Political Extremism: Minds Stuck in a Rut

“All movements, however different in doctrine and aspiration, draw their early adherents from the same types of humanity; they all appeal to the same types of mind.” -- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, 1951

A 2019 research paper, The Partisan Mind: Is Extreme Political Partisanship Related to Cognitive Inflexibility?, tries to dissect the basis for apparent cognitive differences between extremists or ideologues and others. Two hypotheses have been proposed to explain be rigid adherence to a political ideology. The ideological extremity hypothesis, posits that extreme liberals and conservatives are more cognitively rigid than moderates. According to this hypothesis, partisan political extremism arises from inflexible belief systems that capture the world in black-and-white terms that create the (usually false) appearance of certainty and simplicity. Consonant with this hypothesis, there is indirect evidence that left and right extremists are more dogmatically intolerant and more likely to feel superior about their beliefs.

The rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis, posits that conservatives perceive the world in a more inflexible and categorical way than liberals. Consonant empirical evidence reveals a relationship between political conservatism and psychological preferences for traditionalism, familiarity, and certainty. By contrast, that research indicates that liberalism is more tolerant and accepting of uncertainty and ambiguity.

The data this paper generated was interpreted to be generally in accord with the ideological extremity hypothesis. The data indicates that ideological extremism, not just extreme conservatism, correlates with extreme political partisanship, dogmatism and animosity. 

 

What is cognitive flexibility?

Cognitive flexibility is defined as the ability to adapt to novel or changing environments and a capacity to switch between modes of thinking. One group defined it as “the ability to flexibly switch perspectives, focus of attention, or response mappings”. Cognitive inflexibility is believed to be a state of mental stasis or a tendency of an individual to not change. That includes sometimes not changing bad behaviors despite bad consequences. That is sometimes observed in certain patients with compulsive disorder, drug addiction or frontal lobe damage. To investigate the relationship between inflexibility and political ideology, the research protocols here relied on three different, validated measures of cognitive flexibility.

The paper concludes with this summary of the results: "The present investigation sought to address the question: Does mental rigidity reflect one’s partisan intensity or political orientation? The results reveal that strong partisan intensity predicts reduced cognitive flexibility, regardless of the political party’s orientation and doctrine. .... To the best of our knowledge, these findings constitute the first direct objective testing of the ideological extremity hypothesis using behavioral assessments of cognitive flexibility rather than self-report questionnaires. The data here support the essential claim of the ideological extremity hypothesis: political extremists were more cognitively rigid than political moderates, across multiple tests of cognitive flexibility. These results suggest that the rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis may be incomplete, as it does not account for the presence of the 'rigidity-of-the-left.'"

In other words, extreme liberals could be in a similar or the same cognitive boat as extreme conservatives.

As usual, the authors caution that additional "studies should seek to replicate and expand these results, as well as explore ways in which the two hypotheses can be combined and empirically negotiated."

Political Thrillers

 My partner in crime Geri and I have started to watch old classics of late, especially as now with Covid not a lot of new material coming out.

On my Forum I talked about Alfred Hitchcock films, on here I want to talk about political thrillers.

WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO POLITICAL THRILLERS ANYWAYS?

Nowadays the films that pass for political thrillers seem dull compared to some of the classics (at least in my humble opinion).

Examples of what I am talking about:

 Seven Days in May (1964)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058576/

Though the movie is about a General ready to overtake the US government parts are eerily similar to what happened recently via Trump.

Another gem:

All the King's Men (1949)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041113/?ref_=fn_al_tt_4

But one of my favorite all time, and still is, is:

Fail Safe (1964)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058083/

Now, what constitutes a political thriller does vary from person to person, I found a sight that listed "Dr. Strangelove" as a political thriller (say what?) as well as listing "Lincoln" which is really a historical piece more than a thriller.

BUT COME PLAY ALONG ANYWAYS:

GOT any favorites among the genre? Any political thrillers you care to list for Geri and I to watch?

Maybe you know of a gem I have missed.

and Happy Monday to boot!

The Conservative Game: Owning the Libs and Crushing Democracy

Understanding what drives polarization and the breakdown of social comity appears to be of central importance to understanding the American drift into some form of harsh, demagogic dictatorship. A Politico article offers some possible insight that at least partly explains the mess. Politico writes:

For a political party whose membership skews older, it might be surprising that the spirit that most animates Republican politics today is best described with a phrase from the world of video games: “Owning the libs.”

