Category: Culture

Readers of a certain age may recall the book listed in the headline that many of those of us of a certain age read in school.

It was either that, or insert a music video here:

The concept in each is what Charles C.W. Cooke refers to:

My colleague Jay Nordlinger likes to gripe that “you should run for president” is uttered far too swiftly on the right nowadays, the injunction tending to follow almost every instance of public-facing conservative competence. A man has made an impressive speech, full of critiques of which you approved? He should be president! A governor is doing well in a state that is usually run by the other side. Shouldn’t he be our commander-in-chief? We have someone in the legislature who is fluent in fiscal policy? Let’s remove him from his area of expertise and put him immediately into the White House. More often than not, it has to be said, this happens with minorities and with women — the tendency serving perhaps as the Republican party’s own form of affirmative action. If we could just parachute this gifted black man into a position of prominence, the thought goes, our image problem would be solved.

This proclivity is not entirely unwise, of course. Washington D.C.’s insider culture is certainly a real problem, and the abundance of career politicians and wannabe lobbyists does render substantial retrenchment unlikely. On occasion, we really do need outsiders to shake things up. But there are talented political newcomers and there are mavericks and then there are rank amateurs and flavors of the month, and the difference between these two types is the difference between a Dwight Eisenhower or a Rudy Giuliani and a Herman Cain or a Donald Trump. One would like to imagine that the prospect of an unknown’s being held up as the face of a centuries-old party and a timeless political movement would set loud alarm bells ringing in the ears of those who characterize themselves as “conservatives.” That for so many it does not is troubling indeed.

As a rule, we on the right like to tell ourselves that we are steadfastly opposed to heroes in politics, and that we are especially opposed to heroes who promise that their election to the executive branch will result in sweeping changes or in a post-partisan utopia. The United States, we argue, was set up in opposition to princes and to aristocrats, with the express recognition that politics will always be with us and with the explicit understanding that the influence of individual players would be strictly limited by the system. Long before anybody in the wider electorate so much as knew Barack Obama’s name, this instinct was a virtuous and a sensible one. But if we have learned anything from his presidency, it is just how prudent that conviction was. Somehow, however, the hope that a shining knight will come to save the republic from itself remains common within conservative circles. What gives?

I suspect that the impulse is in part the product of the way in which the Right sees politics. On Wednesday, Reihan Salam quoted Noam Scheiber’s invaluable observation that, unlike “interest groups on the left, which tend to accept the transactional nature of government, many movement conservatives have a genuinely coherent worldview they want to see reflected — in its entirety.” This is correct, and to an extent I am among them. An ugly consequence of this, however, is that individuals who line up with a given conservative’s worldview tend to be held up by that conservative as a rarity and as a savior — as an unimpeachable superhero who will not compromise in the face of identity politics or elite pressure and whose elevation to power will immediately stop the ratchet from moving ever leftward. Those who doubt this should see what happens when one criticizes Sarah Palin or Ron Paul. Right-leaning politicians who differ on a few important issues, by contrast, are quickly dismissed as “traitors” or “sellouts” or “fake conservatives.” To witness this process in action, consider just how far Marco Rubio has fallen in the affections of many who once greatly admired him. Rubio, who has an impressively conservative voting record and a generally winsome character, erred on the question of immigration last year. Did this error transform him in the eyes of the Republican base into a fair prospect with some unlikable traits? Or did this make him an unconscionable turncoat who should never have been elected in the first place? For too many, I’m afraid, it is the latter.

This inclination helps to explain why Ronald Reagan is so chronically misremembered, too. Reagan was an unquestionably great man, who, like Margaret Thatcher in Britain, not only helped to turn around the prospects of his own country but played a key role in freeing millions of foreigners who had been brutally enslaved by the Soviet Union. Cometh the hour, cometh the man, as the old saying goes. And yet, despite the common implication of those who revere him, Reagan was by no means a perfect president, and there is some truth to the common progressive jab that he would not get through a Republican primary today. For a start, Ronald Reagan compromised far, far more than conservatives at the time wanted him to — to the extent that some here at National Review considered him to be a failure. He signed an amnesty that we now regard as having been a disaster. He raised taxes when he thought it necessary. He signed gun-control bills, including one that outlawed the importation of automatic weapons. And, famously, he made deals with Mikhail Gorbachev that were slammed by many on the right as being little more than “appeasement.” It is all very well for conservatives to say, “If only Ronald Reagan were president,” but in doing so they have to take the rough with the smooth and to remember, too, that Reagan did not achieve as much as he did because he was a superman, but because he was part of a more general shift.

All in all, the “Reagan era” was an expression of changed public sentiment as much as it was the product of an especially capable president. At no point in Ronald Reagan’s tenure did Republicans control the House, and for six years of his time in office the Democratic party had a majority in the Senate. Despite this, he changed the country for the better and reset the ideological presumptions of the electorate for a generation — perhaps more.

