Ecstasy: A New Treatment For Psychological Trauma

Illustration of a veteran being saved from the debilitating effects of war trauma by the drug ecstasy.

Anyone who has ever taken the infamous club-drug ecstasy (MDMA) knows how the intoxicating effects of the substance can frequently lead to overwhelming feelings of “love” towards most things the user comes into contact with, which often includes things that are normally disliked and thus typically avoided. Although long-term abuse of this drug can certainly be dangerous, researchers are beginning to find that, when used appropriately, this “love drug” can also be an important medicine for helping alleviate symptoms of certain mental illnesses. Specifically, studies are beginning to find that MDMA in combination with psychotherapy can be an effective treatment for post-traumatic-stress-disorder (PTSD). It is important to note, however, that this groundbreaking work would likely be non-existent if not for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a non-profit research and educational organization which funds various projects that investigate the therapeutic applications of psychedelic drugs. The fact that their research has recently been featured on major news networks like CNN is a glowing testimony to both the medical legitimacy and social relevance of their work.

So how exactly does MDMA help treat PTSD? Well, in layman’s terms, the “loving” effect of the drug causes one to be much more emotionally open than normal. This increased access to emotions can be extremely helpful in the process of breaking through various resistances or psychological defenses, which is essentially the goal of most therapeutic interventions. The ability to break through resistances is especially important when working with PTSD, given that a major part of this malady is perpetuated by a seemingly hard-wired instinct to avoid unpleasant emotions (e.g., fear) related to the initial trauma. Ecstasy can help with this by assisting “people in confronting memories, thoughts and feelings related to the trauma without increasing either fear or avoidance in response to this confrontation. An increase in self-acceptance and increased feelings of closeness to others may also assist people with PTSD in forming a therapeutic alliance with psychotherapists.” This suggests that ecstasy has the unique potential to considerably expedite the process of normal psychotherapy. {For more info on possible biological explanations for ecstasy’s success in treating PTSD click here.}

Besides the obvious factor of the negative stigma attached to ecstasy, the FDA is in no rush to fund research on MDMA-assisted psychotherapy primarily because the pharmaceutical industry has no compelling (i.e., financial) interest in making MDMA into a prescription drug. The financial incentive is lacking because MDMA-assisted psychotherapy consists of only a few administrations of the drug “within the context of a time limited course of non-drug psychotherapy over three to four months (8).” Again, ecstasy is being shown as an effective treatment for PTSD after being administered on only a small number of occasions. In contrast, drugs that are currently accepted by the FDA for treating PTSD (e.g., Paxil) are big money-makers because they are prescribed for daily use over long periods of time, if not for life.

And so it goes with Big Pharma’s monopoly on medical treatment. Thank Yahweh for the good people at MAPS for actively challenging this retarded system.

Check out one of their new promos:

~Wolf

Conservative Professor Wants GOP Bullshit Taken More Seriously

Last week, Professor Gerard Alexander from the University of Virginia wrote the most whiney and self-pitying Op-Ed piece I’ve ever read in the Washington Post. Titled, “Why are liberals so condescending?” Alexander launches into the standard woe-is-us conservative cant about how liberals are a bunch of meanies because they don’t give conservatives their due respect, saying at one point,

This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government – and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.

Of course, conservatives never do stuff like this, right Professor Alexander?

Of course, plenty of conservatives are hardly above feeling superior. But the closest they come to portraying liberals as systematically mistaken in their worldview is when they try to identify ideological dogmatism in a narrow slice of the left (say, among Ivy League faculty members), in a particular moment (during the health-care debate, for instance) or in specific individuals (such as Obama or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom some conservatives accuse of being stealth ideologues). A few conservative voices may say that all liberals are always wrong, but these tend to be relatively marginal figures or media gadflies such as Glenn Beck.

