"Your Brain Is Hard-Wired to Love Trump" is a must-read Politico Magazine interview with Rick Shenkman, presidential historian and author of Political Animals: Why Our Stone Age Brains Get in the Way of Smart Politics. (Disclosure: A few years back, I wrote a weekly column for Shenkman's History News Network.) The interview's — the book's — thrust is nicely contained in the interviewer's introductory passage, "The modern human brain formed during the Pleistocene epoch." That says it all, explains it all — why, that is, so many of us primates can be just wild about Trump, or any other knuckle-dragging demagogue. We are a primitive species with a rib-scratching attraction to iPhones and a grunting aversion to uncomfortable facts.
I'm getting to a larger point. Excuse the lengthy quote; it leads to the aforementioned point. Shenkman:
[O]ur brain rationalizes our actions even when they’re at variance with our principles—that’s what cognitive dissonance is all about. So Trump supporters—when they hear Donald Trump say thousands of Muslims celebrated 9/11, and that turns out to be a lie, that obviously creates a conflict. Our brain tries to get out of these types of conflict in any way it can. One of the standard ways is to discredit the messenger—we say the mainstream media is full of it, for example. That’s true for Hillary Clinton supporters and true for Donald Trump supporters. All of us, Republicans, Democrats, we are all afflicted with this inclination to believe what we believe, and it doesn’t matter what the facts say….
By nature, human beings are meant to be believers. We aren’t skeptics. We believe, and only at the second step do we subject our beliefs to scrutiny.... That inclines us to deceptive politicians: We are inclined to believe them unless we have a previous reason not to believe them.
Unless we have a previous reason not to believe them. Keep that excepting clause in mind, as Shenkman poignantly expands on what at first may seem an improbable connection:
Roger Fouts, a primatologist, was the first to teach chimps how to use sign language. One day, he sees that one of the chimpanzees he was studying had defecated in the middle of someone’s living room. He confronts Lucy, his chimp—they are using sign language—and she responds instantly, "It’s not me! It’s you!" And he says, "No it’s not me." And then she blames it on a graduate student. And finally, after a heated exchange, she admits, "Yes, it was me," and she turns sheepish.
The only thing absent from that mini-allegory, properly applied, is that Republican pols have never admitted their transgressions. For decades the big apes have shat on America's carpet — a multitrillion-dollar unprovoked war, massive debt, economic malfeasance, science denialism, Jurassic compassion, on and on — and not once, in my memory, have they tribally sign-languaged "Yes, it was us." They're less honest than chimps.
What's more, or rather more to Shenkman's preceding point, "Unless we have a previous reason not to believe them"? Reasons? Previous reasons? As in immediately previous reasons? Just how many times need GOP pols shit in America's living rooms before the simian collective gets it?