During the Republican primary debate in Arizona a couple of weeks ago, CNN moderator John King asked one of those slightly askew questions that’s designed to poke through the candidates’ finely tuned allegiance to their talking points. What, King asked the would-be U.S. presidents, is the biggest misconception the public has about you? Here is where Mitt Romney went with that one: “We’ve got to restore America’s promise in this country, where people know that with hard work and education that they’re going to be secure and prosperous and that their kids will have a brighter ... Read More
Conservatives’ Politics of Fear a Biological Response
January 23, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
The tone of this year’s Republican presidential primary (which now seems destined to last much longer than Mitt Romney had been planning) seems sort of, well, fearful. One after the other, these would-be presidents have warned of looming threats — war with Iran, economic collapse, class warfare, social disintegration, illegal immigration — and have sought to position themselves as the best candidate for the job of protecting America. Their political advisers must understand a psychological phenomenon that researchers have been studying for some time now: conservatives appear to be ... Read More
Tarring Opponents as Extremists Really Can Work
December 7, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Back in 2002, when the male-only, members-only Augusta National golf club was picked to host the Masters Tournament, advocates of equality for women were taken aback. They wanted the tournament moved or the storied golf club opened to women. And their cause resonated with many Americans in an age when the public supports little outright gender discrimination. The campaign ran into a hitch, though: for many people, it became synonymous with Martha Burk, a feminist leader whose name frequently appeared in the national press alongside words like “radical,” “extreme,” and ... Read More
Reintroducing Paul Goodman, the ‘Public Intellectual’
October 18, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Once upon a time, there was something called a "public intellectual," and writer/pacifist/political radical/bisexual Paul Goodman was practically its template. Brilliant and witty, a New Left guru and regular TV presence on shows like William F. Buckley's Firing Line, Goodman was particularly famous thanks to his enormously influential 1959 book, Growing Up Absurd, in which he argued that society was so morally corrupt, youthful rebellion and disaffection actually signified mental health. "He's a wonderful example of an intellectual who was active as a citizen, who cared about young people, ... Read More
#OWS: Have We Entered the Age of Protest?
October 13, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The Occupy Wall Street movement is in many ways a sign of the moment. The unemployment rate has been hanging out around 9 percent for more than two years. Income inequality is rising. Washington's political system has devolved into dysfunction. There is, in other words, plenty to protest. But there's another way to think about what's going on in Zuccotti Park (and its far-flung spinoffs): People have many legitimate grievances these days, but they're also more prone to protest than in the past. Occupy Wall Street, in this sense, represents a particular moment in time when people are really ... Read More
Mapping the (11) Divisions in American Society
October 12, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Colin Woodard suggests that we've been vastly oversimplifying things by talking about America's internal divisions between red states and blue states, between "the coasts" and the "heartland," between the urban and the rural or even the North, South, Midwest and West. Instead, the veteran journalist slices North America (sans Mexico from Tampico south) into eleven culturally distinct regions that look something like a continentally gerrymandered map gone wild. Until more Americans grasp what this map implies, he believes, we'll continue to have a hard time forging national ... Read More
The Psychology of Political Stubbornness
July 28, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Politicians: They're slick and soulless, shifting positions shamelessly to stay ahead of public opinion. Unless they’re ridiculously rigid and inflexible, sticking to their principles even when doing so courts disaster. Unfair clichés? To be sure. But in rough, unsophisticated terms, these stereotypes delineate the extreme ends of our Congressional continuum. They’re reminders that even politicians from the same party, who advocate the same policies, can have dramatically different personalities. One political scientist argues this often-overlooked truth can help explain our elected ... Read More
Political Infamy Is Raising Money — For Both Sides
July 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
One bored weekend in the fall of 2009, political scientist Justin Buchler was sitting at his computer thinking about the things we think about when we think about Michele Bachmann. He typed the congresswoman’s name into Google just to see what suggested search terms would come up. “And very quickly I saw that several of the suggested searches were epithets,” he recalled. More specifically, these were the 10 recommendations: “michele bachmann quotes,” “michele bachmann wiki,” “michele bachmann census,” “michele bachmann photos,” “michele bachmann crazy,” ... Read More
Misinformation is as Close as Your Inbox
March 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The most troubling technological threat to civil, informed political discourse can be summed up in three words: You’ve got mail. A newly published study of Internet usage and political knowledge assuages one set of fears but raises another. R. Kelly Garrett of the Ohio State University School of Communication reports obtaining information from websites and blogs does not make people more likely to believe false rumors about prominent political figures. However, those inaccurate, often malicious reports are spreading — and gaining unwarranted credibility — through the medium of ... Read More
America Not as Politically Conservative as You Think
January 14, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Among the many memes floating around in the wake of the 2010 election is that America has taken a rightward turn, and conservative pundits seem re-energized in calling America a center-right nation. After all, a plurality of American voters (42 percent) now call themselves “conservative” — as compared to just 35 percent who say they are “moderate” and 20 percent who say they are “liberal.” Two years ago, moderates and conservatives both were at 37 percent. But new research suggests that pundits ought to be cautious of overinterpreting the conservative label: It doesn’t ... Read More