Remember back in the Bush days when anybody who criticized the president or his idiotic war in Iraq was labeled “anti-American” or was accused of giving aid and comfort to the terrorists by Vice President Dick Cheney no less? Remember when Cheney said that a John Kerry victory in the 2004 presidential election could lead to another terrorist attack? Remember last summer when former Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and several GOP members of Congress such as Chuck Grassley claimed that Obama’s health care plan would establish “death panels” to decide the fate of the nation’s elderly? Remember when Republican congresswoman Michele Bachmann called for a House Committee on Un-American Activities redux? Remember how numerous mainstream media conservatives called (and are still calling) Obama a socialist who is seeking to destroy the country? These aren’t “marginal figures,” as Alexander claims. These are very mainstream conservatives within the Republican Party. And time and again American conservatives have shown themselves to be quite willing to steer public debate down a road that leads nowhere. That’s the GOP’s modus operandi. Calling war opponents un-American and saying health care reform proponents advocate death panels is designed to stifle debate, not spark it. How do you argue with someone who believes that the current administration wants to kill old people? How do you argue with the tea party folks who think Obama is the second coming of Hitler or Mao? Such people cannot be engaged in a rational discussion and indeed are often the target of derision from liberals. So yes, liberals can be condescending sometimes, but Alexander should take a look at what the target of that condescension is. And if anything “has impoverished American debates over the economy, society, and the functions of government,” it’s the conservatives’ absurd narrative that they, and not the “godless,” “socialist,” liberals, make up the “real America” (Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck) who are in favor “family values,” as if liberals could not possibly claim likewise.

The current flap over the Obama administration’s handling of the underwear bomber is a perfect example. He’s been treated no differently than the shoe-bomber Richard Reid was by the Bush administration. And yet, conservatives in the House, Senate, and media have been eviscerating Obama for doing exactly what his predecessor did, which these same conservatives voiced no concerned about then. It does not matter to them that the mirandized Abdulmutallab is talking to the FBI and providing them with information about his contacts in Yemen and Nigeria. All that matters is that the GOP sees an opportunity to spout the predictable platitudes about how Obama and liberals in general are weak on terrorism.

But whenever conservatives are called on their bullshit, they play the indignation card and accuse liberals of being condescending. It’s a neat rhetorical trick: warp the debate by making outlandish or hypocritical claims, and then when the opposition points out how ridiculous those statements are, accuse the opposition of being condescending. Conservatives have perfected this debate tactic, and as a result are almost always on the offensive.

The Sarah Palin phenomenon is a typical example. Liberals have subjected her to a never-ending onslaught of criticism and mockery. Why? While conservatives think it’s because liberals are mean and condescending, the fact is, Palin is so obviously unqualified and ill-prepared, that they consider it an insult that John McCain tried to force this woman on us as a viable Vice Presidential candidate. As Christopher Hitchens asked after this dubious VP selection, “What do you take me for?”

But conservatives don’t see it this way. They see liberals attacking Palin—who keeps inserting herself in places where she knows she will garner lots of national attention—and assume that it’s the liberals who have the problem. Forget the fact that Palin has never articulated what it is that she stands for. Forget the fact that Palin clearly has no ability to discuss important national problems in a substantive manner. No, the problem is with the liberals who resent the fact that John McCain picked the hottest MILF at the local high school hockey game to be his Vice Presidential running mate. How dare these liberals demand that our candidates for high office be more qualified than their next door neighbors.

I suppose Alexander and his fellow conservative whiners would chalk up this post to more “liberal condescension.” Fine. But if you’ve been following this site, my condescension comes in proportion to the ridiculousness and stupidity of the things I’m attacking. My level of respect toward an idea or person is generally correlative to the level of seriousness of that idea or person. I have no patience for, “Obama is Hitler” (teabaggers), “This health care plan will kill your grandmother,” (Palin, Grassley), “Gay marriage is a threat to family values” (any anti-gay conservative) or any other garbage that Republicans try to pass off as serious dialogue. If conservatives want liberals to stop being so condescending, they can start by forming some reality-based opinions on the pressing issues of the day.

- Max Canning

New Orleans 31, Indianapolis 17

Subliminal Messages In Political Campaigns (The Political Brain Part 2)

The art of persuasion ain't always this pretty.

Evidence clearly supports that subliminal messages can affect our feelings and behaviors despite the popular belief that such a thing is little more than hocus-pocus. Neuroscience research, for example, shows that images presented subliminally (i.e., so quickly that the person cannot report seeing it) can lead to activation of the emotional processing center of the brain, known as the amygdala. This suggests that we have “an emotion system that is constantly processing emotionally relevant information faster than we can consciously register it” (Westen, 58). Consequently, subliminal messages can serve as vehicles from which information can be transmitted to our unconscious mind, which can then influence our behavior. Most of us have come to expect, for example, that this type of manipulation is often used in product advertisements. However, if political campaigns blatantly made use of subliminal messaging that would certainly raise some serious ethical concerns. Unfortunately, ethics and politics do not often go hand and hand.

