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Blame The Victim
Why this standard conservative ploy is becoming the USA’s dominant motif
Studies have revealed that the way a person votes is far less dependent on their understanding of and preference for policy and far more dependent on personality. This isn’t surprising. To begin with, not one person in 100,000 understands anything about policy and perhaps only one person in 500,000 has the cognitive ability to accurately assess the likely outcomes of any given policy. So nearly every voter votes in the darkness of ignorance. In order to decide who to support, it’s natural that ordinary people fall back on their hardwired behavioral strategies.
Conservatives, it turns out, are in general more fearful than those who identify as centrists or center-left. While all humans are hardwired by evolution to fear loss more than to value potential gain and to mistrust others as a potential threat (because in our ancestral environment everything was a zero-sum game), conservatives evince this trait more strongly than people who are more liberal (in the European sense of the term, not the center-right US sense). Consequently, conservatives are always eager for simplistic rules that they imagine will keep them “safe” and they are more willing to embrace rules that overtly harm others if that’s what they are told the price of “safety” happens to be.
