Conservatives move to keep abortion off the 2024 ballot
Conservatives move to keep abortion off the 2024 ballot
“We don't believe those rights should be subjected to majority vote.”
“We don’t believe those rights should be subjected to majority vote.”
Conservatives are testing new tactics to keep abortion off the ballot following a series of high-profile defeats.
In Arizona, Florida, Nevada and other states, several anti-abortion groups are buying TV and digital ads, knocking on doors and holding events to persuade people against signing petitions to put the issue before voters in November.
Republicans are also appealing to state courts to keep referendums off the ballot, while GOP lawmakers in states including Missouri and Oklahoma are pushing to raise the threshold for an amendment to pass or to make it to the ballot in the first place.
The emerging strategy aims to prevent abortion rights groups from notching their third, and largest, set of ballot measure victories since Roe v. Wade was overturned. And while conservatives celebrated the fall of Roe for returning the question of abortion rights to the people, these efforts are seen as an implicit admission that anti-abortion groups don’t believe they can win at the ballot box — even in red states — and that the best way to keep restrictions on the procedure is to keep voters from weighing in directly.
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it boggles my mind how anyone with a half a brain and any emotion can check that R box without dying a little inside.
ignorance is bliss, i spose?
Right-wing authoritarians (ie. conservatives) are more likely to be, in a word, stupid. Well, stupid and/or sociopaths.
Many of them literally can't understand the world and therefore need a simplistic political ideology that emphasizes traditions and social norms, or they have dark triad personality traits and need a political ideology that centers around hurting the ones they don't like.
Sources
In the present research (N = 675), we focus on the relationship between the dark side of human personality and political orientation and extremism, respectively, in the course of a presidential election where the two candidates represent either left-wing or right-wing political policies. Narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and everyday sadism were associated with right-wing political orientation, whereas narcissism and psychopathy were associated with political extremism. Moreover, the relationships between personality and right-wing political orientation and extremism, respectively, were relatively independent from each other.
We found eleven significant correlations between conservative [Moral Intuition Survey] judgments and the Dark Triad – all at significance level of p<.00001 – and no significant correlations between liberal [Moral Intuition Survey] judgments and the Dark Triad. We believe that these results raise provocative moral questions about the personality bases of moral judgments. In particular, we propose that because the Short-D3 measures three “dark and antisocial” personality traits, our results raise some prima facie worries about the moral justification of some conservative moral judgments
Despite their important implications for interpersonal behaviors and relations, cognitive abilities have been largely ignored as explanations of prejudice. We proposed and tested mediation models in which lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice, an effect mediated through the endorsement of right-wing ideologies (social conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism) and low levels of contact with out-groups. In an analysis of two large-scale, nationally representative United Kingdom data sets (N = 15,874), we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology. A secondary analysis of a U.S. data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact. All analyses controlled for education and socioeconomic status. Our results suggest that cognitive abilities play a critical, albeit underappreciated, role in prejudice. Consequently, we recommend a heightened focus on cognitive ability in research on prejudice and a better integration of cognitive ability into prejudice models.
We report longitudinal data in which we assessed the relationships between intelligence and support for two constructs that shape ideological frameworks, namely, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO). Participants (N = 375) were assessed in Grade 7 and again in Grade 12. Verbal and numerical ability were assessed when students entered high school in Grade 7. RWA and SDO were assessed before school graduation in Grade 12. After controlling for the possible confounding effects of personality and religious values in Grade 12, RWA was predicted by low g (β = -.16) and low verbal intelligence (β = -.18). SDO was predicted by low verbal intelligence only (β = -.13). These results are discussed with reference to the role of verbal intelligence in predicting support for such ideological frameworks and some comments are offered regarding the cognitive distinctions between RWA and SDO.
Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated. The evidence is based on 1254 community college students and 1600 foreign students seeking entry to United States' universities. At the individual level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with SAT, Vocabulary, and Analogy test scores. At the national level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with measures of education (e.g., gross enrollment at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels) and performance on mathematics and reading assessments from the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) project. They also correlate with components of the Failed States Index and several other measures of economic and political development of nations. Conservatism scores have higher correlations with economic and political measures than estimated IQ scores.
Right-wing ideologies offer well-structured and ordered views about society that preserve traditional societal conventions and norms (e.g., Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003). Such ideological belief systems are particularly attractive to individuals who are strongly motivated to avoid uncertainty and ambiguity in preference for simplicity and predictability (Jost et al., 2003; Roets & Van Hiel, 2011). Theoretically, individuals with lower mental abilities should be attracted by right-wing social-cultural ideologies because they minimize complexity and increase perceived control (Heaven, Ciarrochi, & Leeson, 2011; Stankov, 2009). Conversely, individuals with greater cognitive skills are better positioned to understand changing and dynamic societal contexts, which should facilitate open-minded, relatively left-leaning attitudes (Deary et al., 2008a; Heaven et al., 2011; McCourt, Bouchard, Lykken, Tellegen, & Keyes, 1999). Lower cognitive abilities therefore draw people to strategies and ideologies that emphasize what is presently known and considered acceptable to make sense and impose order over their environment. Resistance to social change and the preservation of the status quo regarding societal traditions—key principles underpinning right-wing social-cultural ideologies—should be particularly appealing to those wishing to avoid uncertainty and threat.
Indeed, the empirical literature reveals negative relations between cognitive abilities and right-wing social-cultural attitudes, including right-wing authoritarian (e.g., Keiller, 2010; McCourt et al., 1999), socially conservative (e.g., Stankov, 2009; Van Hiel et al., 2010), and religious attitudes (e.g., Zuckerman, Silberman, & Hall, 2013).