The boldest example of the apparently intentional use of subliminal messaging in a political campaign was witnessed in an ad run in 2000 by the Republican National Committee to elect George W. Bush. “The ad was ostensibly about Al Gore’s prescription drug plan for seniors, but toward the end of the ad, whose theme was ‘The Gore prescription plan: Bureaucrats decide,’ the word RATS appeared in large, bold letters for a fraction of a second while the narrator uttered the phrase, “Bureaucrats decide” (58). In response to the charge of intentional subliminal messaging, the Bush campaign chalked the message up to a possible error in ad production; they further downplayed the charges by essentially stating that such subliminal appeals do not work. Psychologists Drew Westen and Joel Weinberger (2007) were skeptical of this claim and thus decided to investigate whether or not the subliminally displayed RATS could affect perceptions of an anonymous candidate in research subjects. They found that subjects who received the RATS prime before viewing a photo of an anonymous candidate had significantly more negative perceptions (ratings) of the candidate than those who did not receive the prime. In light of this evidence, it is certainly hard to believe that the creators of this campaign ad were naïve to the subliminal message's power to manipulate the unconscious minds of voters.

The aforementioned example clearly exemplifies the use of a highly unethical political marketing strategy. Most appeals to subliminal messaging used in political campaigns, however, are not nearly as blatant as this. The subtle art of persuasion does indeed wear many hats. Generally, effective campaign ads involve communicating explicit (conscious) messages in addition to implicit (unconscious) ones. One of the best examples of the use of both types of communication was displayed in the infamous Willie Horton ad from the 1988 presidential race, which was “run by a political action committee with close ties to then-Vice President George H Bush” (Westen, 63). The ad subsequently made headlines because of the racist undertones that oozed throughout it. Check it out:


As Westen (65) points out, this ad conveyed both an explicit and implicit message; the explicit message that “Dukakis is soft on crime” and the implicit message that “Dukakis lets scary black men endanger your safety.” Conservatives would surely argue that Westen’s claim that the ad conveys implicit racism is a bunch of bologna, and they would likely further point out that such charges are endemic to the pussyfooting philosophies espoused by “bleeding-heart liberals.” Once again, however, conservatives would be wrong. Research shows that even the subliminal presentation of black faces to whites activates the amygdala, and that implicit racial appeals are more effective than explicit ones because they don’t raise people’s conscious attitude towards racism (65). That’s the funny thing about implicit racism: it’s not fully conscious. This is how, for example, a white Rush Limbaugh fan that sort of gets along with the inoffensive Negro at work can allow himself to feel justified in taking offense to the very concept of implicit racism; again, he is not consciously identified with being a racist!

The Willie Horton ad clearly demonstrates a powerful example of how white people in particular can easily be influenced by implicit racism, especially when they are made to be frightened of dangerous, mean-looking, Negro rapists. The fairly obvious racial undertones in this ad make it clear why it was not officially endorsed by Bush's campaign team. The official Bush ad aired the following day:



The symbolism and implicit fear induced in this ad was executed perfectly, playing beautifully to the emotional center of the viewer’s brain. It also appears that the timing of this ad was strategically planned; airing only one day after the Horton ad had sparked massive media attention, which included testimonies from some of Horton's victims. Again, the carefully orchestrated implicit messages that were laid out in the “Horton” and “Revolving Door” ads are what made them so effective. A similar ad campaign designed to deliver only the explicit message that Dukakis was soft on crime would not have been nearly as effective. Indeed, survey data showed that “anxiety about a possible Dukakis presidency skyrocketed” in the months following the airing of these ads (67).

For shits and giggles, let’s now analyze two recent campaign attack-ads that appear to be much more focused on communicating explicitly negative messages about the opponents, and thus are likely much less effective than the aforementioned examples. These ads are both from the recent Martha Coakley Vs. Scott Brown race for the U.S. senate. The first one is not an actual campaign ad, but instead one created by a lunatic, presumably a born-again Christian fan of former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling. The second one is an actual campaign ad from Martha Coakley’s camp.





