And right there in the article is where you can put your brain on a shelf, since you won't be needing it anymore.Though the Science study's authors cautioned against an overly broad interpretation of their findings, the results suggest that fear leads to political conservatism.
I'll never forget the school lunch debate of the mid 1990's. Republicans wanted to block grant the school lunch program (probably a bad idea, but that is beside the point, as the merits and demerits of that were hardly discussed openly), and Democrats yelped that the Republicans wanted to take food out of the mouths of children. Pretty sure Biden was among them. Then there was Gore's tactic in Florida in 2000 -- Bush will take away your social security. Here again, there was something to debate. Bush's plan was eventually presented to Congress in his second term and found little support from either party, but attacking the proposal logically was too high brow for Gore. No, the method chosen by the Democrat was to bypass the debate and simply try to scare Democratically leaning retirees, which he most certainly did. Both tactics were successful. In the first case, Republicans dropped the proposal to block grant the school lunch program, and in the second, Gore surged in the polls in Florida, almost to the the point of winning the state. In fact, are Democrats not selling fear of Republicans? I think so.
