Senate confirmation hearings for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. began yesterday. The controversy surrounding Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services has only intensified. This week, a new letter from his cousin, Caroline Kennedy, criticized his anti-vaccine statements and called him a “predator.”
Another common reaction to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is just … bafflement. Back in August, one political writer remarked: “I can’t get over how wrong he is on everything. Unique combination of brain dead hippie, rightoid, and airhead celebrity all in one.” (This was after Kennedy came out against prescribing the drug Ozempic to treat obesity.)
Another writer, Derek Thompson of the Atlantic, said this about the people who were endorsing Kennedy’s views, “Their only stable principle is: I don’t like liberal-coded elite top-down authority, and I trust bottom-up, intuitive, common sense folks who also hate that top-down authority.”
So, what is going on here? How can RFK be a hippie and a rightoid at the same time?
This one book might explain RFK
To answer these questions, you should read Enchanted America, written by political scientists Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood and published in 2018. This book looks even more prescient today.
Here’s their argument, in a nutshell. Usually when we think about what predicts people’s political beliefs, we focus on demography (age, gender, race, etc.) or on ideology (liberal vs. conservative).
But there’s something else at work: whether people tend to be “rationalists” or “intuitionists.” (Thompson’s use of the word “intuitive” was right on the money.)
Rationalists focus on facts, science, and reason. Intuitionists, by contrast, use their internal feelings to guide how they perceive reality. This can lead them to superstitions, magical beliefs, myths, mystics, charismatics, faith healers, and so on. This is what makes them “enchanted.”
For example, Wood and Porter note that intuitionists reject “the advice of medical experts” but also endorse “the sanctity of natural foods.” Sound like any scion of a famous American political family that you may have heard of?
In general, this is why you can find people, like Kennedy, who have some garden-variety liberal beliefs – he is an environmentalist, for instance – but also think you should not vaccinate your children. Ideology alone can’t explain that combination of views. Wood and Porter argue that intuitionism can.
How to measure intuitionism
In the book, Wood and Porter then build a measure of intuitionist tendencies using survey data. The measure is based on a combination of apprehension (how often you wash your hands, lock your car doors when driving, etc.), pessimism (how much you fear a recession, war, viral outbreak, etc.), and what the two political scientists call “symbolic thinking.”
Here’s one of the survey questions that captures symbolic thinking: Would you rather (a) sleep in laundered pajamas once worn by Charles Manson or (b) put a nickel in your mouth that you found on the ground? If you said you’d rather put a nickel in your mouth, that means you put more weight on avoiding a symbolic harm (wearing the clothing of a murderer) than a more tangible harm (the dirty nickel).
Here are the other five questions that measure symbolic thinking:
- Would you rather: (a) stick your hand in a bowl of cockroaches, or (b) stab a photograph of your family six times?
- Would you rather spend the night in: (a) a luxurious house where a family had recently been murdered, or (b) a grimy bus station?
- Would you rather: (a) stand in line for 3 hours at the DMV, or (b) secretly grind your shoe into an unmarked grave?
- Would you rather: (a) ride in a speeding car without a seat belt, or (b) yell “I hope I die tomorrow” six times out loud?
- Suppose you wanted to buy a ticket for a $500 million lottery. Would you rather buy your ticket from a nearby gas station that had (a) never sold a winning ticket but had no lines or (b) sold two winning tickets in the past three years but had a long line?
In this example, people who rank higher in symbolic thinking will choose: a, b, a, a, and b. That means they would avoid a series of symbolic harms (stabbing the family photo, sleeping in the house where the murder happened, etc.) even if it means risking a tangible harm (like riding without a seat belt). And on the last question, they will bear the cost of waiting in the long line just because it seems like that particular gas station is lucky – even though whether you buy a winning lottery ticket is obviously random.
What intuitionism predicts
When you combine all these survey questions, the resulting intuitionism index predicts all kinds of things:
- Believing in angels
- Believing that we’re living in biblical “end times”
- Believing in ghosts
- Doubting evolution
- Trusting “ordinary people” over “experts”
- Banning foods made with genetically modified organisms (GMOs)
- Giving parents the right not to vaccinate their children
- Believing that gluten makes you unhealthy
Intuitionism, the authors note, is also correlated with conservative beliefs on a range of issues: abortion, euthanasia, immigration, and others. Interestingly, intuitionism predicts these sorts of beliefs among both liberals and conservatives. That’s because even though conservatives may be more anti-abortion than liberals, intuitionist liberals are more anti-abortion than rationalist liberals (and similarly for conservatives).
And it will perhaps not surprise you that in the 2016 Republican primary, Trump voters scored higher on intuitionism than voters for any of the other Republican candidates. So RFK Jr.’s decision to hitch his wagon to Trump looks entirely predictable.
A lot of political debates break down pretty cleanly along traditional ideological lines. But when they don’t, or when you meet someone who has an unusual combination of attitudes, it may be that intuitionism is the root.
If you’re not sure, ask them about Charles Manson’s pajamas.
