Why Ebola triggers massive right-wing hysteria

[underpants]

http://www.salon.com/2014/10/09/why_ebola_triggers_massive_right_wing_hysteria_partner/

Researcher Jonathan Haidt is the architect of the “moral foundations” theory that suggests that political inclinations, at least in modern times, are rooted in five different foundations: harm, fairness, ingroup, authority, and purity. Liberals and conservatives weigh these five considerations very differently. For instance, liberals are more likely than conservatives to factor in whether an action causes harm when deciding if it’s wrong or not. Liberals also worry more about fairness and have more regard for people that are outside of their “group” than conservatives. Conservatives, on the other hand, put far more trust in authority. Conservatives are also far more obsessed with “purity” and far more likely to get hung up on the idea that the body “is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants,” as Haidt explains.

You can see these differences play out with the response to ebola. For liberals, the proper response to ebola patients is to reduce harm by caring for them and to treat the people who got it fairly, by understanding that they didn’t do anything wrong to get it.

But ebola touches, for conservatives, two big, red buttons. First, it’s a disease, so of course it’s going to set off the fears of contamination that Haidt demonstrates plague conservatives far more than liberals. Second of all, conservatives associate ebola with people who are different from them—from different countries, often of different races—and they have little regard for people in “out groups”, which is Haidt’s term for people who are different. And because conservatives are less worried about harming others or being fair, it becomes easy for them to demonize people with ebola, demand that they be left to die without care, and simply kept from “contaminating” the rest of us.

You see this tension with many other issues. Abortion? Conservatives are grossed out by women who gave up their “purity” by having sex, but liberals are more worried about the harm done women who lose abortion rights. Gay rights? Conservatives see gays as impure and different, but liberals are worried about treating them fairly. Ferguson protests and the Mike Brown shooting? Conservatives love authority and support the police, especially against black protesters that are seen as an “out” group. Liberals worry about the harm done to Brown and the protesters and are angry about the unfairness of a policeman shooting an unarmed man or attacking unarmed protesters. Indeed, the ebola panic quite resembles the way many conservatives reacted in the early days of AIDS, demonizing sufferers as disgusting people who should be isolated and left to die.

Once you know these patterns, the conservative reaction to ebola—to panic, to treat the people who have it like pariahs, to demand that we shut off all contact with outsiders, and to even reject the idea of caring for the afflicted—was entirely predictable. Even if they didn’t have cynical political motivations, which many clearly do, their worldview makes it nearly impossible for them to react with compassion instead of fear.

[orpupilofnature57]

1. Your talking about xenophobia, that secret hand signals, exclusive clubs, are what they're about .

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

2. Everything triggers right-wing hysteria.

It's a fear-based ideology, and the fear is greatly aggravated by anything associated with non-white foreigners.

[Louisiana1976]

3. Exactly. You can see it in their fearmongering.

[Cartoonist]

4. Double whammy

I am still disgusted at the way they said AIDS is God's punishment to gays. Now they're in real trouble, Ebola is bisexual.

[bvf]

6. Good point

But the "AIDS is god's punishment to gays" thing began to lose its lustre for them around the time it started affecting heterosexuals, I think. I could be wrong.

Nonetheless, it's gratifying to imagine so many RW heads exploding. Hopefully they'll avoid crowds and stay away from the polls come November 5th!

[Fred Sanders]

5. Fear is at the base of conservative Christianity, nothing new there.

[redruddyred]

7. what if...

I think ebola should be treated *and* contained.

I don't watch faux snooze so I can't comment on the right wing position myself, but I have an issue with equating "let's not let ebola become a worldwide epidemic" with "I don't care about black people".

that said, despite the experts' opinion, I really am worried, and I've good reason to be. we live in a country where access to affordable health care is so poor that people don't visit the doc until they're really, truly ill. these experts are highly educated people making a decent salary who likely don't have a clue how the other half lives. case in point: my dr was shocked that I'd been exposed to a serious communicable illness here in the US.

of course part of the solution is preventing poverty and promoting accessible medical care and sanitary living conditions around the globe.

[orpupilofnature57]

8. +1000 !!!!

And medical experts should be Chastised for Lack of communication skills as it was instrumental in the failure to Contain .

[1StrongBlackMan]

9. Posted to for later; but what I read was very interesting.