Over the weekend there was a piece at boston.com that hashed together some old studies on the science of people’s political beliefs and their abilities to change their opinions when presented with corrective facts. Facts, it turns out, can’t always get people (especially strong partisans) to change their minds. For some reason, this got quite a bit of play on-line, frequently accompanied by some variation on “we’re doomed!”. By way of example, here’s the usually calmer Digby:
And the answer doesn’t seem to be more education. It turns out that even those who are factually right about 90 percent of things are so confident that they are completely unwilling to correct the 10% they are wrong about.
One of the suggested cures is to shame the purveyors of information, the media, with fact checking. But the author rightly observes that the media is shameless.
It turns out that our brains are designed to create “cognitive shortcuts” to cope with the rush of information which I’m guessing is more important than ever in this new age. I’m also guessing one of these “cognitive shortcuts” is trusting in certain tribal identification and shared “worldview” to make things easier to sort out, which is why things are getting hyperpartisan and polarized in this time of information overload. (And sadly, one of the effects of that would be more confirmation of whatever bad information exists within the group.) So politics becomes a dogfight in which the battle is not just between ideas, but between the facts themselves.
We’ve seen the beginnings of a sophisticated manipulation of this effect during the Bush administration’s experimentation with epistemic relativism. (We are seeing it today with the obsession with deficits as well.) I wonder if democracy is up for this?
Yikes, that all sounds awfully dire. Matthew Yglesias, partially responding to Digby, has a slightly more optimistic take:
The reason the system functions is that democratic accountability doesn’t depend on voters knowing what they’re talking about. Most people have strong partisan identities, and just vote for the same team. And swing voters’ views are driven overwhelmingly by economic performance.
This isn’t fantastic—it means politicians have incentive to neglect long-term issues. But it’s better than it might be. And certainly I think quality of life in America would go up if Presidents paid more attention to delivering the goods in terms of economic growth and less attention to spin and media manipulation and the occasional (though not all that common) effort to pander to public opinion.
Yglesias, as he is want to do, then goes on about how this is further reason we need to reform our political institutions, specifically to limit the obstruction ability of the minority. He’s right that most people just vote for their team and be done with it, and that plenty of our political institutions don’t work well. His relatively optimistic conclusion, that none of that has ever halted the functioning of democracy, is also correct.
But the institutions and history on which Yglesias bases his optimism have a rather glaring problem, and in one specific instance Digby’s pessimism is easily justified. What Yglesias fails to mention is that the two biggest and most important political institutions in the country are the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, nothing else is in their league in terms of scope, size or influence. One of them isn’t holding up its end of the bargain these days, and that is an incredibly dangerous thing.
Coincidentally, I just finished reading John Amato and Dave Neiwert’s new book, “Over the Cliff: How Obama’s Election Drove the American Right Insane”. It deserves a full review at some point, but this example from the end of the book neatly points out why there is serious cause for institutional alarm here in the summer of 2010 (quoting right wing expert Dave Weigel):
The conspiracist on the right has had stomping grounds at FreeRepublic and WND, while the radical on the far left is banned from sites like Daily Kos if he/she posts a conspiracy theory.
This is a critically important point, and it goes further towards explaining the current predicament of the two major parties than any other single sentence I’ve read. While it’s true that FreeRepublic and WND aren’t the Republican Party, David Vitter is a sitting Republican Senator, and earlier this week he lent his credibility to the Birther conspiracy theory that came directly from those sites and others like them.
In contrast, after the 2004 election, when the liberal side of the internet was flooded with conspiracy theories, they were quickly tamped down and exiled to the fringe. Even when one such theory was given the dual respectability of Rolling Stone and Robert Kennedy Jr., the lunacy was never permitted to take hold. The institutions on the left, including the Democratic Party itself, kept the fact free speculation brigade away from the corridors of power. The lunatics were never permitted to run the asylum.
The Republican Party and its various supporting apparatuses have proven themselves unwilling to do the same, and America needs the Republican Party. We need the Republican Party to keep an eye on the Democratic Party; we need the Republican Party to present and advocate realistic alternatives to Democratic policies; we need the Republican Party to represent the millions of Americans who are conservative. But the Party does its constituents a massive disservice when it allows easily disproved conspiracies to go unchallenged and become the unofficial Party line.
We live in a time when we have to take a lot of things on trust. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day for someone to stay on top of every issue in this country. It’s impossible. Institutions like the two main political parties make participatory government possible for the masses by providing a supposedly trustworthy shortcut. When a party abuses that trust by, say, allowing a noisy fringe into the mainstream, it’s bad for everybody. Ordinary conservatives get their views warped by having factually incorrect information foisted on them by their leaders (death panels!, Obama won’t produce his birth certificate!), and the rest of the country loses a legitimate political choice.
It’s one thing to throw red meat to the base to get them to turn out in November; it is quite another to hem and haw or wink and nod when confronted with provable falsehoods lest ye be tarred a RINO. Bob Dole, Bush the Elder, and especially Ronald Reagan, were adept at straddling that divide. Now, the once fearsome Republican hierarchy has become a pack of timid followers, afraid to say anything that contradicts the fevered fantasies of its badly misinformed base. They’ve let their party come unmoored from what they derisively termed “discernable reality”, and while it’s not a threat to democracy, it’s got the potential to do a hell of a lot of damage.
