I wonder if the brains of conservatives are structurally different from everyone else’s. Like I get that boomers have their lead poisoning, but younger cons are just as terrible and just as stupid while growing up with better education and endless info against their values.
There might be “better education”, but you also have to remember that we have much worse socialization today. There’s no sense of community anymore, no natural places to go to meet people, families are smaller, it’s much easier to pick up and move somewhere else ending up in an unfamiliar environment with no friends, and so on and so on.
If you have bad socialisation, you end up with bad social skills, so you end up being rejected everywhere you go, so you end up wanting to control people so they have to stay with you, so you don’t end up alone.
There’s a million people who grew up in the same environments who didn’t to turn out to be misogynistic racist bigots though.
Being the first and second child within one family is oftentimes a greater “environmental” difference than being the first child in one family vs the first child in another family. Or getting into one school class with lots of assholes who become friends, versus getting into another class with lots of very nice people who become friends.
What I want to say with this is, even within a unit that we usually call “same environment”, the environmental differences can be massive.
I would suppose the brain, like a muscle, can be trained to be stronger (more computing power) and simultaneously can wither if neglected. Rather than the brain structure being an innate political preference indicator from birth it is (attempted to be) nurtured into a culturally efficient information processing organ. Which is why the battle lines in children’s education around set conservative orthodoxies (such as religions) vs critical thinking, or obedience/conformity vs self actualisation, or hierarchical society vs egalitarianism are so heated. It is a battle for the soul of the country. Which, of course is continued throughout the rest of your life too overtly through partisan messaging and covertly through message format/style.
I think part of it may be that, but there’s definitely big money behind pushing and disseminating these beliefs. You’ve got foreign government-funded groups whose whole purpose is to push these talking points out to large swaths of the US population, to create conflict, on both the Left and the Right. Our own corporate elite has been doing this to the US population for years via our tv and news media, but now with the internet and social media, world governments are getting in on the act and everyone is trying to push us one way or the other.
