The Republican Brain (32 page)

What this means is that PolitiFact's archive of fact-checks provides yet another opportunity for independent validation of my argument. If Republicans do significantly worse than Democrats when put to the test by PolitiFact, that surely tells us something.

As it turns out, the Smart Politics blog at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs analyzed PolitiFact's work during the period from January 2010 through January 2011, surveying over 500 stories that checked facts. And sure enough, it found that while the site fact checked roughly as many statements by current or former Democratic elected officials as from current or former Republican officeholders during this period (179 vs. 191), Republicans were overwhelmingly more likely to draw a “false” or “pants on fire” rating (the worst one of all). Out of 98 politician statements receiving these dismal ratings, 74 were made by Republicans—or 76 percent of them. Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann did the worst, with 8 and 7 PolitiFact slams, respectively.

In fairness, I should note that the Smart Politics blog went on to use this statistical analysis to suggest PolitiFact is biased against the right. That's typical—and typically naïve. As I showed in the last chapter, if anything PolitiFact bends over backward to find ways of bashing the left, even when PolitiFact itself must get the facts wrong in order to do so.

PolitiFact's statistics thus provide still more compelling evidence that Republicans, more than Democrats, are just
wrong.

After learning of the Smart Politics analysis of PolitiFact's work, it occurred to me that it would lend strength to my interpretation of this finding—and weaken the contrary interpretation—if it were possible to replicate the result by conducting a similar analysis of another fact-checking organization's ratings. To that end, and with invaluable and dedicated data gathering and statistical analysis from an assistant, Aviva Meyer, we analyzed the work of
The Washington Post'
s “Fact-Checker,” currently authored by Glenn Kessler and Josh Hicks, and before that by Michael Dobbs. This was relatively easy to do in an objective and quantitative manner, because the
Post
bestows “Pinocchios” for false or misleading claims, giving out one to four of them based on the egregiousness of the error. Thus, getting “four Pinocchios” from the
Post
is comparable to getting a “Pants on Fire” rating from PolitiFact.

From the inception of the
Post's
Fact-Checker column in September of 2007, up through the end of September of 2011 (when this book was due!), our analysis found that Republicans were given ratings on the Pinocchio scale 147 times, and Democrats were given ratings 116 times, for a total of 263 ratings overall. (Ratings of “liberal” or “conservative” interest groups, like
MoveOn.org
or the National Rifle Association, were about 3 percent of the total and were not included in the analysis; nor were those by “neutral” individuals or groups—about 4 percent of the total.)

Already, then, Republicans were flagged for many more misstatements by the
Post
. And indeed, totaling up the net Pinocchios given, Republicans received 361 while Democrats received just 243. This means that about 60 percent of all Pinocchios went to Republicans, and about 40 percent went to Democrats. In a sense, the left-right “reality gap” is captured right there.

One might argue, though, that this is misleading: If Republicans were rated more times overall, then of course they got more total Pinocchios. That's a fair point, but it turns out that the
average
Republican rating (2.46 Pinocchios) was also much worse than the average Democrat rating (2.09 Pinocchios). What's more, the difference between the two was highly statistically significant, meaning that it was unlikely to be the result of mere chance.

In other words, not only were Republicans rated more frequently by the
Post
, but whenever they
got
rated they tended to do worse than Democrats, and by a significant margin.

Looking a little more closely at these data, Republicans got nearly three times as many Four Pinocchio ratings as Democrats—27 versus 11. And even that is being charitable to Republicans, because our analysis could be argued to have understated their real Four Pinocchio total.

In a number of cases, the
Post
fact-checker devoted a single entry to debunking multiple false claims by Republicans like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Donald Trump, and Newt Gingrich, and then bestowed a single Four Pinocchio rating. We were careful to only count these entries once, simply because any other approach would have caused the Republican Four Pinocchio tally to skyrocket. What's more, for some reason the Fact Checker failed to
bestow
a rating after debunking one of Sarah Palin's most infamous flubs: Her claim (discussed further in chapter 11) that Paul Revere “warned the British” on his famous Midnight Ride. This presumably would have garnered Palin four Pinocchios (especially since she stood by her incorrect claim), but the item wasn't officially rated, so we did not include it in our analysis. Again, then, our analysis can only be called charitable to Republicans.

Republicans were also significantly higher than Democrats in the Three Pinocchio ratings category (33 versus 24) and the Two Pinocchio ratings category, the most frequent category used (67 to 46). But interestingly, this trend did not hold up in the One Pinocchio category, where Democrats bested Republicans by a considerable margin (35 to 20). What this suggests is that the
Post
was giving Democrats a lot of wrist-slaps for relatively minor sins, even as the more egregious falsehoods were clearly clustered at the Republican end of the distribution. Indeed, the
Post
fact-checker even acknowledged that one of President Obama's statements was such a minor infraction that it might deserve a “half-Pinocchio,” if there was such a thing.

We therefore reiterate that our interpretation of these data is, if anything, charitable to Republicans.

