When fear and disgust take the driver's seat

I just read an article that cites a few scientific studies showing that conservatives tend to have a more pronounced startle response and gag response than liberals. The implication drawn from the study was that conservatives are more driven by fear and disgust than liberals are, and therefore more prone to feel those things when encountering something unfamiliar - whether it's food they're not familiar with (they preferred meat and potatoes over vindaloo), ideas they're not familiar with, cultures they're not familiar with, sexual identities they're not familiar with, religious identities they're not familiar with... all of those things are more likely to trigger responses of fear and disgust in conservatives than in liberals.

And that makes a lot of intuitive sense. It explains why the average conservative genuinely feels that "a taco truck on every corner" would be a dystopia - rather than the most awesome thing imaginable, which is how the average liberal envisions such a world. It explains why most conservatives not only think LGBTQ people are gross, but also seek out religions that tell them "You're right to feel disgust towards them, and the god who made everything feels exactly the same about them" - whereas most liberals either seek out religions that tell them their god loves LBGTQ people as they are, or abandon religion entirely. It explains why the average conservative went for the authoritarian far-right Trump who promised to protect them from all the imaginary threats that haunt their nightmares, rather than for the moderate-right Hillary who promised to protect LGBTQ people and immigrants from, well, conservatives.

It's just... so frustrating that people driven by fear and disgust have such a disproportionate amount of power, and that their response to those emotions ALWAYS is to act as an anchor holding back the rest of us who want to make a better world for everyone - including them! We could already have had a world where everyone's rights are respected, everyone has access to basic necessities and opportunity to improve their lot beyond the basics, climate change is getting better instead of worse, etc... if not for half the population acting as an albatross round our necks that keeps dragging us down. They're so convinced that anything new is an existential threat to society and therefore must be attacked or avoided at all costs, that they don't realize they have become the existential threat to society (or at least voted it into power).

And their religion is both a symptom and a cause. Their religion requires them to believe that all people, except the elect few who believe exactly what they do, are evil and dangerous and would rape or murder them given half a chance. Their religion requires them to believe that all people are tainted by a vile sin nature so horrible that it cannot be allowed to exist in the presence of the holy and must be consigned to everlasting fire... and that LGBTQ people are a prime example of this vileness. Their religion requires them to believe that an authoritarian father figure is the only one who can keep them safe in this life and the next, so they always look to authoritarian father figures for safety. So maybe they get these attitudes from their religion, but also they seek out religions that reinforce these attitudes. After all, plenty of other flavors of religion - and plenty of other flavors of Christianity, which are arguably far more consistent with the actual teachings of Jesus - would allow them to see the world differently. But they not only avoid those religious beliefs and communities, but actually see them as demonic perversions of the truth, and the most dangerous enemies of all. 

Worst of all, they've gotten so bad that they're starting to make us more like them. They've gotten so over the top in their drive to make the world an objectively worse and more dangerous place in every way - their determination to keep spreading the pandemic and letting it mutate into forms that the vaccine won't stop instead of getting the fucking shot like adults to minimize the risk; their determination to give their imagined "small government" the authority to say who can and cannot get married or use a public restroom; their determination to stop all efforts to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels; their determination that no regulations at all should exist to prevent dangerous people (at least, dangerous conservative white people) from accessing weapons of mass murder; their determination to waste billions of our tax dollars on stopping imaginary threats like "immigrant caravans" rather than the very real threat of domestic Christian white nationalism - all of that has made those of us who were originally less prone to fear and disgust, now feel fear and disgust towards them.

I don't know how we fix that, or if we can. Any effort to get them to see that they're being the bully rather than the victim just makes them feel more aggrieved and imagine even more that they're the victim. Any effort to compromise or collaborate with them just drags the goalposts further and further in the wrong direction; any effort to compete with them just ramps up their fear and disgust even more.