With Donald Trump the Republican nominee and Hillary Clinton the Democratic nominee for the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, speculations of why Trump resonates with many Americans are widespread-as are suppositionsof whether, independent of party identification, people might vote for Hillary Clinton. The present study, using a sample of American adults (n=406), investigated whether two ideological beliefs, namely, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) uniquely predicted Trump supportand voting intentions for Clinton. Cognitive ability as a predictor of RWA and SDO was also tested. Path analyses, controlling for political party identification,revealed that higher RWA and SDO uniquely predicted more favorable attitudes of Trump, greater intentions to vote for Trump, and lower intentions to vote for Clinton. Lower cognitive ability predicted greater RWA and SDO and indirectly predicted more favorable Trump attitudes, greater intentions to vote for Trump and lower intentionsto vote for Clinton.
In Study 1, alcohol intoxication was measured among bar patrons; as blood alcohol level increased, so did political conservatism (controlling for sex, education, and political identification). In Study 2, participants under cognitive load reported more conservative attitudes than their no-load counterparts. In Study 3, time pressure increased participants’ endorsement of conservative terms. In Study 4, participants considering political terms in a cursory manner endorsed conservative terms more than those asked to cogitate; an indicator of effortful thought (recognition memory) partially mediated the relationship between processing effort and conservatism. Together these data suggest that political conservatism may be a process consequence of low-effort thought; when effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases.
Thanks for assembling these!
Jokes on you, they are already dead inside.
MAGAs are rebelling against the notion that they are not a privileged group. They feel like it's the libs (and the 'fakenews') fault that they aren't succeeding.
If those pesky libs didn't try to treat everyone the same (even the blacks and the LGBTs) they would still feel like they are the special important group like they did in the good old days.
They feel attacked at the mere notion they might not be inherently better than disadvantaged groups. Ultimately, they are hiding from the uncomfortable truth that they are just as shitty as everyone else. They're not special. But Trump makes them feel special.
Beyond that, I think most of them genuinely believe that A) things were better in the past...even though it's some because concept of the past, B) that when things were "better" for them, they were better for everyone, and C) if that means reverting in ways like rolling back racial equality, women's rights, religious tolerance, diversity, marijuana reform, and LGBT progress...well, so be it.
To them, things were better back before all that happened, and they're so convinced not only that it was better for them but for everyone, that they're basically saying, "Shut up blacks, women, gays and lesbians, and everyone who isn't a straight white Christian male. You don't know what's best for you. Things were better for us back then so they were better for you too...so we're going to do everything in our power to revert back to that time."
Honestly their warped thinking in this regard is disturbingly similar to the bullshit they've pushed schools to teach children about slavery in the South. Basically, "The slaves had no skills and through slavery they could learn some skills, so it was actually a benefit to them."
Jokes on you, they have no fucking 🧠's
For your average voter caught in the grift then yes... But when you look at the people running the show it's more of a mixed bag. The grift changes. They talk about things in big purposefully narrow and oversimplified versions of leftist rhetoric about constitutional freedoms and equalities which spread power horizontally but their aim is to make it go vertical, create hierarchy. Abortion debate on it's face is an emotional issue that people can get behind because "think of the litte unborn babies! Don't they need freedoms?!" but you aren't supposed to notice that reinforcing the traditional hierarchy of family by removing the choices of women makes it easier to place the entire category in a place where their labor, time effort and freedom of movement and self determination is taken by force. It makes women's entire existence precarious because they might lose their careers and ability to move freely for something they have no reasonable control over. Any woman who becomes romantically entangled with a man, regardless of the quality of that relationship of that becomes at risk because they KNOW birth control even under perfect use conditions is not perfect and part of keeping most long term heterosexual relationships alive and fulfilling means putting a woman in some manner of danger of risking the life she wants to lead a couple of times a week... And as for anything outside of that arrangement they want that to burn too.
At the top they aren't stupid. They just don't want a democracy they want hierarchy and they are smart enough to trick people into believing that their world view is still democratic.
Like I said in my earlier comment, conservatives tend to be either stupid and/or sociopaths. Generally it seems that the "rank and file" are the stupid ones, while the manipulative sociopaths are the ones running the show.
Looking at the American Conservative pool there's some muddying of the water. I imagine if you keep slamming garbage into the system eventually the pool you draw your enthusiastic support from will feed back into itself. Sorting your idiots from your proper authoritarian scum though isn't particularly worthwhile... As long as whatever nonsense you throw into the program is effective in obtaining the objectives you want it doesn't matter who is a true believer of the grift versus one who understands the point. But I think it's a mistake to call them idiots. That tends to make them seem less threatening and if you engage with their rhetoric with the aim of exposing idiocy and hypocrisy you will usually lose the ear of those who are being duped. You have to treat those who are caught in the grift respectfully like intelligent humans who have the capacity to make up their own minds or else they shut down and the programming takes over.
Calling them idiots is statistically accurate, and you can find a bunch of studies to that effect in the comment I linked to.
Being stupid doesn't make them less threatening, though, and I'd be inclined to argue it makes them even more dangerous; a stupid person is much more liable to make, well, stupid choices, and choices that hurt not only others but even themselves
10/10 read. Very well said 👏
It's propaganda. It always is. No one is the villan in their own story, the media they consume tells them they're the oppressed ones and so they become the "hero" when they fight oppression.
Anything the Republicans do that is shitty gets spun or completely ignored by the propagandists. There are no right wingers who think they're doing a bad thing by voting R, they think they're saving America...
Thanks Rupert fucking Murdock. I can't wait for you to join Kissinger.