Although the amateur ad was clearly ludicrous and made by a total ignoramus, both ads may be equally ineffective in that they only appeal to those who already favor the candidate and thus already agree with the ad's message. In other words, the most important votes to win an election i.e., the swing votes, will largely be unaffected by such ads. As I already commented on in a previous post, Martha Coakley was virtually impotent when it came to appealing to the amygdalas (emotions) of the swing voters in Massachusetts. Scott Brown was clearly more skilled in this arena, as witnessed by his more effective weaving together of an emotionally-laden narrative about his campaign, one which more effectively resonated with swing voters.

Subliminal or implicit messages are clearly important to successful political campaigns, whether they are blatantly used in secret as in George W. Bush’s 2000 attack ad, or used more subtly as witnessed in his father’s effective 1988 campaign ads. As Drew Westen makes clear in his book, it seems that the Republicans on average are more skilled at using these techniques than Democrats. An analysis of the political brain thus proves that Democrats need to approach their campaigns with more emotional intelligence.

References

Westen, Drew. The Political Brain: The Role Of Emotion In Deciding The Fate Of The Nation. Public Affairs: New York, 2007.

Weinberger, J., &Westen, D. (2007). RATS, we should have used Clinton. Manuscript under revision.

Republicans Eye Wall Street's Cash

Eric Cantor has convinced many teabaggers that he’s one of them while simultaneously soliciting GOP campaign donations from Wall Street.

Although I’m not sure how much press it will get, there was a pretty telling statement in today’s Wall Street Journal from House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R – Virginia). In an article about the Republican Party attempting to score big campaign contributions from giant financial institutions, Cantor is quoted as saying, “I sense a lot of dissatisfaction and a lot of buyer’s remorse on Wall Street,” referring to Wall Street’s decision to back primarily Democrats in the 2008 election cycle. Of course, those contributions may have had more to do with the fact that Wall Street was trying to curry some favor with the Democrats who were poised for sweeping victories, rather than a belief that Democrats would better serve their interests.

But now the momentum has shifted. Teabagging amnesiacs are loudly calling for a return to sanity in governance, by which they mean a return to Republican rule. The economy is still in rough shape and the Democrats are not looking good heading into November’s midterms. Meanwhile, the GOP is in the process of trying to co-opt the tea party movement by superficially playing the role of the everyman’s opposition to the “big government” Democrats, despite the fact that Republicans are mostly to blame for the vast increases in federal power and the national debt over the last decade. The same article notes than House Minority Leader John Boehner (R – Ohio) recently had drinks with JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon in an effort to woo him and his firm’s money to the GOP.

So what we have here is some clearly duplicitous conduct by the Republican Party leadership. One day they’re playing to the “populist” tea party folks who decry “big government” and Wall Street bailouts. The next day they’re cozying up to the same banking oligarchs that the teabaggers have it in for. Granted, the tea party people are fixated more on phantom socialism than anything else, but at least in theory they don’t want government and Wall Street fucking each other, even if they don’t know coitus when they see it.

Will the Republican Party be able to chase down campaign donations from the criminal banking syndicate in Lower Manhattan while at the same time credibly maintaining the guise of champion for the average Joe? Probably. By and large, Republicans are more adept at shaping the public political discourse than Democrats, even if they are more transparently full of shit than the Dems (who are also very full of shit). Although several congressional Republicans will face purity tests during the primaries in the form of teabagger-backed Republicans, the general elections will play out rather predictably. Here’s Noam Chomsky writing in 1996 about the 1994 midterm elections, to which the 2010 elections are already being compared:

The standard picture is that a “historic political realignment” took place in the congressional elections of 1994 that swept Newt Gingrich and his army into power in a landslide victory, a “triumph of conservatism” that reflects the continuing “drift to the right.” With their “overwhelming popular mandate,” the Gingrich army will fulfil the promises of the Contract with America. They will “get government off our backs” so that we can return to the happy days when the free market reigned and restore “family values,” ridding us of “the excesses of the welfare state” and the other residues of the failed “big government” policies of New Deal liberalism and the “Great Society.” By dismantling the “nanny state,” they will be able to “create jobs for Americans” and win security and freedom for the “middle class.” And they will take over and successfully lead the crusade to establish the American Dream of free market democracy, worldwide.

That’s the basic story. It has a familiar ring.

Does it ever. Chomsky continues,

When asked about the central components of the Contract [with America], large majorities opposed almost all, notably the central one: large cuts in social spending. Over 60 percent of the population wanted to see such spending increased at the time of the elections. Gingrich himself was highly unpopular, even more than Clinton, whose ratings are very low; and that distaste has only persisted as the program has been implemented.

