The right has denied that cigarettes cause cancer, that climate change is a genuine problem, that peak oil is inevitable, that the wars in Iraq, Vietnam and others will be epic disasters, that media deregulation will be bad for democracy, and that squandering resources might not be a good thing.
The right also denied the existence of the credit bubble, of the dot com bubble, of the housing bubble, and has been desperately trying to pretend that outsourcing and wage cuts are good for the economy.
It was so-called doomers on the left who pointed out the truth about all of these, while the right tried to bury the facts.
There's nothing doomy or chaotic about accepting that world peace and prosperity don't seem imminent, and that there are interesting political, economic, ecological, and practical problems that have to be solved before peace starts to become likely - and we can stop spending a trillion a year on war which could be spent on far more interesting and exciting things.
It's reactionary in a literal sense because it's driven by emotion, not strategy.
But this applies to leftists as well. I will only cede that those voting for right wing candidates are on average slightly more biased towards their views being formed by emotion.
Which is why Republicans are more interested in symbols of effectiveness than in actual performance. They vote for whoever makes them feel good, not for whoever will do a good job.
Clinton got a lot of votes based on charisma. Obama's campaign is largely emotionally driven, and his charisma is specifically what got him to where he is now.
The other half is cowering in terror from perceived threats, and hating anyone who can challenge that inflation and bring it to earth.
And those who aim their fear and terror inward - those who would rather themselves be hurt than others - are more likely to vote left wing / democrat.
There are degrees of difference between right and left wing voters, which is why Lakoff's writing is worth paying attention to, but it's not as binary as you want it to be.
you are the media you consume.
I'm talking about the 9-11 conspiracy theorists and those who were saying after the 2006 election that "the republicans won't cede control of congress back to the democrats." These views are driven by emotional chaos.
No they weren't because the Republicans haven't ceded control of Congress back to the Democrats, except in a nominal and superficial sense.
That election was supposed to have consequences - specifically accountability, and an end to funding for the Iraq war - and that simply hasn't happened. Bush has vetoed bills, scribbled in notes on the side of the paper when he's wanted to, and his officers have ignored all serious attempts to bring them to any kind of justice. There's been almost every possible attempt to destroy checks and balances and set up a unitary executive. While there's been more debate about this in Congress than there would have been in the previous Congress, there's been very little genuine action.
Funding for Iraq has continued, there's been FISA, impeachment of the worst president in history has been put off the table and it's been left to people considered kooks - like Kucinich - to try to make it happen.
The chaos has very much been in the outside world on this. When you have a president who describes the most important document in a country's political history as 'just a piece of paper', says it would be much more convenient if it didn't exist, and tries hard to act as if that were true, a little hysteria isn't entirely out of place.
MillMan:
Sure. Policy-based voters are maybe only 20% of the population. But you're missing the point that Ds and Rs rely on different kinds of emotional appeals to reach the rest. The Rs always emphasis phoney self-reliance and self-determination while actually preaching an insane gospel of 'Other people are scary and bad, and we don't believe your actions should have consequences.'
It doesn't even make sense as a meme, but it's the basis of all republican campaigning.
Ds today are more likely to try to use charisma as a payload for realistic management - if only because they'll have read Lakoff and realised they have to.
With Rs it's all charisma, all the time, and there's nothing inside it - it's the politics of personalities who have no real experience or policy skills and can only win power through threats, manipulation and cynical sales techniques.
