We don't know if President Obama has the right answers or not; but we already know where the Republicans' conservative policies lead. We are living through the mess they created right now.

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     Okay, I exaggerate a little. Conservatives are not really brain-dead; their brains just don’t work as well as Liberal brains when it comes to dealing with change.

     Researchers conducted an experiment involving college students whose political ideology ranged from “very liberal” to “very conservative”. The students were instructed to tap a key on a keyboard whenever the letter M appeared on a computer screen, but to not tap the key when the letter W appeared (psychologists call this a Go/No-Go task). The letter M was programmed to appear four times as often as the letter W--thus conditioning the subjects to tap the keyboard when either letter appeared on the computer screen. During the experiment, an electroencephalograph monitored the part of the brain that is known to detect conflicts between a habitual response (in this case--tapping a key) and a more appropriate response (not tapping a key).

     This simple experiment demonstrated a dramatic difference between students identifying themselves as liberals compared to those describing themselves as conservative. The data showed that liberals were 2.2 times more accurate in completing the task, and they were 4.9 times more likely to exhibit brain activity in the area associated with conflict whenever the letter W appeared.

     In other words, when confronted with change, conservatives responded correctly only half as often as liberals. More importantly,  conservative brains failed to respond to a change five times more often than liberal brains.

     I would consider this to be a problem, unless there is some advantage to not being able to recognize and respond to changes in an ever-changing world. Further research needs to be done to determine if this phenomenon is due to genetic variations in the brain; or is the result of brain damage caused by listening to too much right-wing talk radio.

·        “You turn the AM on and there’s Rush, or Savage, or another of the army of right-wing radio talk show hosts. You may not be listening hard, just working, driving, doing busywork or the laundry. Yet if you listen day after day, year after year, your brain will begin to change. ...Words, even those heard casually and listened to incidentally, activate frames--structures of ideas that are physically realized in the brain. The more the words are heard, the more the frames are activated in the brain, and stronger their synapses get--until the frames are there permanently. ...All this is normal. It is how words work. And the right-wing message machine has found a way to take advantage of it - activating, as it were, a conservative system of thought. ...One diatribe after another, the crucial facts left out or lied about, day after day, city after city. It has an effect.”--George Lakoff,  Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at UC Berkeley,  The San Francisco Chronicle, 4/19/09

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     Further studies of the brain may lead to a deeper understanding of some of the other mental problems commonly observed among conservatives--like their approach to problem solving. For example:

     After inheriting the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression, the Obama Administration sought the advice from a wide range of economists to come up with a plan to deal with the crisis. Congressional Republicans took a different approach to the problem. They began with the answer (as they always do), and then the problem becomes: how to justify their answer.

     Rather than seeking unbiased opinions on what to do about the economic crisis, Republicans were only interested in opinions that disagreed with President Obama’s solution:

·        “ATTENTION ECONOMISTS: ARE YOU A STIMULUS SPENDING SKEPTIC? ...House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) is compiling a list of credentialed American economists who would like to add their voices to the list of stimulus spending skeptics.”--from the Office of the House Republican Leader website.

     No wonder they are called “The Party of No”.

 (Authors note: I use the words Republican and Conservative interchangeably--since the Republican Party became a tool of its right-wing conservatives.)

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     Conservative brains also demonstrate a limited ability to recognize hypocrisy.

     ThinkProgress.com compiled a list of 23 Republicans and one Blue-dog Democrat, who voted against President Obama’s economic recovery package, then went home and bragged to their constituents about the benefits they will receive as a result of the legislation.

·        “The Republicans’ sudden reversion to the solemn frugality of their forebears would be amusing were it not so dangerous. Having established a record over the past decade or so as the wildest wastrels in the nation’s history, they now present themselves as straight-laced accountants who simply cannot abide a misspent dime.”-- Joe Conason, journalist, 1/8/09

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     Republicans must also suffer from some form of learning disability. For some reason, they can’t read the writing on the wall.

·        “[In the last two Congressional elections] Republicans lost and Democrats gained 55 seats in the House of Representatives and 14 seats in the Senate... They turned a $200 billion budget surplus into a $1 trillion deficit. They caused the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. They started the stupidest, most unnecessary war in American history. ...Only 19 percent of Americans have a favorable impression of Republicans in Congress, down from 24 percent at the beginning of the year. In contrast, 68 percent of Americans give a favorable rating to President Obama.”--Bernie Horn, Campaign for America’s Future, 2/17/09

·        “[A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll (3/3/09)]  shows that 41% of Americans say the country is headed in the right direction, ...up from 12% before the election. ...By a margin of more than 2-1, Americans trust the Democratic Party over the Republicans to get the country out of the recession. Views of the GOP are near an all-time low. And more than half of all adults say that Republicans in Congress have opposed Mr. Obama’s proposals more to gain political advantage, compared with 30% who say Republicans have done so because they are standing up for their principles.”--The Wall Street Journal, 3/5/09

...and how do the Republicans interpret these ominous numbers?

·        “As Republicans, ...I think we have to admit what our sales job has been poor.”-- Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), 1/29/09

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     No. Absolutely not! The Republican Party’s decline is not the result of a poor sales job. The Republican Party’s problem is that it is selling the same warmed-over conservative crap that it’s been peddling for the past thirty years (at least). It didn’t work then--it won’t work now.   

     We don’t know if President Obama has the right answers or not; but we already know where the Republicans’ conservative policies lead. We are living through the mess they created right now.

     The current crop of Republican lawmakers can offer no solutions to America’s problems because their under-active conservative brains cannot even perceive the problems--let alone respond to them. If moderate Republicans don’t regain control of their party; it is destined to become a regional party of southern conservatives, clinging to their guns and religion, and quarrelling over whether their next Presidential candidate should be Sara Palin or Joe the Plumber. Next stop: the dustbin of history--along with the Whigs and Tories.

     It couldn’t happen to a more deserving party.

Authors Bio:

Mick Youther is an American citizen, an independent voter, a veteran, a parent, a scientist, a writer, and all-around nice guy who has been roused from a comfortable apathy by the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush Administration.