Summary: You can make a difference by taking small steps towards political reform for America. In a few hundred words this post takes you to a conclusions that might change how you see US politics. I believe you will find it worth the journey. {1st of 2 posts today.}
Pouring more water on a rock does not make it wetter.
— Ancient aphorism.
A new paper in 2006 built on a long series of previous social science research, giving us a powerful insight about the origin of our dysfunctional politics: “It Feels Like We’re Thinking: The Rationalizing Voter and Electoral Democracy” by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels (Professors of Politics, Princeton) — Abstract…
The familiar image of rational electoral choice has voters weighing the competing candidates’ strengths and weaknesses, calculating comparative distances in issue space, and assessing the president’s management of foreign affairs and the national economy. Indeed, once or twice in a lifetime, a national or personal crisis does induce political thought. But most of the time, the voters adopt issue positions, adjust their candidate perceptions, and invent facts to rationalize decisions they have already made.
The implications of this distinction — between genuine thinking and its day-to-day counterfeit — strike at the roots of both positive and normative theories of electoral democracy.
Their conclusions explain an oddity of American politics.
Most of the time, the voters are merely reaffirming their partisan and group identities at the polls. They do not reason very much or very often. What they do is rationalize. Every election, they sound as though they were thinking, and they feel as if they were thinking, as do we all. The unwary scholarly devotee of democratic romanticism is thereby easily misled. But in fact, while the voters may be consistent, and while they may be rational in the thin economic sense of the term, they behave in what Lippmann (“Public Opinion
“, 1922) referred to as a pseudo-environment only loosely connected to … “… the real environment where action eventuates. If the behavior is not a practical act, but what we call roughly thought and emotion, it may be a long time before there is any noticeable break in the texture of the fictitious world. But when the stimulus of the pseudo-fact results in action on things or other people, contradiction soon develops. Then comes the sensation of butting one’s head against a stone wall, of learning by experience, and witnessing Herbert Spencer’s tragedy of the murder of a Beautiful Theory by a Gang of Brutal Facts, the discomfort in short of a maladjustment.” {Ed. Not Spencer. It was Thomas H. Huxley in “On the Study of Zoology
” (1861).}
For many people, of course, the discomfort of maladjustment never comes, either because they never emerge from the world of political thought and emotion into the world of practical action, or because the concrete consequences of their misperceptions are too indirect for them to apprehend. Are they to be congratulated for living comfortably and efficiently in their pseudo-environments?
This explains the lack of traction provided in our debates by new information. The teams are fixed. New information is just adding a new ball on the field. Paul Krugman has repeated pointed to this behavior in economics. It dominates the public policy debate about climate science, as documented by Roger Pielke Jr (Prof of Environmental Studies, U CO-Boulder) in The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics
Stating this in operational terms
We respond to information by changing our opinions and behavior (however imperfectly) when managing our personal lives, our families, and our careers. Things we care about, things for which we feel responsible. We treat policy debates like baseball. We cheer our team and boo our foes — irrespective of new information about the score and the players — because they are games, and we’re spectators.
Nothing will change in America until this changes.
What should we do?
Look at websites covering politics, Left or Right. Such as the best of breed (imo): FireDogLake or Naked Capitalism. They focus on news and analysis. Change will come when they shift to providing news as bait for readers while their important content becomes stories that stimulate people to act and mobilize them into organizations — discussing methods and tactics, teaching leadership, and developing plans.
The cost will be high for conveying this unpopular message, as we’ve seen on the FM website. It’s anti-clickbait. A large class of Americans love political news — it’s entertainment for the outer party, catharsis for the politically passive. They don’t want to be told they have power and responsibility, which induces cognitive dissonance with their apathy and passivity.
In effect we will all need to build new audiences from those of today. I suspect it will be neither fast nor easy. People seeking to reform America, whether Left or Right, must change their focus to something with at least a small chance of success. The alternative is, as Walter Lippmann said with great understatement, “learning by experience … the discomfort … of a maladjustment.” Probably a long painful maladjustment.
You can make it happen by asking those running the websites you read to make this change. Ask them if more information will change anybody’s minds, spur anyone into action, or make existing reform movements more effective. If not, ask them to try something new. Something offering hope, not just entertainment. Tells us what to do with the news. Discuss actions for citizens, rather than provide entertainment for peons.
For More Information
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about Reforming America: steps to new politics, and especially see these …
- How you can start the campaign to reform America.
- Events in Ferguson reveal a better way to read the news, giving you more free time!
- Enough analysis! America is broken. Here are some ways to fix it.
- Can we organize the political reform of America? Our past shows how.
- Politics in modern America: A users guide for journalists and reformers.
- One of journalism’s stars explains why & how to read the news.