In conclusion, and much like PolitiFact, it appears the
Post
was trying its best to be balanced, even though Republicans falsehoods overall were considerably more egregious than Democratic ones. Yet at the end of the day, when the
Post
's experienced journalists played referee and adjudicated a large body of facts over a significant time period, Republicans fared significantly worse in their judgment.

I want to be clear: I think the work of the
Post
's fact checkers is admirable and commendable. Having read their entries, I might dispute a few, but overall it is clear that they are good journalists dedicated to truth and accuracy. There is nothing
wrong
with them finding more and worse Republican errors—especially if there
are
more and worse Republican errors. This simply means they are doing their job.

I will concede that someone could still try to use these data to argue that the
Post
and PolitiFact alike are highly biased against Republicans. That's what Republicans may do—but to my mind, the consistency across two fact-checking organizations, combined with the fact that these organizations actually seem to go out of their way to criticize Democrats and appear even-handed, points to a much more simple and obvious explanation: Republicans are just more factually wrong.

Democrats, meanwhile, certainly aren't innocent when it comes to making misleading statements, but their pants are
not
on fire.

This fact-checking analysis is pretty telling, especially when presented in combination with my analysis of all the misinformation believed by Fox News viewers.

But there are still more ways of mapping the misinformation mountain. You can also survey and ascend Mount Fib genre by genre, examining false conservative claims about science, about economics, about history, and so on.

That will be my next task. I'll tackle science in the remainder of this chapter, and economics and history in the next two. There, I'll show that while Republicans have long claimed to own the field of economics, that's no longer the case (if it ever was). And history is an arena in which religious conservatives in particular have embraced a nationalistic and religious mythology, rather than recognizing and accepting what actually happened in the U.S. past.

Let's take science first, however.

I've already shown convincingly in a prior book (2005's
The Republican War on Science
) that Republicans are overwhelmingly in conflict with modern scientific understanding, across a broad array of environmental, reproductive health, and other ideologically tinged issues. And since then, matters have gotten palpably worse, not better. While there is no point in rewriting that book here—although there are a vast number of needed updates—let me begin with two cases that, for different reasons, could be said to matter the “most.”

First, Republicans are vastly more misinformed about the scientific issue that threatens the planet most of all (climate change). If global warming continues unchecked, the consequences will be vast and dramatic, but one consequence, to my mind, rises above all the others: we will eventually cause the melting of land-based ice that is currently sitting atop Greenland and West Antarctica. In fact, there is already some reason to believe we may be drawing close to crossing the atmospheric carbon dioxide threshold that would lead to the destabilizing of Greenland.

Why worry? These two vast ice sheets contain enough water to raise the global sea level by 13 meters (or about 42 feet). If that were to someday occur, pretty much anything that human beings have built very near to the ocean would be impacted, in some case dramatically so. That includes a lot of major cities.

Who denies that global warming is real and human caused? Here the polling data are absolutely clear: Conservatives—and most overwhelmingly, conservatives who are white and male. Here are some statistics: While just 14 percent of the general public is not at all worried about global warming—and as we can see, they have a staggering amount to be worried about—39 percent of conservative white males aren't worried at all. Or slice it another way: 36 percent of adults deny scientists have reached a consensus on climate change, as opposed to 59 percent of conservative white males. Or slice it yet another way: while about 3 in 10 American adults don't believe humans are primarily causing global temperature increases, you can double it to about 6 in 10 for conservative white males.

These conservative white men, especially if they are Tea Party members, are also more inclined to think they understand the climate issue well. Not only are they vastly wrong in their beliefs, but they're confident in their wrongness.

Conservative reality denial with respect to climate change has become so severe that it is, as climate researcher Ray Bradley points out, now a “litmus test” issue in the Republican Party. We saw precisely this with Mitt Romney during the run-up to the 2012 election: Romney appeared to back down (some may say flip-flop) after making a statement that seemed to affirm his belief that global warming is real and human caused. “Bye bye nomination,” announced Rush Limbaugh—and before long, Romney seemed to have gotten back into line, later commenting that he “[didn't] know” whether global warming is mostly human caused.

Conservatives—especially religious ones—are also in denial about the single most important thing that we human beings know about ourselves: Namely, that our species evolved by natural selection and therefore shares a common ancestor with every other living thing on Earth.

You really can't understand many of the most important things about human beings—their aggression and their empathy; their tribalism and their generosity; their intelligence and their biases; their diversity and their similarities—except in light of evolution. Nor can you understand many of the cognitive and information processing phenomena explained in this book, such as the rapid-fire automaticity of our emotional responses, and the way our brains themselves show the stamp of an evolutionary process. Evolution may also help to account for the psychological and even perhaps the political differences between us. We don't know yet why all of these differences exist. But it may be the case that evolution had some hand in it, even if our political views are not an evolutionary adaptation, but merely a by-product.

So in some ways, this is the largest and most consequential reality gap of all. Many American conservatives don't even know
who or what we are.