#40 …partisans who aren’t activists don’t really appear on the radar screen of the people who like to talk about how rude everyone has become.
Perhaps not, but they show up at my kids softball games on a pretty regular basis…

It’s like Searle’s Chinese Room. The man in the room doesn’t know Chinese, and the room with its books doesn’t know Chinese. But man plus room, considered as a system, is a fluent translator. So a political milieu made up of warring extreme partisans seems more likely, in my opinion, to have a grasp of all the possible views than a fuzzy group of hugging Kumbayah singers.

Ugh, can you not be on my side?

There are many different paths by which people come to political activism. Going on about how partisanship makes people stupid is just a way of smearing anyone who is politically active as a thug.

Hold on to your tin-foil hats!

Now, it is a curious feature of the current configuration of the two American political Parties, that ideology, in a loose sense of worldview and general attitudes, is a very strong predictor of partisan identification. But, as another commenter points out, this state of affairs is historically unique; making something that never happened before in 180 years of American party politics into a universal seems a bit odd.

Partisanship, in the first instance, is about the Party as an alliance to obtain office and power. At its core, even in the absence of deep patronage, a Party is a mutual aid society among job-seeking politicians. Ideology and policy programs are just means (and not the only means) to broaden the alliance and enlist auxiliaries. In power, Party is a means for the disciplined exercise of power, but always with consideration for holding or obtaining office.

One of the peculiar features of American politics is that there are only two Parties. This must be considered a product of the Presidential system and the Electoral College, as parliamentary systems appear to allow the persistence of third and fourth and fifth Parties, even though two major Parties may predominate.

The constitutional function of Parties in government is to reconcile conflict into policy choice. Third Parties persist in parliamentary systems, because they always have some realistic hope of obtaining and exercising political power. Indeed, holding the balance of power in parliament, they may, occasionally, have outsized leverage, which may compensate for being mostly excluded.

In a Parliamentary system, the existence of third, fourth and fifth Parties can draw off obnoxious elements and idiosyncratic regional interests, leaving the main Parties able to fashion more coherent policy agendas and, even, ideological identities. It is a lot easier to be a coherent Party, when you only need 40% or so of the vote, than in the U.S., where it is necessary to aspire to 51%, when no third Party volunteers for the suicidal task of electing the Presidential candidate they like least. (The current Labour gov’t obtained its Parliamentary majority with 37% of the vote [22% of those eligible to vote]; nice work if you can get it.)

The impulses that give rise to regional and ideological third (and fourth and fifth) Parties in other countries must exist in the U.S. After all, the diversity of human ambivalence is universal. But, institutional arrangements frustrate and suppress the emergence of these Parties. This, despite the obvious potential to exercise power, afforded to centrist bi-partisans. The pressure to form a Party able to unite the loyalties of 55% or so, of the electorate, and the inability to sustain more than two Party identities, must generate frustration and resentment, as well as encourage the Parties to construct a “Big Tent” of strange bedfellows. It is in this challenging context of team formation that critiques of partisanship arise. To wit, complaints about the alleged “need” for a third Party are perennial, and tensions among broad, and conflicting coalitions, which concatenate unrelated issues into the party platforms and agenda. Many of the criticisms and complaints are really not about the nature of “partisanship” per se, but about there being only a binary choice in the U.S. system. All kinds of political philosophy, personal ambition, and material interests, identities, and regionalisms, must be folded into that diptych.

As it happens, the division of the Parties has put most of the authoritarians into a single Party, as others have noted. The authoritarian attitude cluster (and that’s all it is, a cluster of attitudes that seem to point to a category of personality style) has characteristics that would ordinarily point to low levels of political participation, but not alignment to a political program. They do tend to respect hierarchy, but they are also natural egalitarians. They are good followers, but poor team players and lousy diplomats.

