onald J. Trump now looks like the guy who struggled for four years against
the bureaucrats who tormented him, threw them off Nakatomi Tower, then
took his bazooka and blew up the Democrat party while walking away
in slow motion from the explosion, covered in blood, without looking back.
Whatever you may think of Trump, that fist-in-the-air gesture when he realized that he had nearly been murdered for his beliefs was an amazing act of defiance.
Many guys view that as evidence of strength in adversity, but some women still fear the name-calling and the mean tweets. They remember the chaos of his administration, notwithstanding the fact that it was mostly manufactured specifically to terrorize them.
Thus, conservatives are trying to figure out why “suburban white women” vote Democrat. Maybe, they say, it's because they're in “empty marriages devoid of meaning.” Or maybe it's all that guilt they feel for getting a tax deduction for buying a hybrid. This is, the theory goes, because Democrat ideology is all about “feel[ing] guilty about things they didn't do and make it up to people who didn't have things done to them.” The stereotype is that they drink Chardonnay and have many cats.
Maybe. The writer means so-called race guilt, and it certainly fits together, but it's not really a good explanation. At the moment, women are statistically more likely to vote Democrat. What is it about them—or anybody—that would make them do such a terrible thing?
The fact is that women have always been slightly more conformist than men. They have to be: by nature they're less aggressive and physically weaker. Being a non-conformist requires strength and carries physical risks. Women learn from birth to do whatever it takes to earn praise, despite the terrible toll that takes on them.
The DNA theory
Genetically it makes sense: a punch in the gut could cause major problems in childbirth. A scar could be a sign that she gets into fights; the last thing a male wants is a female who will fight with the offspring, or what may be worse, to refuse to have children altogether. The cave man instinct to avoid such women is well founded in evolution.
For the cave woman, a non-conformist male who can withstand repeated accusations of being a Russian spy and unflinchingly tolerate malicious prosecution in court by rogue district attorneys is evidence of strength and determination that means safety for the children. So they should like him, but something is holding them back.
Psychologists say there are two types of conformity. Stallen and Sanfey [1] define them this way:
Informational conformity occurs when one adopts the view of others because others are assumed to possess more knowledge about the situation. Normative conformity refers to the act of conforming to the positive expectations of others in order to be liked and accepted by them.
The current theme in neuroscience is to identify brain regions such as the reward center, called the nucleus accumbens, that are changed in conformist individuals. This brain region seems to work in opposition to the rostral cingulate zone in the medial prefrontal cortex, where processing of conflict occurs. The question they're asking is whether conformity is an explicit decision a person makes or whether it means their actual perception of reality is literally changed by the crowd. Preliminary fMRI results suggest the second one, but the answer is not yet certain.
The upbringing theory
Our upbringing also plays a role. Male children are told to be tough and fight back. Female children are given sympathy and comfort. They live in different worlds. A boy who's constantly told that he's a bad person for dipping a girl's pony tail in an inkwell, or whatever kids do these days, will be more likely to grow up to discount the opinion of others and therefore less conformist. Female children remember well how the other girls made up stories about them to hurt their feelings.
Of course, many men are conformist as well, but men generally believe that when someone praises you, it's because they want something from you. To a conformist, the worst thing that can happen is to be socially excluded, so they do as they're told. Conformists may be more likely to believe in global warming and to think masks prevent Covid, not because they understand atmospheric physics or virology, but because the news media tell them they must believe those things to be a good person. Going with the crowd makes a conformist feel safe. Ideologues recognize this, which is why they create a narrative that Trump is a “Danger to democracy.”
Non-conformists become either great leaders or despised outcasts, or sometimes both. What they have in common is that they don't give a God damn what other people think. That may be why Republicans respect RFK Jr. despite the political mismatch.
Of course, it's not a clear-cut distinction. There are many women who are great non-conformists and many men who conform. And people can change if they have something to gain by doing so.
But history shows that if Trump wins, the Democrats will riot and burn and the media will once again invent more fake stories portraying Trump as threatening and destabilizing. That is terrifying to the conformist, who fears change and craves safety.
If the Republicans really want to win in November, they need to stop criticizing those “suburban Chardonnay drinkers” and describe how their candidate will make them feel safe. Respect them or not, the Republicans need their votes.
And to be honest, that Chardonnay looks pretty good, although there's something off. Somehow it reminds me of . . . Bud Light.
[1] Stallen M, Sanfey AG. The neuroscience of social conformity: implications for fundamental and applied research. Front Neurosci. 2015 Sep 28;9:337. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2015.00337. PMID: 26441509; PMCID: PMC4585332.
jul 30 2024, 8:52 am
