politics

Okay, I can’t hold off any longer. The appallingly inane drivel I’ve been hearing from all sides — from mainline news sources and blogs, from friends and from colleagues, from school dropouts and from Ivy League professors, from Democrats and from Republicans — compels me to vent a bit.

The idiocy comes in a variety of forms. Sometimes it comes as breathtakingly crazy value judgements provoked by an opponent who doesn’t belong to your tribe. Read any random three op-ed columns and I guarantee that at least one of them will exemplify this so I won’t bother showing you examples. Sometimes it comes as gullible repetition of some nonsense that makes your opponent look like a monster, nonsense that you could have dismissed had you bothered to spend five minutes fact-checking. Maybe some of us are too busy to spend those five minutes (though I’m inclined to think that maybe you should then refrain from repeating vicious hearsay). But I’m pretty sure that The New York Times ought to be able to spare five minutes for that sort of thing. What sort of falsehoods do I have in mind? The claim that Sarah Palin was a member of the Alaskan Independence Party or that her youngest child is actually not her own, for example. Or that Barack Obama is secretly Muslim. All three, and many more, have been widely repeated.

So that’s the sort of thing that has gotten my ire up. What is my stake in the debate? I loathe both the Republican Party and the Democrat Party. This isn’t because I’m a moderate trying to find space between them. It’s because I’m way to the right of the Republicans on some issues and way to the left of the Democrats on others. Not that I’m pretending that this gives me an unbiased perspective on the debates; but those are my cards. As you’ll soon see, bias actually won’t much matter for the kinds of things I’ll say anyway.

To finish out this introductory post, let me point out that recent research in psychology pretty much confirms what has been obvious to many of us for a long time: partisans become irrational with respect to the topic of their partisanship. This is what happens when, say, a really smart philosophy professor who can spot a fallacy from a mile a way suddenly starts spouting nothing but fallacies when talking about the political party he opposes (don’t even ask how often I get to witness this). It’s because the part of his brain that handles logical reasoning got turned off. And, of course, he is entirely unaware that it got turned off and so he undoubtedly thinks that he is making all sorts of brilliant points. But those of us not in the sway of his partisanship are embarrassed at the sad spectacle. I won’t bore you with all the details, but you can see a popular introduction to some of the research here. If you find the stuff interesting, you should hunt down the researchers’ papers. It’s fascinating material. Drew Westen’s research is particularly interesting.

The moral of the research is that if you are an enthusiastic advocate of some person or cause or an adamant opponent, chances are you say lots of stuff that sounds really stupid to the rest of us. And remember that you can’t tell if that is so if you are caught in the grip of partisanship. So if you find yourself feeling zealous about something, it’s probably best to assume that you’re liable to say crazy things if you open your mouth. At the very least, it behooves you to make an extra effort to sit back and cooly think about what you want to say before saying it. Also remember that we’re much better at spotting flaws in our opponents’ arguments than at constructing good arguments ourselves. So if your opponents tell you that what you said sounded stupid, it probably did so you might not want to repeat it, lest you merely provide further fodder for your opponents.

Remember that you are under no obligation to read this or any future rants of mine.

Sydney