The Right’s Advantage Is That It Loves To Lie!

Bad faith bad faith!

Photo by Celeste T on Unsplash

If only the American Right’s primary advantage was structural.

In the waning weeks of the 2024 election I paid close attention to the opinions and feelings of a handful of (mostly) apolitical Baby Boomers I know, all of whom have been disgusted by Donald Trump for decades. I took fleeting mental notes of these Boomers’ giddiness over Kamala Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney and getting cable news headlines about some once-prominent Republican officials throwing their support behind the Democratic nominee.

The concept of various factions of American politics coming together to defeat the Bad Man was delicious to these folks, the kind of thing that might have tickled the part of their brain that lit up when they watched The West Wing in the wonderfully stable late ‘90s. I thought we were done with that kind of toothless politics, but I guess not.

It wasn’t just the political camaraderie that proved so appealing for these Harris supporters; it was the idea — I think — that the anti-Trump forces could win a clean fight, that we did not have to stoop to the level of the right-wing ghouls slinging piles of shit into an information environment that proved to be so corrupted as to be unfixable. A big enough tent with a big enough group of people who could overcome their varied differences in economic and social matters would win the day against the shit slingers, the thinking went. People didn’t need to be tricked into opposing fascism; they didn’t need the same messaging drilled into their heads over and over in the final weeks of the campaign. People are good, the thinking goes, and will do the right thing when the time comes.

And what could be more right than stopping an enemy of the United States from winning its highest office?

By simply piecing together a disparate electorate, those who opposed Trump could avoid engaging in that dirty little p-word (propaganda) so beloved by the shit slingers and go high when they go low, as Michelle Obama said in 2016. I guess these folks missed when she reversed course on such good, clean high mindedness during the 2024 DNC.

Anti-Trump voters — not necessarily left or even liberal — could stay above the fray and keep the insurrectionist out of office simply by cobbling together enough support. The American mind, corrupted by 25 years of nonstop superhero movies, sees the Avengers everywhere it looks. Our Big Orange Thanos would certainly fall to the power of moderate Republicans with laser beams shooting out of their hands or whatever.

Slinging shit seems to have been the better solution.

The Journal of Marketing this week published study results showing Republicans’ willingness to spread misinformation in times of extreme political polarization, to get down in the muck and rally around their ideological compatriots, to defend and strengthen the so-called in-group.

Probably you didn’t faint upon reading this. Probably this is not the first you’ve heard of conservatives pelting their social media timelines with the most egregious lies imaginable about Democrats and their allies, especially during an election cycle, when power is on the line.

But this research offers some academic confirmation of what you have known in your marrow for years and years: Your right-wing friends and family will do anything to advance the conservative cause, which in recent elections has curdled into an explicitly fascist cause.

Based on theories of political ideology, we posit that conservatives will convey more in-group-skewed political misinformation than liberals because they value in-group dominance more strongly; however, polarization will trigger this value difference and behavior. Researchers have found that conservatives are more likely than liberals to seek in-group dominance, that is, they want their in-group to dominate and be superior to other groups. Conveying in-group-skewed misinformation helps with in-group dominance, which should appeal to conservatives as it is a core value, but that value may not be salient. Among conservatives, the need for in-group dominance may become salient in politically polarized situations. […] Our findings indicate that conservatives in polarized situations have an elevated desire for in-group dominance, which provokes them to spread in-group-skewed misinformation, whereas liberals do not react this way. In addition, conservatives and liberals do not differ in less polarized situations. Our research appears to be the first to show that conservatives’ tendency to convey misinformation is driven in part by their need for in-group dominance, provoked by polarization. More broadly, we show that misinformation is caused not only by a person’s ideology but also by situational factors.

This is where conservatives have an edge that cannot be overstated. Their advantages in the US are not only structural — the Electoral College, gerrymandered House districts, the existence of the Senate — but behavioral.

Those on the Right, far more than people in the center or on the Left, tend to see the world through a hierarchy of oppression (or domination). This explains why the backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement has been so severe and sustained — because for a moment, white people in the US were told that they were atop the hierarchy of oppression, that this was something that needed to be addressed and, eventually, fixed. Conservatives lashed out in ways both vengeful and petty, advocating for violence against racial justice protesters, passing state-level laws that made police officers a protected class — as if being a cop is an immutable trait — and ending government diversity programs while bullying corporations and universities into ending any and all efforts to promote inclusion in recruitment and hiring practices.

This was all one long effort for the American Right to reaffirm the dominance and superiority of the white race after a short-lived moment in which people suggested a national embrace of equality, fairness, and justice. This served as an accelerant for the fascism machine (social media).

Social dominance theory suggests that this difference may originate from rival viewpoints on hierarchical social structures, because conservatives typically view dominance-based hierarchies as legitimate, whereas liberals see them as illegitimate and advocate for equality. […] Moreover, according to moral foundation theory, conservatives typically prioritize binding moral values that promote in-group cohesion, such as loyalty, authority, and purity. In contrast, liberals tend to focus on individualizing moral values like care and justice, prioritizing the rights of individual members of society over their in-group interests.

An ends-justify-the-means mindset defines not just modern right-wing politics, but those of 20 and 30 and 40 years ago. Winning, at some point, became the only thing that mattered for Republicans, and today they enjoy the fruits of that mindset: The courts are stacked with right-wing activist judges; the Supreme Court is a captured institution at war with much of the federal judiciary; state and congressional districts are gerrymandered beyond imagination; and even when Democrats have some electoral success, they are prevented from exercising power. We saw this play out in North Carolina two years ago: Republican legislators stripped the state’s incoming Democratic governor of power in a move that would have made Jim Crow-era conservatives blush.

If winning requires the unapologetic spread of lies and half truths during an election cycle, so be it, the collective Republican mind says, guided by its burning desire for in-group dominance. Democrats, the big tent party by choice or default — it’s hard to say — lack this desire and suffer for it. The Democratic Party and its surrogates in the media have made this brutally clear over the past 20 years: Upholding norms and engaging in good-faith politics is paramount. If that leads to an electoral victory or two, so be it. There is a total lack of win-at-all-costs politics on the American Left, making the fight against an increasingly radical Republican Party a one-sided affair. It is nothing short of unilateral disarmament.

The Journal of Marketing researchers posit that “the marketplace,” presumably social media platforms that strive to steal as much of your attention as possible, “often incentivizes polarization to increase audiences and engagement, inadvertently provoking misinformation.”

There is nothing inadvertent about this, of course. From Facebook to Elon Musk’s X to Instagram and Threads, social media algorithms are engineered to promote the most outrage-inducing content because nothing keeps engagement high like infuriating folks who log on seeking ways to be mad about the state of the world. That these platforms push polarizing, outrageous videos and memes and text to the top of your algorithm is not some big industry-wide whoopsie. They are toying with your lizard brain.

These researchers claim there are “viable solutions” to the intentional and unintentional spread of misinformation, “including better fact-checking to remove the misinformation and media literacy education to teach misinformation detection.” This, like the claim about social platforms accidentally promoting misinformation, is patently untrue, especially in the US, where flooding the zone with bullshit lies is protected speech, as free speech naturally consumes itself.

There are no easy answers here. My hope over the past decade was that the Democratic Party would eventually become so beaten down and desperate that it would at least partly embrace ends-justify-the-means politics and the in-group dominance that animates the American Right. I don’t know if that holds much appeal for so-called independent voters who flip and flop between the parties every election cycle or two.

That the total lack of social media regulations accelerates the Right’s embrace of in-group dominance is just another reason to crack down on the billionaire-controlled algorithms polluting our politics and proving incompatible with democracy. We’re a long way from that though.