Froot Loops Nation
What happens when a major political party conditions its members to believe in conspiracy theories?
Over the weekend, this poll elicited many gasps:
It was indeed shocking, but not surprising.
After all, as the same poll reaffirmed, Republican support for Donald Trump remains incredibly robust. And this “despite the U.S. dipping into a recession, reporting the highest unemployment rate in decades, and continuing to log sizable new coronavirus cases and deaths,” as a Bloomberg reporter observed.
So what gives? Has the Republican party turned into a death cult, as some people are saying? (Actually, a lot of people.) At the very least, Tim Alberta writes in Politico “that Donald Trump’s party is the very definition of a cult of personality. It stands for no special ideal. It possesses no organizing principle. It represents no detailed vision for governing…if it agitates the base, if it lights up a Fox News chyron, if it serves to alienate sturdy real Americans from delicate coastal elites, then it’s got a place in the Grand Old Party.”
Or does this stout Republican allegiance to Trump owe more to an extreme case of turbo-charged partisanship, fueled by a deadly feedback loop?
I’ll leave it to social scientists and future historians to sort all that out. In the meantime, there is a common denominator to the steadfastness of filial Trump Republicans and QAnon believers that might explain why the very stable genius still has more than a fighting chance to win re-election in November: The power of social identity.
Which, in the MAGA universe, is electrified by conspiracism. Think about it. Since the 2016 Presidential election, conspiracy narratives have been a major part of the public discourse, generated by Trump’s twitter megaphone and amplified by his echo machine in social media, at Fox News, et al.
To those of us not living in upside down world, the litany has become mind-numbing.
But if you are a Trump/Fox news-watching Republican, conspiracies are larded into your daily media diet. Maybe they were hard to swallow at first. Maybe you even got indigestion. But after being fed a constant stream of crazy-land fodder for the last four years, you’ve probably gotten better at digesting it. And now you have these cravings that only Trump’s tweets, Lou Dobbs, and Sean Hannity can satisfy.
I get it. I’ve been eating Froot Loops my whole life. I love my junk cereal. It’s part of who I am. (Why should I be forced to grow up?) Now my kids and my wife are trying to take it away from me. They are shaming me. I resent it. So of course I will eat my Froot Loops to spite them.
My Trumpy friends and family members can surely relate. Joe Biden, Dr. Fauci, and the Deep State want you to wear a mask because that will help weaken the virus. But they are part of the Trump-hating cabal and besides, this whole Pandemic is a CNN hoax.
Not that I’m trying to make light of all this insanity that is routinely normalized. I just don’t know how else to process it. The best I can do is try to understand how and why it is happening.
On that note, I read a new paper in a psychology journal titled, “The dark side of social movements: social identity, non-conformity, and the lure of conspiracy theories.” It argues that conspiracy theories can form an important part of a person’s identity:
People are prone to form social identities in which group membership becomes part of the self. Social identities are connected with different motives including the need to hold positive beliefs about ingroups and negative beliefs about outgroups. We argue that these motives draw people primarily to certain contents of conspiracy theories.
Before the 2012 U.S. Presidential election, Democrats and Republicans equally expected that electoral fraud would occur. Once President Obama was re-elected, however, Republicans were more likely to believe that electoral fraud had occurred. After the elections, fraud beliefs might have helped Republicans to uphold a positive partisan identity.
Of late, Trump and his sycophants in conservative media are juicing that partisan identity.
The authors of the journal paper write that people are “more likely to believe conspiracy theories that aligned with their party’s political stances and vilified the opposite party.”
I’d like to hear what other researchers think of this. But it bears pointing out that there is only one major political party in the United States that now conditions its members to believe in all manner of outlandish conspiracy theories. And it seems to have worked.
I may eat junk for breakfast, but don’t blame me if we turn into a Froot Loops nation.
hey Sam your entitled to you opinion, but thats BS . im not comparing them as the same virus etc, im saying they are different and should be statically separate,along with pneumonia , but they are being put together. I have read this , seen it on the news and heard this in numerous places including a family member who it a mortician. carry on , Im out.
dont believe everything you read. as I am now not doing here. for every psychological study one can find as in the one cited in this article, one can find another of opposite findings. we seek and find material that supports the world view we have invested in. the idea of a person being a democrat or a republican put in a two box identity is ridiculous. I am at times a liberal and at times a conservative. I weigh and evaluate each thing on its merit and common sense. i can see right out of the gate here in this article a "leading the witness". the idea of the republicans being a death cult is reckless. in every bad flu season as in the swine flu , well up to 150 thousand people died in this country and not a soul yawned. now we have this covid thing and it packages all deaths, influenza , pnemonia and covid all together , so we dont really have a honest covid statistic do we? yet has anyone looked at the damage due to this lockdown in lost jobs, careers lives damage to children, suicides depression , rape mental illness and medical conditions unattended to due to the covid boogy man. i have a friend who died on the toilet bowl from prostate cancer, told he had to wait till 2021 for a procedure. I can see I will be removing myself from this list