Category Archives: The Partisan Mind

This Is Surprising

Posted on July 19, 2011 | Leave a comment

Report: Obama top recipient of News Corp. donations

Eager to hear how partisans on both sides will spin this one.

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Posted in Media, The Partisan Mind

Schumpeter on Ideology

Posted on July 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

Schumpeter believed that, because people are fallible creatures, even the scientific method isn’t entirely objective. Ideology is reflected in, say, a scientist’s (or an economist’s) choice to research one topic instead of another, or the patterns they find (or miss) while interpreting the data:

“It embodies the picture of things as we see them, and wherever there is any possible motive for wishing to see them in a given rather than another light, the way in which we see things can hardly be distinguished from the way we wish to see them.”

-Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, p. 42

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Posted in Books, Economics, Great Thinkers, The Partisan Mind

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The Neuroscience Behind Partisanship

Posted on July 1, 2011 | 1 Comment

I’m very much enjoying Michael Shermer’s new book The Believing Brain. It’s about how the brain forms beliefs, why people hold on to their beliefs so strongly, and why people believe in weird things like ghosts and conspiracy theories.

On p. 260, Shermer quotes from a study (pdf) by Drew Westen, et al, where his team ran fMRI scans on the brains of political partisans to see what parts of their brains were firing when engaged in political dispute:

We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning. What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up… Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidascope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones.

There you have it: scientific proof that partisans aren’t quite right in the head.

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Posted in Books, Science, The Partisan Mind

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Beyond Binary Politics

Posted on June 18, 2011 | Leave a comment

Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch have a must-read essay in today’s Wall Street Journal on the rise of independents, and the decline of the Republican and Democratic parties.

Their main point is that duopolies tend to die out when they abuse their customers. That is exactly what the two parties have been doing; no wonder people have been abandoning them in droves.

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Posted in The Partisan Mind

The Partisan Mind at its Finest

Posted on June 2, 2011 | Leave a comment

I don’t watch cable news. Sometimes people ask me why. This video explains as well as anything:

MSNBC’s Palin obsession is puzzling at first glance. There is no way she could win a presidential primary, let alone a general election. She polls poorly with independents, and not even everyone in her own party supports her. She is irrelevant to the 2012 election.

Why pay her any mind, then? Because she’s polarizing. That’s good for ratings. Palin has become a two minutes hate figure right out of Orwell.  Hence the video above. We must find something, anything, that will make this person look bad! And thus, to feel good about ourselves. It’s as base an impulse as there is.

The partisan mind is not rational. It suffers from clouded judgment. That’s been my hunch for some time. And it turns out that neurological research is bearing this out.

The left-right political dichotomy is obsolete and inaccurate. I propose replacing it with a liberal-illiberal split; conservatives and progressives might be surprised to find themselves firmly allied on the illiberal side.

Maybe then Sarah Palin’s 15 minutes of fame can finally, mercifully, end.

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Posted in The Partisan Mind

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Adam Smith on the New Tone

Posted on May 19, 2011 | Leave a comment

“The furious behavior of an angry man is more likely to exasperate us against himself than against his enemies.”

-Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments

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Posted in The Partisan Mind, Pith, Great Thinkers

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They Just Won’t Stop

Posted on April 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

The Hill: “GOP bill would require birth certificates from presidential candidates“

Because otherwise voters might elect a President who was never even born.

Yeesh.

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Posted in Political Animals, The Partisan Mind

Oops.

Posted on April 20, 2011 | 1 Comment

The Des Moines Register: “A case of mistaken identity has entangled a small family-owned Des Moines company in union protests and led to a death threat… Dutch Koch, president of the Des Moines company, wants everyone to know he’s not one of those Koch brothers, and he’s not politically active.”

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Posted in The Partisan Mind

In Politics, Inertia Always Wins

Posted on April 14, 2011 | Leave a comment

The GOP has been bragging that its budget deal that passed the House today will save $38 billion. The CBO took a closer look, and it turns out the actual figure is $353 million, or 0.02 percent of this year’s budget deficit.

In The Daily Caller, I point out that this is one more example of the iron law of politics — inertia always wins.

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Posted in Publications, Spending, The Partisan Mind

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Setting a New Tone

Posted on March 9, 2011 | Leave a comment

People complain that the level of political discourse in America is lower than ever. That isn’t actually true if you look at the historical record. But the ratio of heat to light is still far too high.

Over at the Daily Caller, I share a bit of wisdom from the economist Joseph Schumpeter about how people can have a more constructive dialogue about the direction of the country.

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Posted in Great Thinkers, Publications, The Partisan Mind

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