Having most of the authoritarians in one of two Parties is certainly going to undermine any symmetry of organization or philosophy across the Parties. It does mean that distinctive attitudes are the the new Partisan “ideology”, which is may prove to be more elastic a common bond than interest, identity, or philosophy.

True. But wouldn’t you just get sued for plagiarism by Jonah Goldberg?

(Yeah, yeah, false dilemma again; no doubt I should surround this with lots of “it isn’t as available etc.)

Back on topic, it may be the case that political partisans are no more likely to be sucked into ideology and misplaced than other groups. But it doesn’t seem ridiculous that they might be somewhat more likely because they see themselves as actors and thus may fall prey to a sunk cost fallacy (I’ve worked so hard for this, how can I give it up now) that isn’t as available to others.

And look how it played out in this very thread. Robert writes “The right is much more likely to have RWA types than is the left. ” Which hasn’t been shown at all and is almost certainly garbage. Definitionally RWA types tend to support either the current regime, or tend to get sucked cult-like into counter-culture regimes. Whether or not they will be right-wing or left-wing in typical usage of the term is likely to depend on the location of the status quo. RWA types in Chavez’s regime are very likely to be left-wing. RWA types in modern Russia are likely to be former Communists. RWA types in the Ukraine are likely to be a weird mix. The whole point is that the definitional concept being described is not attached to right and left wing as normally meant. The problem I have with the term is that ‘right-wing’ adds essentially nothing to the term.

Authoritarian personality is just as good or bad a term with no extra confusing language. And frankly it captures the underlying personality trait better because it allows for the cases where the Authoritarian Personality type gets sucked into a counterculture-cult type situation or unwarranted revolutionary situation. (It allows for some Che or Mao followers to be easily described without getting into a stupid ‘left-wing right wing authoritarian personalities’.

Probably the whole thing isn’t that precise. A better description would probably to make it a subclass of something like ‘subordinating personality’ but whatever.

I suspect that many contemporary liberals would be torn between denying what I just said, and saying “I don’t see anything wrong with that”.

As I always say, republican populism is fake, but Democratic elitism is real.

Rich and I were on a thread elsewhere where I was trying to present an activist description and analysis of today’s media, and bumped up against two or three media historians who criticized it as “simplistic”, etc., from a historical point of view. There seemed to be no recognition that the way you sum up a situation in order to decide what to do about it (the activist view) might legitimately (and in fact, must) focus on different things and present things differently and than an objective historian from Mars would. I believe that they held the common academic belief that activist descriptions differ from academic descriptions by being wrong and dishonest, whereas it’s really just a different way of sorting, selecting, and presenting the data. Still less did they recognize that hands-on activism can be a form of research, and teach you things you couldn’t learn otherwise—and one of the media experts revealed his total ignorance of contemporary activist media criticism.

I’m just starting to read Hofstadter, and in the first few pages I skipped to I found him accusing perfectly sane Progressives and Populists of paranoia. I think that Hofstadter’s rejection of popular politics is wired into college teaching. (I haven’t read far, and maybe Hofstadter’s own view is more nuanced, but I think that that’s the way he is read and taught.)

I get the feeling that this view starts with using Joe McCarthy and Father Coughlin as the archetypal Populists, interpreting those who opposed WWII as Nazi sympathizers, which few were, and then lumping the WWI opponents in with them. The problem with this is that by doing so you effectively denounce a high proportion of the Progressives and left liberals who made the New Deal possible.

So after WWII we got professionalized, neutral, administrative liberalism, with the populism held firmly under control. And since 1968 we’ve had a faux-populist right (controlled by big money) repeatedly humiliating a professionalized, administrative Democratic Party.

Basically the Republicans, even the so called moderates your average toxic girl or boy friend that mom warned you about. Growing up, before Goldwater, it was a toss up whether to be a Republican or a Democrat, the Democrats were better on a lot of things, but supporting them, meant giving power to the segs in the south. The Republicans were a bit to the right of where I wanted to be on economics, but except for the fringe ok. This has changed.