Gamers borrowed the term from the nascent world of 1990s computer hacking, using it to describe their conquered opponents: “owned.” To “own the libs” does not require victory so much as a commitment to infuriating, flummoxing or otherwise distressing liberals with one’s awesomely uncompromising conservatism. And its pop-cultural roots and clipped snarkiness are perfectly aligned with a party that sees pouring fuel on the culture wars’ fire as its best shot at surviving an era of Democratic control.

But in a post-Trump America, to “own the libs” is less an identifiable act or set of policy goals than an ethos, a way of life, even a civic religion.

“‘Owning the libs’ is a way of asserting dignity,” says Helen Andrews, senior editor of The American Conservative. “‘The libs,’ as currently constituted, spend a lot of time denigrating and devaluing the dignity of Middle America and conservatives, so fighting back against that is healthy self-assertion; any self-respecting human being would… Stunts, TikTok videos, they energize people, that’s what they’re intended to do.”

“I can envision a time where [pro-Trump Florida Rep.] Matt Gaetz could pin a picture of [Democratic New York Rep.] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to his own crotch, and smash it with a ball-peen hammer, and he’ll think it’s a huge success if 100,000 liberals attack him as an idiot,” says Jonah Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the anti-Trump conservative outlet The Dispatch. “It’s a way of taking what the other side criticizes about you and making it into a badge of honor.”  

“It’s a spirit of rebellion against what people see as liberals who are overly sensitive, or are capable of being triggered, or hypocritical,” says Marshall Kosloff, co-host of the podcast “The Realignment,” which analyzes the shifting allegiances of and rise of populist politics. “It basically offers the party a way of resolving the contradictions within a realigning party, that increasingly is appealing to down-market white voters and certain working-class Black and Hispanic voters, but that also has a pretty plutocratic agenda at the policy level.” In other words: Owning the libs offers bread and circuses for the pro-Trump right while Republicans quietly pursue a traditional program of deregulation and tax cuts at the policy level.  

That’s led to predictable tensions, as the party’s diminishing cadre of wonky reformists lament a form of politics that seems more focused on racking up retweets and YouTube views than achieving policy goals. Even so, Trump-inspired stunt work is, for the moment, the Republican Party’s go-to political tool. “Owning the libs” is no longer the domain of its rowdy, ragged edges, it’s the party line, with the insufficiently combative seen as inherently suspect and outside the 45th president’s trusted circle of “fighters.”

Do liberals really spend too much time denigrating and devaluing the dignity of Middle America and conservatives? That complaint is not uncommon. Is it true? Do people, like me, who heavily criticize the ex-president and dark free speech cross a line from principled political opposition and rhetoric to mere partisan rudeness and hypocrisy? Or, is the republican complaint a propaganda ploy by elites to keep the rank and file riled up, deceived, manipulated and betrayed, all without their understanding of exactly what is going on and why?

“The John the Baptist to former President T****’s all-ownage-all-the-time 

messianic leadership: Rush Limbaugh

Limbaugh regularly filled the three daily hours of his program with invective against women, people of color, LGBTQ people and any number of other groups that didn’t include Rush Limbaugh. .... to his millions of devoted listeners, no remark was too inflammatory to be brushed aside in light of his peerless talent for owning the libs.”

Exactly who is denigrating and devaluing the dignity of who and what?

Intellectual Property in the Pharmaceutical Industry

A Washington Post article focuses on the intellectual property situation that vaccine manufacturers are defending in the face of the pandemic. Again, this emphasizes the moral framework that most companies operate in. For pharmaceuticals in particular, patents and trade secrets (know-how) are critical to maintain high profit margins. WaPo writes:

Abdul Muktadir, the chief executive of Bangladeshi pharmaceutical maker Incepta, has emailed executives of Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax offering his company’s help. He said he has enough capacity to fill vials for 600 million to 800 million doses of coronavirus vaccine a year to distribute throughout Asia.

He never heard back from any of them.

The drug companies that developed and won authorization for coronavirus vaccines in record time have agreed to sell most of the first doses coming off production lines to the United States, European countries and a few other wealthy nations.

Billions of people are left with an uncertain wait, with most of Africa and parts of South America and Asia not expected to achieve widespread vaccination coverage until 2023, according to some estimates.

