What Makes Americans Susceptible to Manipulation

This mirrors some of my own thoughts about the same subject. I quote it here in its entirety.

[This piece ran as an op/ed in the Baltimore Sun in late October, 2004, just before the election.]

What Makes Americans Susceptible to Manipulation?
by Andrew Bard Schmookler

One question has been especially troubling me: Why will so many Americans buy images of national leaders that are so at odds with so much evidence?

This question is crucial because the American democracy was founded on the notion that the truth will out in the deliberations of a free people.

Fear is surely a factor, especially so since our country came under attack three years ago. When we’re afraid, we lose our tolerance for ambiguity. Black-and-white thinking is in: you’re either for us or against us. When in the grip of fear, we crave certainty, because uncertainty magnifies the feeling of vulnerability. So a leader who shows no doubt, who doesn’t even entertain second thoughts, is comforting for the fearful. The more afraid we are, the more we shift into a part of the brain where rational analysis does not govern.

It is when people do not think critically that they are most manipulable, and fear is but one force that’s eroded America’s capacity for critical thought. Over recent generations, the most mighty of our educational institutions –advertising—has systematically worked to teach us to mistake appealing image for the reality, the sizzle for the steak. Those taught to buy cigarettes to make themselves glamorous can be persuaded to buy incompetent leadership to make them safe.

Many Americans have more recently been still further trained away from habits of critical thinking by the powerful subculture of intellectually irresponsible right wing media. For more than a decade, “the Godzilla of talk radio” –Rush Limbaugh—has taken millions of Americans on a daily excursion that panders to their prejudices, never challenging them to reconsider their ideas, always encouraging them to blame all their problems on identifiable others.

The voice leading them on these excursions radiates the aura of certainty, despite the vast ignorance it covers over, and shows no scruples about distorting facts to reach a desired conclusion. These daily forrays into comforting falsehoods have forged in the minds of millions of Americans a path down which fine-sounding messages unmoored from reality could more readily travel.

But there are still older paths in the American psyche that have been available for adept political manipulators.

One of the most powerful ways of by-passing critical rationality in America has long been the posture of religious piety and moralism. That’s how the Music Man sells River City on a boy’s band. “These leaders must have integrity, they’re so religious,” I heard on my call-in radio show. People who have been betrayed by the false piety of the Jimmy Swaggarts and Jim Bakkers of the world will still assume that one who speaks often enough of his great faith can be trusted.

That’s the way that the wolf of unbridled self-aggrandisement hides behind the sheep’s clothing of false righteousness. (That’s how political leaders who are only serving their lust for power and their greed can get legitimacy and compliance.)

There is another venerable template in American political culture: the pattern of rhetoric by which governing elites inflame peripheral issues to distract their followers from seeing the truth of their exploitation.

In the South, race long served as the imflammatory distraction to enable the few to dominate the many. In our times, the pseudo-alliance to preserve white purity has been largely replaced by a pseudo-alliance to maintain moral purity. What’s not noticed is that while the leaders just keep these hot-button moral issues (like abortion and gay rights) festering, unresolved, they make sure that the agenda of the rich and powerful (the regressive tax cuts, the dismantling of environmental regulation, etc.) actually gets accomplished.

While the con itself is not new, the scope of today’s successful deception of the American people is unprecedented.

The powerful used to just take what they wanted by the sword. The rise of democracy required the powerful to trade in the sword for the con job: just manipulate the people into choosing against their own true interests. It is only when the people can see through the lies that they reclaim the power that is their birthright as citizens of this American democracy.

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