Using Child Psychology to Understand Republicans
What is it like to be a Republican?
Everyday, we find ourselves dealing with Republicans. They are our coworkers; they are our family members. Our Facebook feeds abound with ultra-right wing slogans posted by aunties, uncles, and hard-bitten high school acquaintances, Republicans all. For some of us, Republicanism hits dangerously close to home, as it has come to afflict a spouse, parent, or voting-age child.
Inevitably, we find ourselves asking, why do Republicans think and act the way they do? It turns out that developmental psychology, particularly the research of Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget, can help us trace the smooth contours of the Republican mind.
Piaget’s Theory
Piaget proposed that there are four stages to human cognitive development. The first stage, the sensorimotor, lasts from infancy until the first use of language. Herein, a person learns that they are separate from their environment, and that objects still exist when out of sight.
The second stage is called the pre-operational, and it’s worth paying close attention to for our purposes. Here, a child starts to figure out how the world around them works. Children in this stage are beginning to use reason, albeit with flaws. One major flaw is transductive reasoning, where a child construes causal relationships between unrelated things. For instance, a child might see rain falling just after hearing a truck backfire, and then conclude that rain falls because trucks backfire. This stage lasts until age seven, when a healthy human leaves these kinds of errors behind.
The child can then move into the concrete operational stage, where they engage in problem-solving through trial and error and also by putting opinions to the test. Children at this phase realize they are not the center of the universe and will consider other people’s perspectives. By age eleven, a functionally developed child enters the formal operational stage, in which they begin to encounter abstract concepts and deal with hypothetical “what-if” problems. Able-minded children can now discern outcomes and consequences of their actions, as they are poised to become functional adults capable of contributing to society.
Republican Pre-Ops
Even though the voting age is 18, many Republicans still partake in transductive reasoning. Take, for instance, the hypothetical case of a male Trump supporter who experiences unemployment due to an unwillingness to look for work outside the non-renewable energy sector. As he storms off his job site, he hears Spanish being spoken nearby, and so he concludes that Mexican immigrants took his job. This same Republican might feel a general anger towards pedophiles (as most of us do) while also feeling specific anger towards Democrats for, say, being too soft on immigration. Hence, it follows transductively that all Democrats are pedophiles. Transductive reasoning serves as the basis for many a Republican’s core political beliefs.
In the process of worrying about immigration, climate change, abortion, transgender rights, and the right to bear arms, along with a host of other right-wing hang-ups, the Republican can only think of how said issue personally relates to him or her. Immigrants will steal my job. Abortion and transgender people make me feel uncomfortable. I deserve to have an AR-15 no matter how many other people’s kids get shot by them. COVID-19 cannot exist because no one I know got it. It’s unseasonably cool where I am today, so climate change is made up by the left. Me and my friends voted for Donald Trump, so he could not have possibly lost the 2020 election. The Republican, then, remains at the center of the universe, and any perspective based on experiences other than their own is unfathomable. Republicans have not yet made the leap to the concrete-operational stage, in which they would realize that they live in a society rather than a solipsism.
Similarly, a Republican has not made the crucial concrete-operational adaptation of testing the opinions they hold. While they may be of the opinion that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump based on a strong emotional reaction, they have ignored the multiple credible sources that report no evidence of vote tampering. Rather, they have chosen to double down on their disproven opinions, moving to even more outlandish conspiracy theories and creating wildly incoherent worldviews for themselves as a result.
These resultant, psychotic viewpoints are interesting, as they actually betray trace amounts of formal-operational skills. That is, the Republicans do make stunted attempts to deal in “what-if” problems and hypotheticals. Unfortunately, through the power of social media, hypothetical scenarios are shared as outright fact, and mistruths spread like metaphorical wildfire. As such, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s hypothesis that it is not climate change but rather Jewish space lasers that cause actual wildfires comes to be taken as undeniable fact. And even as their deranged worldviews and inability to accept change of any kind erode personal relationships and perpetuate long-term, large-scale strain on society and the planet, the Republican cannot see the complicity of their decision-making in their own misery.
Developmentally speaking, then, many Republicans have not moved past age seven, having become mired in the pre-operational stage. They are, in a sense, voting-age children. Intriguingly, Donald Trump has famously bragged that his personality became solidified at age seven, and that he hasn’t changed since. This suggests that he too is pre-operational in mind — truly the Republican writ large. It’s no surprise, then, that Republicans have made a leader out of this person experiencing developmental delays to which they can relate.
Concluding Thoughts
To vote Republican, then, bespeaks a profound developmental deficiency. Accordingly, we should treat Republicanism like a cognitive or neurodevelopmental disorder akin to Asperger Syndrome or ADHD. This malady of mentation is particularly evident in the party’s most extreme sectors, such as the Trump supporters and Q-Anon believers. These people truly suffer in their day to day lives on account of their beliefs, and so we must afford them at least a modicum of pity.
And, in fairness, we must also appreciate the fact that not all Republicans are stricken to the same degree by their illness. Some Republicans who are chiefly concerned with fiscal conservatism rather than, say, restricting transgender bathroom usage, do indeed live productive, functional adult lives. In fact, more than a few Republicans have moved onto the concrete-operational stage, and some have even reached formal operational. Like autism, Republicanism manifests on a spectrum.
So far, we’ve used the word “Republican” rather liberally. However, many people have yet to understand that Republicanism is a complex condition, and so referring to any given sufferer as “a Republican” may very well be impolitic. After all, the label “Republican” comes with a host of negative stereotypes and assumptions (e.g. that they are equally prejudiced against all non-white people, or capable of cold-blooded murder with a firearm at any provocation). Moreover, calling a family member a Republican to their face may give them the urge to double down, provoking them to make the label an ineradicable aspect of their character (if it isn’t already).
Thus, in the spirit of “people-first language”, which puts a person before their diagnosis, it is best that we refer to Republican voters as “people experiencing Republicanism.” By doing so, we are describing the personal-cum-political turmoil an individual is going through rather than defining them by it. If nothing else, this gives us hope that people presently experiencing Republicanism can one day move past their political and cognitive defects and become capable of voting for parties and politicians who put adult reasoning and children’s well-being ahead of imaginative conspiracy theories and AR-15 ownership.
Read more of Gosham’s insights into Republicanism here:
