The political brain: Why stories trump logic

Debbie Jacob

POLITICS IS tricky, and the political brain is complex. If we hadn't understood this before, we certainly should have after the debate between former president Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, when the numbers didn't move significantly in favour of either candidate, contrary to what many people had expected.

Choosing who to vote for usually has little to do with facts or logic, and it’s harder for a candidate to lose supporters than you think. Not even Trump’s claim that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio could sway a significant number of voters to switch allegiance.

If this shocks you, then you need to read The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation by Drew Westen. The author says his book is for “readers interested in how the mind works, how the brain works, and what this means for why candidates win and lose elections.”

His intended audience are readers interested in politics, psychology, leadership, neuroscience, marketing and law.

Since the 18th century, philosophers, cognitive scientists, economists and even political scientists felt that the “dispassionate mind” that reasons and weighs facts makes political decisions. But that is not true. Westen uses US elections to show why Republicans like Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, George W Bush and Donald Trump won elections for the Republicans and how Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama broke the Republicans winning streaks.

Westen determined that only about 20 per cent of eligible voters determine an election. These independent voters analyse the facts. The other 80 per cent are almost evenly divided and committed to the Democratic or Republican Party. Little or nothing that either candidate says or does will change their minds.

If a voter buys the narrative of the person representing their political party – immigrants are causing crime in the US (Trump) or Trump wants to reverse civil rights and women’s rights (Harris), the stories and mental pictures that result from those themes are nearly impossible to dislodge.

“The brain registers the conflict between data and desire and begins to search for ways to turn off the spigot of unpleasant emotion,” says Westen. In other words, voters refuse to notice any conflict between their candidate’s words and deeds. They eliminate the distress that comes from contradiction.

Westen says when the Republicans were beating solid Democratic candidates in the past, the difference was that Republicans sold voters stories. Democrats tried to sell them facts.

So let’s take Trump’s Haitians eating pets narrative and apply Westen’s reasoning to it. He says, “If you think the failure to tell a coherent story, or to illustrate your words with evocative images, is just the ‘window dressing’ of a campaign and makes little difference in the success or failure of a candidacy, you’re missing something very important about the political brain.”

And that is that “political persuasion is about networks and narratives.”

Forget debunking Trump’s story of pet-eating Haitians. Don’t expect logic from him. His narrative hit home with those Americans who resent the “browning” of America – the loss of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) majority; the loss of jobs to immigrants, and he tied the majority of crime (wrongfully so) to illegal immigrants. He told people it’s even worse than they think.

It’s a horror story tailor-made for politics, a visual narrative that doesn’t need to be true to be successful for the political mind. Westen says political appeal comes from emotional structure – not logical structure.

“We are not moved by leaders with whom we do not feel an emotional resonance.”

The most effective political moments, he argues, “combine emotion and cognition.” If you can hit both and create an indelible visual image in doing so, you’ve captured a voter. But remember, in politics “when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins…Republicans have…a near monopoly in the marketplace of emotions.”

Democrats express outrage and horror over Trump’s pet-eating narrative. They rely on logic and call Trump incoherent or crazy. But do you find Republicans expressing the same outrage as Democrats?

Don’t doubt that Trump laid a trap with that narrative. He threw it out there, got many people to believe it and got extra mileage from those who ridiculed him and repeated it.

This may be the most emotionally-charged election the US has ever had. The shared theme for both parties is fear. Which weighs more heavily? The fear of losing their culture (Republicans) or the fear of losing rights (Democrats)? The only question is who will have the election-winning narrative?