But drug companies have rebuffed entreaties to face the emergency by sharing their proprietary technology more freely with companies in developing nations. They cite the rapid development of new vaccines as evidence that the drug industry’s traditional business model, based on exclusive patents and know-how, is working. The companies are lobbying the Biden administration and other members of the World Trade Organization against any erosion of their monopolies on individual coronavirus vaccines that are worth billions of dollars in annual sales.

The fights over vaccine supply are not just over a moral duty of Western nations to prevent deaths and illness overseas. Lack of supply and lopsided distribution threaten to leave entire continents open as breeding grounds for coronavirus mutations. Those variants, if they prove resistant to vaccines, could spread anywhere in the world, including in Western countries that have been vaccinated first.

But no coronavirus vaccine manufacturer has agreed to participate in the program, called the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool, the WHO said. Albert Bourla, the chief executive of Pfizer, last year called the concept “nonsense.”

“Unfortunately, only limited, exclusive and often non-transparent voluntary licensing is the preferred approach of some companies, and this is proven to be insufficient to address the needs of the current COVID-19 pandemic,” the WHO said in response to questions from The Washington Post. “The entire population and the global economy are in crisis because of that approach and vaccines nationalism.”

These exclusive franchises are on track to generate billions of dollars in revenue for the companies. The Moderna vaccine, which was co-developed with the United States government and supported with $483 million in taxpayer backing, is expected to bring in $18.5 billion for the company this year, Moderna said in February.

Pfizer, which partnered with Germany’s BioNTech, a company that received German subsidies, has predicted it will get $15 billion from sales of its vaccine, an estimate that is considered conservative. Pfizer did not accept U.S. government funding.

Step-by-step manufacturing instructions are just as important as intellectual property rights, because vaccines require multiple complex steps to produce. It takes highly specialized equipment and workers trained in biopharmaceutical manufacturing.

In a Zoom call on Feb. 3, John Lepore, Moderna’s senior vice president for government engagement, told vaccine advocates the company is reluctant to share details about how to make its vaccine, according to advocates who participated in the call and were interviewed by The Washington Post. Lepore said Moderna sees its mRNA vaccine delivery system as a proprietary platform for other drugs and vaccines in the future, the participants said.

Moderna did not comment on the conversation but referred to the October patent pledge. “Our patent pledge stated that, while the pandemic persists, Moderna will not use its patents to block others from making a coronavirus vaccine intended to combat the pandemic. There was no mention of a commitment to transfer our know-how beyond our chosen partners,” Moderna spokesman Ray Jordan said in an email.

Does this business model still work? The moral imperative here, profit, is crystal clear. On the one hand, Americans got vaccines in record time by assuming most of the risk of vaccine development failure. But on the other hand, if new virus variants arise among billions of unvaccinated people in the next couple of years, we might need to do this all over again with a new vaccine that works against the new variant. That could go one for a long time. The flu virus requires a new vaccine every year, so this possibility is not out of the question.[1]  

One critical component is the know-how needed to make the vaccines. Without it manufacturers cannot make the vaccine, even if the vaccine is patented and the ingredients are known with precision. What the patents apparently do not teach is the know-how needed to make a functioning vaccine on a large scale. It isn't just a matter of adding ingredients together and stirring the vat. The process is far more complex than that. The process probably can be reverse engineered over a period of months, maybe a year, but that would take a lot of money.

What should the US government do, if anything? The government could fund a research effort to discover the manufacturing process. If successful, and it probably would be, that would convert the know-how (trade secret) into public knowledge, free for anyone to use as long as patents do not block sale of the end product vaccine. The vaccines industry has two lines of defense, patents and know-how. Even if the know-how is eliminated by reverse engineering research, the patents will remain there to block vaccine sales.

What is the right thing to do here? Do nothing and let the free market (such as it is) sort it out? Or intervene in hope of protecting the public interest and people generally? Compel licensing of the patents? At what point does the profit moral outweigh the public interest, if ever? Or does protecting the profit motive always best serve the public as hard core capitalists claim?

Footnote: 

1. A couple of weeks ago, I think one source mentioned that flu season this year is about 2% of what was projected because of mask wearing and physical distancing for COVID. That is solid evidence that COVID is far more infectious than this year's flu. COVID is still spreading while flu got clobbered. That COVID is definitely not the typical flu is something to keep in mind.