Show Notes
Scott Eidelman went into a bar and proved something that most of us already suspected. In 2012, Eidelman, a psychologist at the University of Arkansas, wanted to test a simple idea. What happens to a person’s political beliefs when they stop thinking hard? Not when they change their mind. When they stop using their mind altogether. He walked into a bar, asked patrons their political opinions on a series of social issues, and then breathalyzed them. He controlled for sex, education, and how the person identified politically when sober. None of that mattered. The drunker they were, the more conservative they answered. Every single time. Then he took sober people into a lab and did it three more ways. He split their attention with a distracting task. He put them under a time limit so they had to answer fast. He told one group to give their gut reaction and another group to actually think about their answers. Every single manipulation produced the same result. When people stopped thinking, they got more conservative. When they started thinking again, they moved away from it. Four studies. Four different ways of shutting down deliberate thought. Same finding every time. Eidelman called it low-effort thought. Conservatism is what your brain does when it quits.
The Default Setting That is the part nobody on the right wants to hear. Conservative positions are not conclusions. They are defaults. They are what the brain produces when it is not working. Hierarchy is natural. People get what they deserve. The system is fine. Tradition is good. These are not ideas anyone reasoned their way into. They are the path of least resistance. They require no imagination, no complexity, no willingness to consider that the world might be more complicated than it looks from your couch. Liberal positions require effort. Inequality is structural. Outcomes are shaped by systems most people cannot see. The current setup might need to be torn apart and rebuilt. Those conclusions cost something. You have to override your defaults. You have to sit with ambiguity. You have to hold more than one idea in your head at the same time. That takes energy. And a lot of people do not have it because they were never trained to use it. Conservatism is not an ideology. It is what happens when you skip the homework and guess on the test. The Machine That Prevents Thinking This is where it stops being a lab finding and starts being a political strategy. If conservatism is what you get when people stop thinking, then all you have to do is make sure they never start. Keep them scared. Keep them angry. Keep them overwhelmed with a new crisis every single week so they never have time to slow down and actually process what is happening to them. That is the entire conservative media playbook. A new enemy every month. A new outrage every day. Caravans. Drag queens. Critical race theory. Woke. Trans athletes. The targets rotate but the speed never changes. The viewer is never given a quiet moment to sit with a single idea and think it through. Because the second they do, Eidelman’s research says they start drifting away from conservatism. A scared brain does the exact same thing a drunk brain does. It stops deliberating and grabs the easiest answer available. That is not a metaphor. That is what the data says. Fear suppresses effortful thinking the same way alcohol does. Overload suppresses it. Exhaustion suppresses it. Speed suppresses it. The entire conservative media ecosystem is engineered to produce the exact cognitive state that Eidelman tested in his lab. Fox News is not informing its audience. It is keeping them drunk without the alcohol.
Why They Sound So Confident Here is the part that makes this dangerous. A low-effort answer does not feel like a lazy answer to the person giving it. It feels like common sense. The answer came fast. It felt obvious. It required no struggle. So it must be right. That is why every conservative argument starts with “it’s just common sense
More from The Lucas Bean Show
There is a particular kind of man who shows up to political rallies in body armor he bought online, drives a truck that has never hauled anything, and screams about strength while falling apart the moment someone disagrees with him. He is not hard to spot. He is the loudest person in any room he enters. He is also, according to decades of research, the most frightened. The video that accompanies this piece covers sociologist Robb Willer’s research on masculine overcompensation: the finding that men whose masculinity is threatened respond with exaggerated displays of dominance, aggression, and toughness. The effect is consistent and measurable. It shows up in attitudes toward war, attitudes toward gay people, and even in what kind of car a man wants to buy. But the research goes much deeper than one study, and the implications stretch far beyond a rally.