Besides that: Should politicians be anyone’s hero? No politician — and that includes the politicians you like and vote for — enters politics for reasons that don’t include accumulating power for himself or herself, even for good reasons.

Cass Sunstein appears to have found another form of discrimination:

If you are a Democrat, would you marry a Republican? Would you be upset if your sister did?

Researchers have long asked such questions about race, and have found that along important dimensions, racial prejudice is decreasing. At the same time, party prejudice in the U.S. has jumped, infecting not only politics but also decisions about dating, marriage and hiring. By some measures, “partyism” now exceeds racial prejudice — which helps explain the intensity of some midterm election campaigns.

In 1960, 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said that they would feel “displeased” if their son or daughter married outside their political party. By 2010, those numbers had reached 49 percent and 33 percent. Republicans have been found to like Democrats less than they like people on welfare or gays and lesbians. Democrats dislike Republicans more than they dislike big business.

Consider one of the most influential measures of prejudice: the implicit-association test, which is simple to take. You see words on the upper corners of a screen — for example, “white” paired with either “good” or “bad” in the upper left corner, and “black” paired with one of those same adjectives in the upper right. Then you see a picture or a word in the middle of the screen — for example, a white face, an African-American face, or the word “joy” or “terrible.” Your task is to click on the upper corner that matches either the picture or the word in the middle.

Many white people quickly associate “joy” with the upper left corner when it says “white” and “good” — but have a harder time associating “joy” with the left corner when the words there are “black” and “good.” So too, many white people quickly associate “terrible” with the left corner when it says “black” and “bad,” but go a lot more slowly when the left corner says “white” and “bad.”

To test for political prejudice, Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood, political scientists at Stanford University, conducted a large-scale implicit association test with 2,000 adults. They found people’s political bias to be much larger than their racial bias. When Democrats see “joy,” it’s much easier for them to click on a corner that says “Democratic” and “good” than on one that says “Republican” and “good.”

To find out whether such attitudes predict behavior, Iyengar and Westwood undertook a follow-up study. They asked more than 1,000 people to look at the resumes of several high-school seniors and say which ones should be awarded a scholarship. Some of these resumes contained racial cues (“president of the African American Student Association”) while others had political ones (“president of the Young Republicans”).

Race mattered. African-American participants preferred the African-American candidates 73 percent to 27 percent. Whites showed a modest preference for African-American candidates, as well, though by a significantly smaller margin. But partisanship made a much bigger difference. Both Democrats and Republicans selected their in-party candidate about 80 percent of the time.

Even when a candidate from the opposing party had better credentials, most people chose the candidate from their own party. With respect to race, in contrast, merit prevailed.

In a further test of political prejudice, Iyengar and Westwood asked 800 people to play the trust game, well known among behavioral scientists: Player 1 is given some money (say, $10) and told that she can give some, all or none of it to Player 2. Player 1 is then told that the researcher will triple the amount she allocates to Player 2 — and that Player 2 can give some of that back to Player 1. When Player 1 decides how much money to give Player 2, a central question is how well she trusts him to return an equivalent or greater amount.

Are people less willing to trust people of a different race or party affiliation? The researchers found that race didn’t matter — but party did. People are significantly more trusting of others who share their party affiliation.

What accounts for the explosive growth of political prejudice? Modern campaigns deserve some of the blame. Iyengar and his colleagues show that when people are exposed to messages that attack members of the opposing party, their biases increase. But the destructive power of partyism is extending well beyond politics into people’s behavior in daily life.

First: It is wrong to discriminate against people based on immutable characteristics — for instance, race. It may or may not be wrong to discriminate against someone for non-immutable characteristics. Do you want a convicted child molester working with your children?

As usual, you have to sift through a load of it’s-the-other-side’s-fault comments to get to the crux of what Sunstein identifies:

