Splitsville FEAR ITSELF ITSELF

The Sprightly, Carefree Newsletter for Fans of THE SPLIT

If you’re like us, there are some days when you contemplate the beliefs and actions of the people who elected (or work for) Donald Trump, and ask yourself or your friend or your spouse or your dog, “What the fuck is wrong with those people?” And by “some days” we mean every day. You ask not so much in sorrow, or in anger, or in well-merited disgust, but just in freaking disbelief.

After all, Trump is obviously the worst person who ever lived, or at least the worst person currently living. No, we’ve thought about it: he’s the worst person who ever lived. His badness is manifest morning, noon, and night. His lies, his failures, his grifting, his cheating at literally everything, are matters of historical record and are visible from the moon. You don’t have to be an exquisitely sensitive Minority Report empath to detect vibes of fraudulence, ignorance, and cruelty emanating from him. You just have to be—well, wait. We were going to say, You just have to be awake. But you don’t. Any normal person can intuit and sense the sheer wretched awfulness of Donald Trump while they’re asleep. Or in a catatonic state.

So what gives with his fans? Are they stupid, or hypnotized, or ill-informed, or evil, or what?

Well, yes. But some of them aren’t stupid. Some of them aren’t hypnotized or ill-informed. Some of them aren’t even evil. Millions of them are indeed MAGA cultists, with absurd beliefs and ludicrous opinions about Trump, duly disseminated and amplified by the propagandists on Fox News and other right-wing media. But not all of them. Tens of millions non-MAGA “centrists” put Trump over the top last year, undeterred by his miserable performance in his first term, his inane braying of “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats,” and undisguised musings about being a dictator.

Why? What explains their endorsement of a man and a party so obviously cruel, intolerant, bigoted, corrupt, lawless, and horrible?

Try fear.

Of whom? Of what? Why, of everyone and everything—of the world, of the future, of “illegal immigrants” (whom most of them have never encountered), of “wokeness” (which most of them probably could not define), and of just about everything under the sun that wasn’t and isn’t exactly like them.

Okay, but again: Why? And, also to the point, why weren’t the 70 million-or-so people who voted for Kamala Harris not beset by the same fears? (The only fear they were beset by—for good reason, as we now see—was of another Trump term.) One answer to all these questions can be found in one of the best Words With Friends/Scrabble words ever, a word (like spatula and far-fetched) sounds like it’s Yiddish but isn’t: amygdala.

We read of this recently in a nice NY Times interview with Leor Zmigrod, a neuroscientist at Cambridge University, whose book, The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking, was just published. Her book is not about Trump (how could it be? It has the word “brain” in the title but, rather, about the relationship between ideology and psychology—meaning, to be blunt, brain structure.

She describes ideology thus:

It’s a narrative about how the world works and how it should work. This potentially could be the social world or the natural world. But it’s not just a story: It has really rigid prescriptions for how we should think, how we should act, how we should interact with other people. An ideology condemns any deviation from its prescribed rules.

Does that sound like fun? Well, no—but it doesn’t sound entirely repellent, either. After all—

Ideologies satisfy the need to try to understand the world, to explain it. And they satisfy our need for connection, for community, for just a sense that we belong to something.

There’s also a resource question. Exploring the world is really cognitively expensive, and just exploiting known patterns and rules can seem to be the most efficient strategy. Also, many people argue—and many ideologies will try to tell you—that adhering to rules is the only good way to live and to live morally.

(We love the term “cognitively expensive,” and look forward to using it in our daily lives, e.g., “What? Imagine that Trump actually makes it alive through his entire term? Sorry, no. That’s too cognitively expensive.”)

Zmigrod isn’t a fan of ideology:

Ideologies numb our direct experience of the world. They narrow our capacity to adapt to the world, to understand evidence, to distinguish between credible evidence and not credible evidence. Ideologies are rarely, if ever, good.

Note the plural—she’s referring to ideologies across the political spectrum, from left to right. “Ideologues are strong partisans either to the left or right. Psychological rigidity is linked to ideological extremity regardless of the mission of the ideology.”

But the focus, of the interview at least (we haven’t read the book itself), is on conservative ideology, and its ability to warp perception. She cites a big study done at the University of California, Berkley in the 1940s, involving hundreds of children. After first being evaluated on their “levels of prejudice and authoritarianism,” the children were told a story about students at a fictitious school. Later, when asked to recount the story, the more prejudiced of the kids got a lot of the details wrong, made up negative traits among the students from minority ethnic backgrounds, and often repeated lines verbatim from the story (as though being sure to adhere to the “rules” of the narrative). The more liberal students gave much more accurate versions of the tale.

In this study, and her discussion of it, “conservative” and “liberal” refer to rigid versus flexible, and not everyday political values. And what causes these differences among those California kiddos? Brain structure:

In fact, we find that people with different ideologies have differences in the physical structure and function of their brains. This is especially pronounced in brain networks responsible for reward, emotion processing, and monitoring when we make errors.

For instance, the size of our amygdala — the almond-shaped structure that governs the processing of emotions, especially negatively tinged emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, danger, and threat — is linked to whether we hold more conservative ideologies that justify traditions and the status quo.

So. Like Lady Gaga said: Born this way. Although to Zmigrod, anatomy isn’t necessarily destiny. “I think we all can shift in terms of our flexibility. It’s obviously harder for people who have genetic or biological vulnerabilities toward rigid thinking, but that doesn’t mean that it’s predetermined or impossible to change.”

Bear in mind that we’re not saying that all Trump voters, or even all MAGA loyalists, are ideologues. In fact, probably none of them are, since a) most people don’t cultivate and adhere to a self-conscious intellectual identity, and b) nothing about Trump or his performance in office offers any of the kind of consistency a rigid thinker would require. He doesn’t “stand for” anything other than greed, revenge, and a desperate need for attention. It’s similarly impossible to describe any Republican these days as possessing an ideology, since anything they profess to believe on Monday they’re perfectly willing to ignore or violate on Tuesday. All they stand for is lowering taxes on the rich, and keeping their jobs so they can continue to stand for nothing lower taxes on the rich.

But even if most people (conservative and liberal) don’t profess an ideology per se, the pattern is clear—and tailor-made for Splitsville, where we discuss and bemoan our condition, in which two different “nations” co-exist in a single “country.” It wouldn’t surprise us if a gigantic Trader Joe’s tote bag containing all the amygdalas of Trump voters outweighed a similar bag of Harris-voter amygdalas. (As one of our ninth-grade biology teachers used to say, that “would make a good science project.”)

Harris’s campaign was one based on hope. Trump’s was based on fear. We saw how that turned out. Maybe Dems can take a lesson from it all. God knows there will be plenty to fear when (and if) we have another election.