As usual, this campaign season GOP candidates will step up the rhetoric against “big government” and “tax-and-spend liberals,” while avoiding substantive discussion of their own preferred economic policies for the reasons Chomsky noted above. We need only recall the attempt by Republicans to “reform” Social Security by dismantling/privatizing it in the wake of George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004. After a public uproar, the issue quickly went away. We can envision a similar backlash if Medicare is ever a target of Republican “reform” as well. While Republicans are sure to talk about wonderful sounding things like “job creation,” tax cuts,” and “getting government off our backs” (i.e., deregulation) on this year’s campaign trail, discussion of these issues will be rather cursory.

Of course, as I noted in my post about the hypocrisy of the teabaggers, they favor “big government” and “socialism” when it directly benefits them, especially if it’s in the form of Social Security and Medicare. I doubt they despise the nanny state so much as to forgo their own entitlements, even as they ridicule entitlements for others.

Barring a terrorist attack or some unforeseen scandal, the economy will be the big issue in November. However, that doesn’t mean the GOP cannot also run on their traditional bullshit issues of illegal immigration, abortion, gay marriage, and anything else that doesn’t really affect the majority of the population. In fact, it wouldn’t be an American political campaign season without this stuff playing some role in quite a few of the races.

I suspect that the Cantor remark about how disaffected Wall Street is with the Democrats will not hurt his party. Not only that, I predict that the Republican Party will successfully co-opt the tea party movement simply by telling them what they want to hear. It is to be expected that a few GOP incumbents will lose to more conservative primary challengers, but don’t expect anything earth-shattering to happen. The Republicans have been successfully manipulating their base for over a quarter of a century, and by now they have it down to a science. You’ll notice that even when conservatives are in power, they fail to deliver for the people who voted them in, always leaving them angry at the increasing acceptance of gays and abortion, for example. At the same time, once in power, Republicans strive to enact economic policies that are incredibly damaging to the middle class. And that’s how the GOP wants it. That way, they can always run on social issues and blame the sorry state of America on illegal immigrants and a perceived moral decline in the country. But if gay marriage and abortion were made forever illegal all of a sudden, a large chunk of the modern GOP’s raison d’être would subsequently disappear. So while it does Republicans well to speak out against these “immoral” practices, it does them no good to actually do something about them. That’s what scapegoats are for. The problem is, if you finally send that scapegoat out into the desert, there is nothing else on which to pile sins.

- Max

Curt Schilling Is A Giant Blowhard

Quick! Somebody sew that glove to his mouth!

As a Red Sox fan I have immense respect for Curt Schilling as a pitcher and what he did for the team between 2004 and 2007. His performance in Game 6 of the 2004 ALCS was legendary, whether that was real blood on his sock or not.

But Curt Schilling is also the biggest blowhard ever to come out of the sports world, which is saying a lot. Now retired, Schilling has a blog (which I won’t bother linking) where he pops off about everything from baseball to climate change to health care reform. He is unabashedly conservative. In 2004 Schilling campaigned for fellow born-again Christian George W. Bush. I think no further comment on that is necessary.

Schilling has written posts opposing the Democrats’ proposed health care reform legislation (as have I, but for completely different reasons). Something about costs. I’m not sure. The man isn’t worth quoting, but perhaps we should take a moment to ask, Where does Curt Schilling get off pontificating about health care reform? Excuse me, but this guy has lived most of his life in a fucking fantasyland where over the course of his career he’s been paid a grand total of at least $114 million to play baseball, which to remind you, is a game. This figure includes the $8 million he collected while he sat on his ass for the entire 2008 season and didn’t throw a single pitch. Eight million dollars for not working. Kind of like a welfare check subsidized by the Fenway fans. You’re welcome, Curt, you great conservative you.

In all seriousness, do you think Curt Schilling ever had to worry about whether his insurance company/team would shell out the money necessary for any surgeries he needed? Of course not. I doubt he even had a co-pay. Schilling, like every other ballplayer, was an investment that needed to be protected. His employers took care of him using money from the working stiff fans who kept showing up at the ballpark forking over their hard earned dollars to watch men play a kid’s game. But in the real, non-fantasy world, people are viewed as expendable by employers and health insurers, and so they have to worry about things—very important things—like whether their bloodsucking HMOs are going to cover the cost of the treatments they need, whether they’re going to get modest raises at work this year, or whether they’ll still even have a job in a month. In the real world, “free agents” don’t have millions of dollars in accumulated salary to fall back on until they sign with another organization.