• While politics and party ideology are the easy targets, the culprit is the continuous expansion of the size, scope and reach of the US government.
• Why would that explain the animosity towards opposing political parties which is greater than racism?
• Because as more and more of your life is exposed to and impacted by politics, the more threatening someone with opposing political views becomes.
• I would generally agree with that premise only to add that they become more threatening as an individual ties their own well being to that of a political party. So when their party or any of their ideas are assaulted in some manner, it’s taken personally.
  Still, I’m curious why the original poster would suggest this has anything to do with the size of government. It just seems like a sidestep of the original issue presented in this article.
• You’re missing the point. it’s not that people’s well being is tied to a political party, it’s that as governments grows, the non-political sphere shrinks. To paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. The federal government dictates the heath insurance I must purchase, the gas mileage my car must get, what kind of light bulbs I can buy, what’s in my kid’s school lunches and a thousand other things.
  If the government’s role was limited to what a strict reading of the constitution allows, very few people would be interested in anybody else’s political leanings. But, for better and for worse, that’s not the world we live in.
• We have reduced politics to a sport in which people display passionate but blind loyalty to their own team while heaping vitriol on the other. The spirit of respectful and reasoned debate backed by a willingness to compromise has been lost, and our democracy can’t function effectively without it.
• Maybe there isn’t anything valuable being put forth. Maybe the politicians themselves invent problems and crisis and the perception that they can fix them. Maybe Americans have finally started to realize that government is inept to solve problems and thus should be a minimized “necessary evil”
  “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.” – Thomas Paine
• I’d suggest that what the article reports upon is quite real — widespread revulsion with liberal and conservative viewpoints, to the point that an increasing number of people cannot be paid off to go along with either one.
  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that a fairly large number of self-described conservatives are not particularly conservative, they are best described as “vehemently opposed to the liberal agenda.” In fact, when “their” conservative agenda is attacked, they have little to say in favor of conservatism, responding almost entirely with anti-liberal venom.
  Ditto a fairly large number of self-described liberals.
• The political divisions that exist in this country are driven more by media than anything else.
  At ground level I have friends and work associates of all political persuasions and we rarely quarrel or hate over those differences.
  Want to feel hate and contempt? Turn on the TV or jump on the Internet. Want to avoid those negativities? Spend most of your time among actual people. People in person rarely quibble about politics, practical concerns make up the day.
  The author not only does a poor job isolating media as a major factor but also plays up the divisiveness for the sake of a column.
  The media is owned and run by the powers-that-be; evidently they’d much rather we quarrel with each other than with them.
  That in fact is the crux of the matter; divide-to-rule is one of the oldest and most pervasive power strategies in the book. See the button-pushing clearly for what it is.
• Attempting to draw conclusions about reality from artificial “studies” with limited participation (while a favorite hobby of Sunstein’s) is fraught with risk.
  That said, are we really surprised that politics trumps race in the “trust” test? A white person and a black person are not, necessarily, adversaries in any particular sense. But political parties are, necessarily, antagonistic: in any given house, senate or presidential race, only one candidate wins. So if I give $10 to my opponent and they receive $40–and the only thing I know about that person is their political affiliation–I now know that this person has every rational reason to keep $40, even if that person is kind and trustworthy.
  Of course, this has no bearing on reality. In real life, there are reasons why people may reach across the aisle–the most obvious being that life is a repetitive game and someone in a majority position today may be in a minority position tomorrow. There is zero reason to expect that to be replicated in the lab.

It may shock some readers to know that I have liberals in my own family. In fact, at one of our Christmas celebrations talking about politics was banned by the powers-that-be. (Mothers, of course.) I also have friends whose political viewpoints differ substantially from mine.

The fact is, however, that politics is a zero-sum game. One side wins, which means the other side loses. Next year maybe the winner and loser switch sides, but the zero-sum game remains, with, unlike a sporting event, no end. (Except, of course, for John Maynard Keynes’ observation that “In the long run we are all dead.”) As Douglas MacArthur said about war, in politics there is no substitute for victory, even if the victory is often fleeting and sometimes Pyrrhic.

There are some political issues that are truly zero-sum. If you believe that, for instance, abortion or war are truly evil, then the correct number of abortions or wars is zero. If you believe that life begins at conception, then reducing the number of abortions in half still means that that number of lives are being snuffed out. If war is the worst thing on this planet, then you’re not very happy with, well, any presidential administration since Herbert Hoover.

Some of this, I suppose, could be blamed on our I-am-the-center-of-the-universe society. Try talking to a diehard Bears fan about the Packers. Try talking to a Government Motors enthusiast about, say, Toyota. Suggest to a Beatles fan that the band might be overrated, but you had better have a leg pointing in an escape direction. I know huge fans of fantasy football, but I question the use of a made-up sport that, frankly, measures the wrong things instead of what counts in sports — wins and losses.

Of course, you can choose to watch the Bears or Packers (or no football at all), you can buy one brand of car instead of another, and you can choose or not to participate in a particular pastime. Trotsky’s alleged statement (which sounds like something Yakov Smirnoff would say) is absolutely and unfortunately correct.

I don’t have a sister, but I do have children. I am positive I will have no input on their choice of spouse. That question is moot, because parents don’t have a vote. (Entertaining side note: My mother, raised a Methodist, was to marry my father, raised Roman Catholic. Before the wedding day, an ex-boyfriend of my mother’s called my grandmother to implore her to forbid my mother from marrying one of those Catholics. My grandmother, also a Methodist, told the ex where he should go.)

The thing about people with political views that differ from your own, it seems to me, is the extent to which your political opponent feels the need to jam his or her views down your throat. My observation from experience is that liberals base their arguments on emotions, whereas conservatives base theirs on logic, but that doesn’t necessarily always apply. (The same could be said by replacing “liberals” with “women” and “conservatives” with “men,” irrespective of the political viewpoints being expressed, but that could be a generalization too.) I know liberals and conservatives who literally cannot shut up about politics, and even the ones I agree with can become annoying.

Politics should not be the be-all and end-all of your life. It is possible that if you meet someone who has different political views from yours, that person may have other different views that makes that person incompatible with you. Or maybe they just have different political views. Mature people should know what is important.