© Associated Press/Chris Carlson/J. Scott Applewhite/Mark J. Terrill/Fox News/SalonRush Limbaugh, Ted Cruz, Donald Sterling, Sean Hannity
You knew it was true. Now research proves it! The real motivation behind Rush, Sterling and defenses of awfulnessLet's start with what I said about Limbaugh simply being a good conservative when he rushed to Sterling's defense. That's not just a liberal canard. It's not just me trying to do to Limbaugh what Limbaugh does to liberals. It's what
conservatives themselves have said repeatedly over the years. The defense of hierarchy is what conservatism is all about, as Corey Robin reminded us all with his recent book,
The Reactionary Mind.What's more, the differences between how liberals and conservatives think are reflected in a range of divergent cognitive processes, as summarized in a 2003 paper by John T. Jost and three co-authors,
Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition that brought together findings drawn from 88 study samples in 12 countries:,
"The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat," Jost and his co-authors wrote in the abstract. These are not merely American phenomena, nor is there any reason to think they're particularly modern.
While Jost's paper revealed a complicated array of different factors involved, two in particular have been shown to explain the lion's share of intergroup prejudice: right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO). John Dean's book
Conservatives Without Conscience focused on the combined workings of these two factors. While there is some overlap between the two, RWA is more predominant among followers, who would probably make up the main bulk of Limbaugh's audience, while SDO is more prominent in folks like Sterling.
SDO represents a generalized tendency to support groups' dominance, whether the groups are defined biologically (men over women, the old over the young) or culturally (race, ethnicity, religion, etc.).
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