The long answer is erudite and exceeds my mental capacity. The short answer --based on my personal observation living in a hotbed of the phenomenon you describe-- is: indoctrination, ignorance and conformity. The folks I deal with daily get their opinions prefabricated from their ministers, who get them from their ordained leaders, Charles Dobson and Pat Robertson. Other right wing opinion-makers include Rush Limbaugh and talk radio in general, Fox News, Lou Dobbs, and the Republican Party. (Google/Wiki the names, RockstarJizzy.) The basic ideas are Righteousness and Populism, which suggests that ignorance and bigotry are OK if approved by ordinary folks and spiritual leaders. And where ordinary folks are ignorant and culturally inclined to bigotry, populism finds fertile ground. And of course it’s seen by its proponents as informed and rational. The electorate’s stupidity is cynically exploited by the ruling class, which is regularly able to persuade the deluded and powerless to vote for the Republican Party, from whose policies they derive no benefit whatsoever --though they are kept in the dark about this by their masters. This is done with a potent and cynical brew of flattery, lies and spin. The flattery is that they –-the anointed of the churchgoing Right-- are morally superior to their villainous adversaries on the left, an obviously depraved grab-bag of hot-button abortionists, homosexuals, freeloaders, criminals, drug users, intellectuals, “elitists” and quiche-eaters, socialists, insider politicians and their lobbyist buddies –joined quite recently by investment bankers and now even terrorists. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjxzmaXAg9E. Diversions all. The true elitists –folks like Rupert Murdoch, miscellaneous billionaires, the Bush family, Cheney, Karl Rove and the McCain campaign-- are delighted by half the electorate’s compliant gullibility, which they exploit to the hilt to win elections, and which they're able to whip up into flights of rage and indignation. When things go wrong: like Goebbels, they blame the left, confident of their target audience’s impressionability. But more than this: incredibly and most potently of all, they BLAME THE GOVERNMENT-- obviously a socialist conspiracy, as all government is –-and such is their constituency’s stupidity that spinmasters are able with only modest smoke and mirrors to get them to ignore the fact that they themselves --the ruling class-- ARE THE GOVERNMENT, and they were elected by their constituents, the churchgoing plain folk, the individualists, the anti-elitists! The cynical manipulators are able to do this by tapping into an American belief so vast and mythic that even liberal members of this board subscribe to it: that ALL GOVERNMENT IS INHERENTLY BAD (and obviously a leftist conspiracy, since right-thinking folks all wish it would wither away). Thus it is that every Republican administration is elected on the promise of shrinking government. Once elected, however, both Reagan and Bush grew the government to unprecedented size –-secure in the knowledge that they could conceal even this from their deluded supporters. Conformity works through peer pressure. Many Americans congratulate themselves on their individuality, while conforming rigidly to the opinions of their peers. The true individualists are the ones who don’t make a fetish of it --and of course, of these there are few. Blame Goebbels; the ideas are mostly his. (Though the deluded will tell you they're Jefferson's.) .