150 years old, and I'm sure if I looked I could find even more apt ones from Plato's time and before.
Back to modern times, scientists have fairly recently discovered that conservative and liberal are genetically predetermined personality types. People are not blank slates for propagandists to write on. Talk radio definitely falls into the "environmental" factors that get to work on us after birth. We also vary within personality types; political moderates, intractable radicals, and rabid racists are not personality types but variations.
Politics are an environmental factor. Most liberals tend to adopt liberal political orientations, but not necessarily. Here in rural Georgia I've often suspected some of our supposedly conservative acquaintances of being naturally liberal but completely unaware of it -- and conservative enough by environment, and proud of it, that in 18 years I've never risked insulting, or possibly distressing, any of those by commenting on what I suspect. Intellectually aware people know who they are.
In any case, people drawn to right wing radio and its dishonest messages tend to think differently from those who are repelled by them. They see moral issues different than liberals do, less oriented to individual rights and more about maintaining stable and healthy community structures. They even tend to think in different order, reportedly running information by for emotional response before intellectual evaluation. A survival advantage when responding to a frightening rustle in tall grass, no doubt, but not in the world we inhabit these days.
Etc, etc, etc. But bottom line, ... whatever it is. Being called to lunch.
Edit history
Recommendations
0 members have recommended this reply (displayed in chronological order):
= new reply since forum marked as read