This is serious stuff. Over 30 million Americans don’t have health insurance. Tens of millions more are getting crushed by annual premium hikes in excess of 10%. In 2009 one in eight Americans used food stamps. People are still getting their homes foreclosed on, and too many people are still out of work.

But it’s all right because millionaire Curt Schilling is posting away on his blog telling us how we can get things back on track. And even though he supported George W. Bush who turned a surplus into a $5 trillion dollar deficit through corporate welfare and military wet dreams with the help of a Republican-controlled Congress, Schilling assures us that what we need is more Republicans. That’s why he endorsed Scott Brown for Senate, a man who said he’ll be “an independent voice” for Massachusetts. Color me skeptical, but I’ve seen this routine before.

The sad thing is that it didn’t have to be this way. Schilling had Major League stints in Baltimore, Houston, Philadelphia, and Arizona before ending up in Boston. He could’ve chosen to live in any one of those places after retirement, but he decided to stay here and grace the region with his pompous presence. Lucky us.


- Max

The Irrationality Of Rational Politics (The Political Brain Part 1)

Neuroscience and psychology research prove that voters do not appeal to reason and logic when choosing a candidate. Republicans fail to be surprised.

Scott Brown’s recent victory over Martha Coakley for the U.S. senate seat in Massachusetts is reminiscent of George W Bush’s two “victories” over equally impotent Democrats; both cases clearly demonstrate that voters do not appeal to logic and reason when selecting a candidate. In his book The Political Brain, renowned psychologist Drew Westen cites evidence from the fields of psychology and neuroscience indicating that “what passes for reasoning in politics is more often rationalization, motivated by efforts to ‘reason’ to emotionally satisfying conclusions” (xi). In other words, people usually rely on their emotional (gut) feeling about a candidate rather than actually giving a shit about what the person is going to do in office. This is how our brain works in relation to most things in our world. We like things based on our gut feelings about them, which are largely derived from the implicit (unconscious) activation of various bundles of thoughts and images, known as associative networks (3). The ability to strategically play to these associative networks is crucial to any successful political campaign. Unfortunately, recent history shows that the GOP is much more skilled at this game than the Democrats.

Whether they realize it or not, Republicans seem to have a more accurate understanding of how the brain actually works. They seem to have figured out intuitively what “the philosopher David Hume recognized three centuries ago: that reason is a slave to emotion.” Democrats, on the other hand, display an “irrational emotional commitment to rationality—one that renders them, ironically, impervious to both scientific evidence on how the political mind and brain work and to an accurate diagnosis of why their campaigns repeatedly fail” (15). This almost exclusive reliance on rationality leads Democrats to focus their campaign strategies on what actually appear to be quite insignificant things like “facts, figures, policy statements, costs and benefits, and appeals to intellect and expertise.” It is unfortunate that appeals to reason and intellect are insufficient to move voters, but this reality must be accepted by Democrats if they hope to win elections this fall. They should also familiarize themselves with the strategies Westen outlines in his book that describe how candidates can speak more to the emotional rather than the logical brain of voters.

Dr. Westen’s (among loads of other) research clearly demonstrates the overwhelming power of implicit associative networks. For example, in focus groups, the vast majority of people support universal health care plans, but only when the term itself is not explicitly referred to. When the exact same plan is then revealed to fall under the universal health umbrella, almost nobody supports it. Westen explains how this is due to the successful branding by the GOP of the term universal health care itself. For most Americans, simply hearing that term alone primes the implicit negative associations of “big and personal clinics, socialized medicine, and the idea of being separated from your doctor.” Westen advocates that Democrats do away with this term altogether in their public discourse for this very reason.

Another example of where Republicans have been extremely successful at employing negative branding strategies is in the association of Democrats with liberal elites, or ivory tower intellectuals that cannot possibly be in tune with mainstream America. So how exactly can Democrats combat this already successful branding of them by the GOP? Well, the most important thing a candidate can do is win over the (emotional) hearts and minds of the people. This is done most effectively when they are able to communicate a sense of passion through weaving together a coherent and emotion-laden narrative that plays on specific positive networks of association and/or directly combats negative associations.

