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March 20, 2005
Emotion vs. Reason
Jim Hindraker over at Powerline has some thoughts on why the Dems can't seem to move on from their defeats. He had recently noticed a Paul Wellstone bumper sticker on a car in St. Paul, over two years after Wellstone's death.
It seems to me that many Democrats--not a majority, probably, but certainly most of the party's core--have gone into a state of permanent opposition. No election is ever over. No administration not favored by them can ever be legitimate. This is, I think, something new in American history--or modern history, anyway. In the past, elections were hard-fought, but when they were over, the lawn signs came down and life went on. Hatreds were not nursed--not, at least, on the mass scale that we see today. And people, by and large, accepted the quaint idea that once a government had been chosen by the majority, people should accept it and even, in foreign policy at least, give it their support.
I remember vividly a small dinner party a few years ago, at which all of our closest friends were present. They are all to the left, to varying degrees, of my wife and me. I can still remember our host's skepticism (who was once a hippie anti-authoritarian, now single-mom professional) when I stated that the baby boomer generation was spoiled rotten, and that we boomers had little appreciation of the hardships of our parents' generation.
To make a sweeping generaliztion, I think the root problem with the left is that at heart, they base their positions on emotion. And as the difficulties each succeeding post WWII generation faces diminish, the emotional focus of leftists falls on more and more trivial ideas, and elevates them to an importance they don't deserve on a comparitive historical scale.
And no, I'm not diminishing the threat of the Islamo-fascists, nor the tragedy of 9/11. But we lost over 400,000 men killed in WWII, and my point at the dinner party, which I still adhere to, is that we are ill-equipped to even consider those kinds of losses today.
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Comments
I think you hit the nail on the head. The left are most certainly more emotion-based in their interaction with the world. I'd love to see someone do a study that correlates political persuasion with Meyers-Briggs personality
I've always been surprised that no one (as far as I can tell) has found this to be the explanans for Hollywood's strong leftward tilt.
Think about it: they're "artists" by nature, and actors in particular. A requisite skill of an actor is complete submission to one's character, a process that leaves one incredibly vulnerability emotionally. (Hence, some are able to get amazing performances with real tears, etc.).
In short, Hollywood (and the left in general) probably have more active right-brain activities (emotion) than left-brain activities (reason, logic).
Posted by: Dave L at March 21, 2005 11:29 PM
