported to have said:

No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

In other words, dehumanization occurs in war whether we like it or not. It’s not easy to kill someone unless you dehumanize them first.

A large percentage of the Republican voting base (and apparently the entire GOP caucus in the House) are convinced they are in a guerilla war against a loathed enemy — socialism, which is another name for “big government”. To them King George III was the poster child for bad government and Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong were his 20th century counterparts. The MAGA rank-and-file think the dehumanizing stunts committed by their leaders are warranted because they are all are engaged in warfare. These foot-soldiers are willing to espouse and believe propaganda, because they sincerely believe they are defending America against forces that are much darker than Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, and Donald Trump could ever be.

On the advice of DK’s Mark Sumner, I binge-watched all the available episodes of the Lucasfilm series Andor. It’s a story about an ordinary (albeit brave and talented) human, Cassian Andor, who gradually becomes convinced that his life will mean more if he supports the Rebel Alliance in their inter-galactic fight against the ruling Empire. However, in his zeal for doing so, we see him (and several of his compatriots) engage in dehumanizing actions. (Mark’s diary adds great clarity to some of the strategies and tactics used by the authoritarian villains, so please do have a look there before you binge the series.)

I think we can safely say, as Joe Biden has said, we are in a “battle for America’s soul” — but I also believe we can say that we are not yet engaged in a full-on war. At this stage, I’m inclined to believe that half of our countrymen and women who currently call themselves Republicans can be turned away from the dark side. And I don’t think we need to engage in dehumanizing tactics to achieve that.

Quite the contrary... The January 6 commission laid out a beautiful, logical, compelling case against Donald Trump and his criminal enterprise, and they did it without resorting to petty name-calling and dehumanizing language toward our fellow Americans who are simply stuck on the wrong side of “the good”.

Let’s not stoop to their level, but let’s illuminate every one of their attempts to infiltrate our semantics and our language. The pen is mightier than the sword — but we must continue to wield it carefully.

And perhaps we need to do a better job of finding the forums where we can tell our story in a way that convinces the purple voters out there that blue is actually quite good right now and they should be very suspicious of all the lies that are generated by Fox News and Republican pundits to the contrary.

Many of these purple voters already know that Donald Trump is a criminal, and they won’t vote for him or his clones. However, they haven’t figured out yet that Dems are beyond benign — and that we are actually quite benevolent. No, we aren’t error-free, but we are benevolent at heart.

And while some red voters may think stunts by Ron Desantis, Greg Abbott and Stephen Miller are entertaining, they need to hear from us that all that is just a bunch of dehumanizing garbage, and we can all do without more garbage in our lives.

[END]
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[1] Url: https://dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/11/2146606/-Outgroups-Disgust-and-Political-Warfare

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