The associative network that leads people to perceive Democrats as weak on national defense is yet another glaring example of a successful brand-job by the GOP, an association that Obama consistently concerns himself with trying to refute. Unfortunately, as it stands now, more or less maintaining the status-quo with national defense seems the only way that Obama and other Democrats feel they can quell this nasty association of them with big blubbering vaginas. If Democratic strategists paid more attention to Westen’s work, however, candidates might begin to counter this type of branding that all too often contributes to them losing elections.

In the following clip, Dr. Westen gives an example of what Democrats should have been saying all along in response to the claim that they do not support the troops (by favoring withdrawal). His example demonstrates how the Democrats should be stealing from the GOP playbook in order to win over the hearts and minds of the public by using passionate speech which appeals to the emotional rather than reasoning faculties of the brain.



References

Westen, Drew. The Political Brain: The Role Of Emotion In Deciding The Fate Of The Nation. Public Affairs: New York, 2007.

~Wolf

The Hypocrisy Of The Teabaggers

Obama a black Nazi? In Tea Party Land, anything is possible.

As the enlightened followers of this site already know, the teabaggers are an extremely hypocritical group of people who are “fed up” with the government. Although they were nowhere to be found while George W. Bush was turning a surplus into record deficits, all the while shitting on the U.S. Constitution, they took to the streets less than two months after Barack Obama’s inauguration. Today, when a teabagger complained to Matt Taibbi in the comments section of his blog that the latter was not giving the movement its due respect, Taibbi responded with guns blazing:

What happened at the END of the Bush administration? What about before that, I wonder?

That’s why the Teabag movement has no credibility — none, zero. Bush, having inherited a budget surplus, added $5 trillion to the national debt, not only with his two idiotic wars but with massive giveaways to his campaign donors like the Prescription Drug Benefit Bill, which in spirit and in execution was basically no different from Obama’s health care plan.

Bush was a rampant spender and the only reason the Teabagger crowd didn’t perceive him as such until the end was because you always saw Tom Delay pushing for “cuts” in things like food stamps and heating oil whenever they needed to find money to pay for this or that asinine pork program.

I remember sitting in congress and watching in the months after Katrina and listening to Republican congressmen one after another patting themselves on the back for making the “tough” decision to pass the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, which sliced $70 billion in food stamps, college tuition aid and Medicaid.

But of course this wasn’t a net cut overall — they passed it in order to pay for a tax cut that primarily impacted top-bracket taxpayers, a tax cut that was pushed through despite the fact that the federal government was going to take a huge bath on Katrina emergency relief and unexpectedly high Iraq expenditures.

So the entire maneuver was deficit-neutral at best, and in reality added to the deficit, because all the “cuts” did was offset a blatant giveaway in the middle of a gigantic budget disaster.

But the Teabag crowd was happy because what they saw was a cut for “entitlements” — in other words, you cut $10 billion in food stamps for Mexicans, no one cares if you add $20 billion in drug subsidies and corporate tax breaks and outmoded weapons programs and the supremely idiotic occupation of Iraq, where private companies were getting paid thousands of dollars a minute to drive phantom truckloads of gas across the desert (what Halliburton called “delivering sailboat fuel”).

In the course of covering two presidential campaigns I never once heard any of you people talking about Bush’s spending. It was always liberals this, liberals that, gay marriage, welfare and socialism, and cheering whenever someone like Ann Coulter said something daring and witty, like how “compassionate conservative” carries the same connotations as “articulate black.”

And when people like Jeremy Scahill did a pretty excellent job proving that the Bush administration was practically setting fire to billions of taxpayer dollars in Iraq, you folks didn’t want to hear about it back then. All you wanted to do was cuddle up in your idiotic fantasies about how people like me were socialist traitors plotting to turn the state over to Hamas and single Dominican moms.

So forgive me if I feel like laughing whenever you complain about how you’re not taken seriously. If over the last eight years you’d spent a little more time reading and a little less time impugning the patriotism of honest Americas like me, I might be inclined to listen to you now. But your basic problem is that you only hear what you want to hear and don’t even consider learning about anything else, and all you want to hear about is how Those People are to blame for your problems.

