OCTOBER 2024 SULLYGRAM:  The great divide in our nation is billed as ideological, and it is, if you can focus on what our current candidates have actually done or failed to do. But – like it or not – what many of us tend to vote on isn’t the Message. It’s the Messenger, the personality spin. Style, style, style, smile, smile, smile – Obama over McCain, Obama over Romney, Trump over Hillary, Biden over Trump, and now the ultimate test of grinning, chuckling Harris against blunt, hyperbolic Trump.

Even so, putting the current political track on “loop” for another four years requires a monumental sell. Is the entertainment-news cartel up to it? Consider the dress rehearsal. Raise a generation on “Madam Secretary” and “The West Wing,” and President Bartlet’s secret infirmity as he sought re-election after Season 1 segues smoothly into Biden’s shielded decline. “The West Wing’s” empathy for Democrats followed that script this past summer for those who ignored Biden’s unfitness in 2020. He’s just “…a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” said Special Counsel Robert Hur in refusing to prosecute Biden for retaining classified documents after leaving office in 2016, starkly contrasting prosecution of Trump for the same thing. The good guys and the bad guys. Life imitating art. Why wouldn’t politically partisan TV shows blur into reality for those who grew up absorbing them? As the NYTimes reported (and Hillary confirmed), the fledgling country of Myanmar used DVDs of “The West Wing” to study democracy. Half of America votes categorically on emotional reflexes.

And Hollywood scripts have become liberal news political playbooks that could all be titled BAIT AND SWITCH. Lure with personality, generalities and platitudes, and when the voters take the hook on election day, reel ‘em in to their fate with the fine print. Emotions first, substance later.

It’s the old 45-55 split that has determined every election since Eisenhower, with the exception of John F. Kennedy. I’m not the first to note it, but I’ve written about it for a couple of decades now. Simplistically put, roughly 55% of men and 45% of women vote Republican, while 55% of women and 45% of men vote Democrat. Gender preference? You could call it that, if you are very, very, very careful how you define gender. It has nothing to do with overall intelligence. Rather it has to do with two bell curves of intelligence factors: logic and emotions. Conservative logic and liberal emotion do not strictly conform to party politics, of course. Neither do they strictly define any of us as individuals. But they do fit the distribution of the 45-55 rule. I like to express it as do your emotions inform your logic, or does your logic inform your emotions? If you think about it, you probably relate best to one archetype or another rather than simply your biological identity. Can’t tell you how many women tell me they relate more easily to men than they do to women. Similarly, I know many men I would describe as thinking like women. That pegs me as archetypal male, I guess.

Here’s the science, if you care to observe an autopsy. The average male brain is 10-15% bigger than the average female brain, but the female has stronger side-to-side connections which amplify intuitiveness, while males have stronger front-to-back connections which heighten perceptions and motor skills. According to neuroscience, women tend to use more white matter which enhances sensory awareness and language skills, while men have larger inferior-parietal lobules which process math, estimating and judging. Archetypal men and women also process hormones differently, which neuroscientists believe may explain why females are twice as likely to develop anxiety and depression. One imagines that those parameters vary as much by individual as by gender, and they are clearly marginal (45-55) when associated with emotional vs logical leanings in voting. Still, it’s a compelling voting pattern in a society where the dominant culture and institutions are increasingly driven by media/cultural emotions.      

So, gender labels can be deceptive when you get past biological plumbing (that ought to fly high with the folk who keep dividing us into dozens of sexual orientations). In a world where ominous threats could plunge us almost instantly into a dystopian aftermath, I fear the dominance of emotions we find ourselves in. If it was truly empathy toward a balance, and the lamb could lie down with the lion, I would welcome it. But that’s not nature. Not our species. To anyone who understands the playgrounds of their youth (the dynamics of force and subjugation, the Lord of the Flies bedrock of competitive “nature red in tooth and claw”), it is shocking to see the psychological surrender of liberal masses to naïve social engineering, disincentivized economics, undermined common sense, terrorism, and to truly evil actors be they congenital or shaped by culture.

The world has many religious and cultural identities, some borderless, some national, whose emerging technologies and arsenals will soon re-write the balance of power. Those playground rules that any archetypal male understands from childhood apply. Go soft, appease, flinch before the tiger, telegraph weak intentions, dilute consequences, lower expectations, waffle – this is how you lose freedom and become someone else’s lunch. It is dismaying to see well-meaning but vulnerable blocs of voters who do not understand nature’s imperatives give criminals, terrorists and authoritarian regimes exactly what they want. Their wishful thinking erodes rational thinking, rewarding, encouraging and enabling the very forces that threaten them. Terrorism wins, hostage-taking wins, aggression wins, unflinching negotiators win, social anarchists win, law breakers win, while young generations drift rudderless and undisciplined in the vacuum. ICE data just released lists over 425,000 illegal immigrants with criminal convictions roaming our streets, and another 222,000 with charges pending as “non-detained.” Then add to that the estimate that over half of the many millions of illegal immigrants who cross our borders go undetected, not to mention 320,000 children now missing. Gullible appeasement and misguided pacifism fueled WWII just as they do in the more abstract theaters of life such as competition and commerce. Bottom line: we do not have the luxury of any more weak leadership. We should have seen that in the contrasts between the two administrations of the past 7½ years. Weakness invites collapse.

Will the 45-55 split repeat again this time? Or will the percentages skew more decisively toward one candidate? Perhaps the choice goes beyond governance to the core of our hard-wiring. Brains evolve. Neuroscientists tell us our youth are already wired differently from a generation or two ago. Could be we are voting for an evolutionary change in who we are. Emotions shout that we need more emotions. Logic whispers that we should move beyond personalities and single-issues – or as someone put it, a vote is not a Valentine. The prism of emotions vs the prism of logic. Cast your vote.

No partisan rants, please.

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan