And you thought I was joking about those "CRAZY CONSERVATIVES", huh?

[Gimpy]

Well guess what--I WASN"T---the PROOF is below!!!

############################

Those crazy conservatives
Their reaction to a new study confirms it

BY CLIFF BOSTOCK

Are conservatives inherently deranged?

A storm has been brewing the last few months over a study about political conservatism published in the May issue of the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin. The study, which identified a handful of psychological traits that conservatives tend to have in common, has outraged everyone from Ann Coulter to George Will.

The study -- actually a meta-analysis of 50 years of research literature on the psychology of conservatism -- identifies two core traits of conservatives: resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality. Among the associated psychological factors of conservatism, the study cites fear and aggression, dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity, uncertainty avoidance, need for cognitive closure and terror management.

Although the authors of the study insist they are not pathologizing conservatism, it's hard not to be sympathetic with critics since they do also cite "lowered self-esteem ... pessimism, disgust and contempt." At the same time, it doesn't take an effete intellectual to conclude that the study considers ideology on a scale affected by characteristics we all share. Obviously, Mussolini and Hitler were more tolerant of inequality than Rush Limbaugh and Ronald Reagan, but the fundamental tendency to devalue diversity is consistent among them. And it is more present than it is in people characterized as liberal.

The authors explain that they elected to study conservatism instead of liberalism because there simply are not enough psychological studies of liberal movements to perform a meaningful meta-analysis. Most of the damaging movements of the last 50 to 100 years have been right-wing, they say.

The reaction of conservatives, unfortunately, has done nothing but reinforce the study's observations. One of my favorite examples is the National Review's indignant response to the comparison of Mussolini and Reagan. Sharing the same Web page carrying Byron York's pissed-off column is an ad that compares Hillary Clinton to Saddam Hussein.

Besides the obvious irony, the ad illustrates the bad logic of another argument used to attack the study: Left-wing ideologues, such as Stalin, Krushchev and Castro, demonstrate most of the same characteristics that the study attributes to far-right conservatives, critics say. Obviously, though, once those men came to power, they became staunch conservatives, devoting all their energies to maintaining the status quo. Thus, Stalin the communist can be typed a conservative in the same way right-wingers can call Hillary a leftist but identify her, as an authoritarian presence, with Saddam, who's as far right as you can get.

If there is a form of mental illness associated with conservative thought, its poster child is Ann Coulter. She is the shining example of intolerance of ambiguity, otherwise expressed as the need to think in pure terms of good and evil. She is so loony that even the National Review fired her when she wrote that America should invade the Islamic nations, kill their leaders and convert their populations to Christianity. In her new book, Treason, she canonizes notorious Commie-hunter Joseph McCarthy as a saint and, acting just like him, calls all liberals traitors.

In Coulter's world, there is no middle ground. The radical division of the world into good (conservative) and evil (liberal) requires a willful self-blindness since, of course, life often paints itself in gray tones instead of solid black or white. The most obnoxious example is Coulter's inability to recognize that her personal experience differs from her rhetoric. If, as she complains, the media is run by such a radical cult of information-manipulating leftists, why is it impossible to open a magazine or turn on the television and radio without encountering her? Why did Crown, well known for its roster of liberal authors, pick her up after HarperCollins, well known for its conservative writers, dropped her?

Conservative columnist George Will raised the inevitable question about the study by asking if conservatism is even an appropriate subject of study for psychologists. "The professors have ideas; the rest of us have emanations of our psychological needs and neuroses," he writes sarcastically, actually misreading the study, which said nothing about neurosis. Nonetheless, his comment communicates his disdain for psychology's meddling in the question of ideology's formation at all, as if belief were unaffected by psychological states.

Actually, it's long past time for psychology to more aggressively break out of the consulting room to ask how our lives are affected by the greater culture, instead of focusing so intently on family dynamics. It would be virtually impossible, for example, to explain in personalistic terms why Americans have so willingly swallowed the Bush administration's lies about its tax cuts and the Iraq invasion. This study, however, goes a long way in explaining how an intolerance for ambiguity and the urgent need for closure can cause us to reach premature conclusions -- especially when we are terrified by events like Sept. 11. Thus right-wing populism gains its greatest foothold when our terror and need for security are amplified -- either by reality or the voice of demagogues.

Conservatism is, of course, not a mental illness. But its adherents can become sheep -- terrified but contemptuous followers of tyrants -- when life doesn't satisfy their need for black-and-white solutions.

##############################

There you have it. Course, I knew it all along!