Last time I was in DC, there was a teabagger rally on the mall and not one of the dozens of you people I interviewed even cared that there were House hearings on financial regulatory reform going on. You all had plenty of things to say about how Obama was going to steal the next election with an immigration amnesty, but not one of you even knew what a derivative is or what the proposed new laws governing them were.

And give me a break about how much it hurts your feelings when I use the word “teabagger.” You love it when slick overeducated northerners like me call you names, because it validates your amazingly overdeveloped sense of victimhood/political martyrdom, which you love to wallow in above all things. You think we don’t listen to Rush and Hannity and hear you calling in whining all day long about how you’re not being taken seriously?

From Taibblog

Ouch.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we should talk about the teabaggers. On one hand, like all non-wealthy Americans, these are people who have gotten clobbered financially by thirty years of Reaganomics and neoliberalism, and so perhaps some sympathy is warranted. Noam Chomsky, for one, identified the tea partiers as people with “real grievances” who are getting crazy answers from the right wing media as to the cause of their problems. Chomsky says that it is incumbent upon the Left to provide better—i.e., reality-based—answers to them. That is all well and good; but it is a sad fact that no matter how coherent and truthful our answers may be, many—probably most—of the teabaggers are going to continue to believe that the biggest problems facing America today are illegal immigrants, gays, unions, community organizing groups such as ACORN (which commits the reprehensible crime of giving a voice to the voiceless poor), and government spending on “entitlements.” But as Taibbi pointed out, the only entitlement programs that they ever attack are ones that help others: Medicaid, food stamps, etc. You won’t hear too many middle-aged teabaggers decrying Medicare or Social Security for the plain fact that they fully expect to reap all the benefits of those entitlement programs. And cutting the military budget is out of the question for them because they favor a “strong national defense,” which is a euphemism for unchallenged U.S. hegemony in the international arena. Also out of the question for the teabaggers is eliminating pharmaceutical and agribusiness subsidies because most of them don’t know they exist.

Judging by the coverage of the tea party rallies, it seems to be that a good chunk of the teabaggers are baby boomers, who, despite the constant trashing of younger Americans in the media, collectively make up the most selfish generation in American history. As a result of the hard work and sacrifice of their parents who persevered through the Great Depression and World War II, the boomers had exponentially better lives than their parents. As George Carlin said of the boomers, “They had a free ride, and they took it all.” Their philosophy was, and still can be, summed up thus: “Gimme it, it’s mine! Gimme that, it’s mine!”

A generalization? Obviously. But perhaps there is more than a kernel of truth in this. I hear a lot of teabaggers bemoaning government spending and deficits, but what I’m not hearing are any offers to forgo their own entitlements. They rail against socialism, but fully expect to get their Social Security checks and Medicare when they turn sixty-five. But for the teabaggers, neither Social Security nor Medicare seems to constitute “socialism,” which they love to scream about and condemn. No, “socialism” describes entitlement programs for other people. This way, socialism can continue being a dirty word. After all, no red-blooded American could possibly be in favor of, or benefit from, socialism, so those entitlement programs don’t count. But something like Medicaid, which far fewer Americans have than Medicare, is socialism because it benefits poor people and minorities, and not teabaggers. Are you starting to see how this works?

I don’t know what will happen in the November midterm elections, but suffice it to say the Democrats are in rough shape. While there was no way they or anyone else could’ve turned the economy around by now, they haven’t exactly given the public a reason to reelect them. When Obama took office and Americans were calling for the heads of the Wall Street titans partly responsible for sending the economy into a terminal nosedive, the president sat on his hands, did nothing, and then went to Lower Manhattan last summer to politely ask that Wall Street reform itself. This sorry episode shows just how beholden even the Democratic Party—the supposed party of the working class—is to the business interests of the country, particularly the financial services sector.

Having said that, I find it incredibly disturbing that more Americans are starting to believe that the answer to what ails the country is to put the Republicans back in power. One would think that the havoc wrought by the GOP on this country in both domestic and foreign affairs during the last decade would have left an indelible impression on the American mind. Apparently not. The teabaggers and their sympathizers do not seem to remember anything that occurred before January 20th, 2009.

This just goes to show what horrible choices Americans are faced with at the ballot box. It has been said that the backlash against the Democrats is actually part of a wider anti-incumbency sentiment. And maybe there’s some truth to that. But while I find it almost impossible to make a good case for keeping the Democrats in power, I find totally impossible to make any case for bringing back the Republicans.

- Max Canning