There is something deeply damaged in these people...
Paul Ryan is the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. By his own account, in college he used to hang out with his friends and drink beer while sharing his dreams of cutting Medicaid. When Ryan was 15 years old, his father died from a heart attack affected by alcoholism. Ryan and his family then received his father’s Social Security survivor’s benefits. Ryan used that money to attend college. This was not the only money that Paul Ryan received from the federal government. His family built its wealth from receiving government contracts.
Like his idol Ayn Rand (who argued against the very idea of government and the commons yet received Social Security and Medicare), Paul Ryan has combined meanness, cruelty and callousness toward the weak and the vulnerable with gross and unapologetic hypocrisy.
Republicans like Ryan — along with the millionaires and billionaires who comprise Donald Trump’s Cabinet and inner circle — literally want to take food, shelter and health care away from poor people like Christa Patton. Today’s Republicans view these Americans as useless eaters to be disposed of by means both passive and active.
It is normal to feel aghast at and disgusted by the Republican Party’s war on the poor. The more challenging and perhaps even more disturbing task is to ask why today’s conservatives feel such antipathy, disregard and hostility toward poor and other vulnerable Americans. Certainly greed and a slavish devotion to a revanchist right-wing ideology are part of the answer. But they may not be sufficient
Conservatives are more likely to exhibit social dominance and bullying behavior. This is a function of their authoritarian tendencies. The election of Donald Trump exemplifies this phenomenon.
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Social psychologists have shown that, in effect, poor people become invisible to the rich and upper classes.
The psychological dynamic known as “diffusion of responsibility,” whereby people tend to ignore those in crisis — especially if they’re perceived as being of a different social group, race, ethnicity or class — also encourages a lack of empathy and concern. It undercuts policies meant to offer direct assistance to vulnerable and marginalized individuals and communities. A perverse corollary to the “diffusion of responsibility” can also be used to legitimize punitive policies that target specific individuals and groups.
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The brain structures of conservatives and liberals are quite different. Conservatives are capable of being empathetic. Conservatives, however, focus those feelings on members of their in-group such as immediate family and community. Liberals have a different biological inclination: They are able to feel empathy for people and groups who are not part of their close social circle. What can be done?
The bad news is that conservatives’ brains cannot be modified to make them more empathetic and sympathetic toward their fellow human beings. Nor is the harmful messaging and narratives from the right-wing media about poor folks — and “the other” more generally — likely to change in the foreseeable future.