Study: U.S. Flag 'Primes' Voters Toward Republican Viewpoints

From Fox News courtesy of Digg:

Just a glimpse at the American flag can sway voters, even Democrats, toward more Republican voting behavior, attitudes and beliefs, a new two-year study says.

The authors, from the University of Chicago, Cornell University and Hebrew University, say the research proves the American flag has a powerful effect on voters.

"A single exposure to an American flag resulted in a significant increase in participants' Republican voting intentions, voting behavior, political beliefs, and implicit and explicit attitudes, with some effects lasting eight months," reads the study titled, "Long-Term Effects of U.S. Flag Exposure on Republicanism."

More here.

Leaving aside the fact that the University of Chicago, what with its professors emeritus Milton Friedman and Leo Strauss, was an incubator for both neoliberalism and neoconservatism, as well as the fact that this is being reported by "fair and balanced" Fox News, it looks to me like this flag effect, if true, does nothing but reflect the now decades of relentless conservative propaganda that only they are true Americans. That is, in your face nationalism and arrogant American exceptionalism are the primary domain of the Republican Party, not the Democrats. No surprise that Old Glory makes people gravitate toward the party of "we're better than you." We've been socially conditioned to do so.

I mean, the GOP has been literally draping itself in the American flag since the Reagan era, while Democrats, hammered by even more years of Republican red-baiting, as well as a continual flow of media images connecting them to anti-American hippies and other 60s fun, just don't seem so serious in their nationalistic zeal by comparison. It is as though there is nothing they can say or do which will make them out to be the stars-and-stripes armband wearers their conservative opponents are.

Propaganda really does work.

In the end, this is just another example of how the Democrats simply don't understand the modern political environment.

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