There’s a familiar ritual that happens every time an authoritarian movement begins to collapse. The supporters disappear. Not physically. Psychologically. They scrub the evidence, rewrite the timeline, and emerge on the other side with a story they’ve rehearsed just enough to almost believe. “I never really supported him.” “I just voted against the Democrats.” “I don’t talk about politics anymore.” This is happening right now across America. The yard signs are coming down. The hats are going into drawers. The Facebook posts are being deleted. And millions of people who spent a decade loudly and publicly cheering for cruelty are quietly trying to exit the building before someone turns the lights on. The companion video to this piece says what needs to be said plainly: they’re not confused. They’re lying. They know what they did. They know what they defended. And they’re trying to erase the evidence before accountability arrives. This Substack examines why that matters, why it won’t work this time, and what history tells us about populations that try to pretend they were never part of the thing they spent years supporting.
Most political analysis starts with policy. Voters chose this candidate because of the economy, immigration, healthcare, taxes. And for most voters in most elections, that’s probably true. But Donald Trump is not most candidates. And the question that keeps surfacing isn’t why people agree with him. It’s why they love him more every time he does something cruel. The mockery. The insults. The attacks on disabled reporters, Gold Star families, and women. Behavior that would end any other political career has somehow become the foundation of his. In 2021, psychologist Matthew Yalch at Palo Alto University published a study in PLOS ONE titled “Dimensions of pathological narcissism and intention to vote for Donald Trump.” And what he found should make everyone uncomfortable, including the people it describes.
In February 2025, researchers at the University of Amsterdam published a study in Social Science & Medicine that should have rewritten every conversation about why people join the far right. They tracked over 40,000 people across nine countries, with data spanning fifteen years. They controlled for income, education, immigration attitudes, and political ideology. They wanted to know what actually predicts whether someone will support the populist radical right. The answer wasn’t immigration. It wasn’t economics. It wasn’t religion. It was loneliness. Lonelier individuals were consistently more likely to support radical right movements, with the association holding across all fifteen years of Dutch data and appearing across multiple European countries. The researchers noted that the effect sizes were comparable to the known health correlates of loneliness, meaning that the connection between loneliness and far-right support was statistically as meaningful as the connection between loneliness and heart disease, high blood pressure, and depression. A 2021 RAND Corporation study of former extremists and their families confirmed this from the other direction. Half of the former extremists surveyed said feelings of marginalization drove them toward radicalization, with most citing isolation and loneliness specifically. Individuals reported that the social benefits of joining extremist organizations, the friendship, the camaraderie, the sense of finally belonging somewhere, were among the most powerful forces keeping them in. These people didn’t join a movement because they were convinced by policy arguments. They joined because someone finally made them feel like they weren’t alone. And that tells us more about what MAGA actually is than any analysis of tariffs or border policy ever could.
A woman stood up at a political rally and asked a sitting congressman to create a federal law that would force her adult daughter to let her see her grandchildren. Not a therapy session. Not a family mediator. Not a phone call to her daughter asking what went wrong. A federal law. That single moment contains more psychology than most textbooks. Because what she revealed, in front of cameras and a cheering crowd, wasn’t a grandmother’s heartbreak. It was a narcissist’s playbook when someone finally tells them no. How a boundary becomes a theft. In 2002, psychologist Roy Baumeister at Case Western Reserve University published a theory that combined two existing psychological frameworks into something new. The first was narcissism, the personality structure built around an inflated self-image that requires constant validation. The second was psychological reactance, a concept developed by Jack Brehm at the University of Kansas in 1966, which describes the motivational state people enter when they perceive their freedom as restricted. Brehm found that when people believe a choice or behavior has been taken from them, they experience an intense drive to restore it, often wanting the restricted option more than they did before it was restricted. Baumeister’s insight was that narcissism supercharges reactance. When an ordinary person encounters a boundary, they may be disappointed, but they can process it. When a narcissist encounters a boundary, they don’t experience disappointment. They experience theft. The boundary isn’t perceived as another person’s valid choice. It’s perceived as something that belongs to them being taken away. And they feel entitled to take it back by whatever means necessary. Baumeister called it narcissistic reactance. This grandmother didn’t process her daughter’s boundary as a painful but legitimate decision by an autonomous adult. She processed it as her property being stolen. Those grandchildren aren’t people her daughter is protecting. In her mind, they are hers. Access to them is her right. And no one, not even their own mother, gets to take what’s hers.