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New research on Trump voters: Theyre not the sharpest tools in the box


Now there's proof: Trump's voters lack "cognitive sophistication, " often believe Bible is literal word of God

The United States is experiencing an existential democracy crisis, with
leading Republicans and millions of their voters and supporters either
tacitly or explicitly embracing authoritarianism or fascism. Democrats,
for the most part, have not responded with the urgency required to save Americas democracy from the rising neofascist tide.

American society was founded on white settler colonialism, genocide and slavery. This unresolved birth defect at the foundation of the American democratic experiment meant that the country was racially exclusionary by design, from the founding well into the 20th century. At present, American politics is contoured by asymmetrical political polarization, in which Republicans have moved so far to the right that the partys most moderate members are far more extreme than the most conservative Democrats. This
makes substantive compromise and bipartisanship in the interests of the
common good and the American people almost impossible.

Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Trump supporters
and Trump-loathers, increasingly do not live in the same neighborhoods or communities. In all, they largely do not socialize with each other, or
have other forms of meaningful interpersonal relationships in day-to-day
life. Advertisement:

To the degree that race is a proxy for political values and beliefs, the
color line functions as a practical dividing line of partisan identity and voting. Religion is also a societal space that is divided by politics. For example, public opinion research shows that white right-wing evangelical Christians have increasingly embraced authoritarian views, conspiracy
theories and other anti-democratic and antisocial values.

As the new Faith in America survey by Deseret News & Marist College
highlights, the basic understanding of the role of religion in a secular democracy has become so polarized that 70% of Republicans believe that
religion should influence a persons political values, where as only 28% of Democrats and 45% of independents share that view.

Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, also do not consume
the same sources of information about news and politics. Conservatives now inhabit their own self-created media echo chamber, which functions as a
type of lie-filled and toxic closed episteme and sealed-off universe. The creation of such an alternate reality is an important attribute of
fascism, in which truth itself must be destroyed and replaced with
fantasies and fictions in support of the leader and his movement. Advertisement:

Americas struggle for democracy and freedom against authoritarianism is
taking place on a biological level as well. Social psychologists and other researchers have shown that the brain structures of
conservative-authoritarians are different than those of more liberal and progressive thinkers. The former are more fear-centered, emphasizing
threats and dangers (negativity bias), intolerant of ambiguity and
inclined to simple, binary solutions. Conservative-authoritarians are also strongly attracted to moral hierarchy and social dominance behavior.

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Recent research by Darren Sherkat, a professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University, demonstrates that Americas democracy crisis may be
even more intractable than the above evidence suggests. In his recent
article Cognitive Sophistication, Religion, and the Trump Vote, which
appeared in the January 2021 edition of Social Science Quarterly, Sherkat examined data from the 2018 General Social Survey and concluded that there
are substantial negative differences between the thinking processes and cognition of white Trump voters, as shown in the 2016 presidential
election, as compared to other voters who supported Hillary Clinton or
another candidate, or who did not vote at all. Advertisement:

Sherkat observes that Trump support has been linked to religion and level
of education, but until now not to cognitive sophistication, which was
found to have a positive effect on voting, but a negative effect on
choosing Trump. He notes that philosophers and political elites have
debated the potential effects of mass political participation for
generations, concerned about the unsophisticated masses coming under the
sway of a demagogue. In effect, this debate was always about the quality
he calls cognitive sophistication, since citizens who lack it may not be
able to understand and access reliable and valid information about
political issues and may be vulnerable to political propaganda:

Low levels of cognitive sophistication may lead people to embrace
simple cognitive shortcuts, like stereotypes and prejudices that were
amplified by the Trump campaign. Additionally, the simple linguistic
style presented by Trump may have appealed to voters with limited
education and cognitive sophistication. Beginning with [T. W. ]
Adornos classic study of the authoritarian personality, empirical
works have linked low levels of cognitive sophistication with
right-wing orientations....

Trumps campaign may also have been more attractive to people with low
cognitive sophistication and a preference for low-effort information
processing because compared to other candidates Trumps speeches were
given at a much lower reading level.... While much of the Trump
campaigns rhetoric and orientation may have resonated with the poorly
educated and cognitively unsophisticated, those overlapping groups are
less likely to register to vote or to turn out in an election.

As part of his research, Sherkat evaluated the political decision-making
and cognition of Trumps voters, using a 10-point vocabulary exam. In a
guest essay at the website Down with Tyranny, he explains what this
vocabulary test revealed about white Trump voters:

Overall, the model predicts that almost 73% of respondents who missed
all 10 questions would vote for Trump (remember, that is controlling
for education and the other factors), while about 51% who were average
on the exam are expected to vote for Trump. Only 35% of people who had
a perfect score on the exam are predicted to be Trump supporters.

Notably, this very strong, significant effect of verbal ability can be
identified within educational groups. While non-college whites
certainly turned out more heavily for Trump, the smart ones did not
only 38% of those with perfect scores are expected to go for Trump,
and only 46% of non-college graduates who scored a standard deviation
above the mean. The same is true for college graduates low cognition
college graduates were more likely to vote for Trump. ...

What is really depressing isnt just the poles of the vocabulary exam,
its the average. The mean and median of the scale is 6 so half of
white Americans missed 4 of the easy vocabulary questions.

Sherkats research also explored how religion impacted support for Donald
Trump among white voters: This study confirms that white Americans with fundamentalist views of the Bible and those who embrace identifications
with sectarian Protestant denominations tended to vote for Donald Trump in
the 2016 election.

Belief that the Bible is the literal word of God also impacted Trump
voting: Viewing the Bible as a book of fables is also significantly
predictive of vote choice, with secular beliefs reducing the odds of a
Trump vote by 80 percent when compared to literalists, and reducing the
odds of a Trump vote by 52 percent when compared to respondents who view
the Bible as inspired by God.

In an email to Salon, Sherkat offered additional context and implication
on the relationship between white Christianity, American neofascism and cognition:

The problem of the contemporary American fascist right is rooted in
education and information. And this problem is not simply about
attainment of some quantity of education, but of the quality and
content of education, how that leads generations of white Christian
Americans to process information about a wide range of issues. The
segregation academies that proliferated in the mid-1960s and
accelerated in the 1970s have taught millions of Americans a radically
skewed version of American and world history and encouraged a
continued segregated society. The homeschooling movement augmented
this division, and further denigrated the value of knowledge.

White fundamentalist Christians have always segmented their
communities from the rest of America, and even exert considerable
control over public educational institutions, particularly in rural
areas and in the states which embraced slavery. White fundamentalist
Christians distrust mainstream social institutions like education and
print media, and they actively seek to eliminate public education and
to provide alternative sources of information. As a result, people who
identify with and participate in white Christian denominations and who
subscribe to fundamentalist beliefs have substantial intellectual
deficits that make them easy marks for a wide variety of schemes from
financial fraud to conspiracy theories.

If you cant read the New York Times, youre going to believe whatever
you hear on talk radio or on television. Its simply impossible for
people with limited vocabularies and low levels of cognitive
functioning to make sense of the complex realities of the political
world. And we now have a population where for 55 years substantial
fractions of white people have gone to private fundamentalist
Christian schools that leave them both indoctrinated in Christian
nationalism and ill-prepared to process any additional information.
Worse, we now have over a million children in a given year who are
homeschooled by parents who are uneducated white fundamentalists and
that total has been pretty constant for three decades since the
homeschooling movement blossomed.

What does this mean for the present and future of American democracy in
this time of crisis? Sherkat cited the disturbing ... influence of anti-intellectualism on American public life, which lends performative
power to ignorant elites:

Spouting off obvious untruths is no longer a mark of shame, because
even basic historical and contemporary truths are not recognized. We
seem to have a stable set of about 30% of Americans, 35% of white
Americans, who are oblivious to political realities and incapable and
unwilling to come to terms with any of our key social problems. The
increasing control over public education by right-wing fanatics is
entrenching ignorance and intellectual laziness in future generations.
It does not bode well for the future of American democracy.

Donald Trump and his movement did not create all these American
authoritarians and aspiring fascists. Such people have long been a feature
of American society. What Trump and the Republican-fascists and their
movement have accomplished in recent years is to empower and normalize a dangerous set of antisocial, anti-human, retrograde and anti-democratic
values and beliefs. Advertisement:

Saving Americas democracy will require a moral and political reckoning and
acts of critical self-reflection on a nationwide scale about the American peoples character and values, and about how their leaders and governing institutions have failed them.

Changes in laws and institutions are necessary. But on their own, such interventions will not stop the spread of fascism. A lasting remedy will
demand that the countrys political, cultural, and educational institutions
be renewed, re-energized, and reimagined. The questions Americans must ask themselves are simple yet enormous: Who are we? What are we to become? How
can we unite in defense of democracy, the common good and the general
welfare? Without real answers to those questions, there will be no
democratic renewal in the 21st century and fascism wins.

Read more on Trump supporters and the rise of fascism:

Republicans have dropped the mask they openly support fascism. What
do we do about it? Former GOP strategist Rick Wilson on Putins deep
appeal to dictator-friendly Republicans At last the Republican Party
comes clean: It stands for terrorism and Trump, against democracy

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