In which my brain breaks and I learn more than I ever did in a college classroom so far

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The Political Duality Of Rep and Dem by Paul Rosenberg

There's a rather far-flung concept in mathematics known as "duality." A few days ago it struck me how this concept can illuminate something very fundamental about the current state of American politics. It's a powerful, and far-reaching concept, but fortunately you don't have to grasp a great deal about it in order to get my point.

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The Basic Duality

(A) Democrats are reality-based when it comes to policies, and totally out to lunch when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.

(B) But Republicans are totally out to lunch when it comes to policies, and as reality-based as it gets when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.

Actually, that's just a first approximation. It's actually more rigorous than that, which is what makes it interesting. But that's enough to let you know the ballpark we'll be playing in, if you care to continue this exploration.

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One such example is Shawn Rosenberg (no relation), who emphasizes a greater role for the social environment, as opposed to seeing development as purely an internally-driven process. In his 1988 book, Reason, Ideology and Politics he lays out a three-fold typology of adult reasoning,
which is discussed along with other developmental approaches in an online papepr, "Structures of Geopolitical Reasoning":

* Sequential thinkers reason "by tracking the world," recognize regularities in sequences of events, but have no abstract understanding of cause and effect. The world they perceive is a world of appearances that has very little organization to it beyond the recurrence of sequences.

* Linear thinkers understand cause and effect, limited to a one-direction, one-cause/one-effect model. The world they perceive has logical order and structure, but the structure is invariably hierarchical, causality flows top-down, and the world is divided neatly into cause and effect.

* Systematic thinkers understand multi-faceted, multi-linear cause and effect, with mutual cause-and-effect relationships between different elements. The world they perceive is primarily a world of systems and relationships, rather than objects.

Because sequential thinking plays such an important role in movement conservatism, I want to elaborate it more fully. The first two points come from the paper linked to above, the last two from Rosenberg's book:

* The notion of causality, e.g. that events are caused by necessary and sufficient preconditions, does not play a salient role in the sequential mind. Events transpire, without much interpretation of how they come about. The attention is occupied by one item at a time, and there is little spontaneous effort to relate them to other items or to a general context.

* The sequential thinker is not really aware that the world may appear differently to other people, and he or she has therefore a limited ability to take the perspective of others.

* Sequential thinking involves conceptual relations that "are synthetic without being analytic. They join events together but the union forged is not subject to any conceptual dissection." [Direct quote from Rosenberg's book.] Because such relations are non-rational, there is nothing rational one can say or do to change them. (Sound familiar?)

* But they can change, Rosenberg explains, based on changing appearances. These relationships "are mutable," they can either be extended, based on "share[d] recognized overlapping events" (connections provided by Limbaugh, O'Lielly, etc.) or changed, when the sequence does not play out as expected. Because it is a pre-logical mode of thought, "the relations of sequential thought engender expectations, but do not create subjective standards of normal or necessary relations between events."

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Why Conservatives Can't Govern

In The Political Duality Of Rep and Dem, I made the claim that Republicans and Democrats are inverted mirror reflections of one another:

(A) Democrats are reality-based when it comes to policies, and totally out to lunch when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.

(B) But Republicans are totally out to lunch when it comes to policies, and as reality-based as it gets when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.

And I argued that there is a deeper, more specific explanation for why this is so. To lay the groundwork for that argument, I spent most of the diary laying out two related schemas for understanding human cognition in a stage-like developmental framework, and I presented an initial argument that liberalism represented a generally more advanced way of thinking about the world. In this diary, I want to take one main example-the defining example of the "war on terror"-to flesh out that argument some more by showing how the "war on terror" is heavily dependent on a low level of cognitive development. I will add some comments at the end about several other issues as well, to give the flavor of how such an analyisis can be generalzied into other areas as well. Then, in the next diary, I will look at how liberals and Democrats tend to be as clueless about politics as conservatives are about governance.

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Two Other Brief Examples: The "War on Drugs" and Abortion

I'd like to supplement the above exhaustive look at a single example with a few other observations about other examples, which I would like to deal with thematically, using a single example in each case to stand in for a number of other different examples.

First of all, a common movement conservative practice is to divide the world up into good and evil, and declare war on evil in a fashion that has no clear foundation in even a single simple causal explanation that one would find in linear thinking. The foundation of such an approach in Lakoff's Strict Father morality is fairly straightforward, but Lakoff's argument is largely separable from the argument here. (Lakoff does argue that there is a set of logical entailments involved, and I don't dispute this. But these entailments act primarily to structure the issue landscape, which is a different subject entirely from what I am discussing here, which is how arguments are presented within that landscape. )

Here my focus is simply on the fact that a good-vs-evil framework drives the argumentative assumptions, so that logic can be dispensed with almost entirely. A "war on drugs" means that we need not ask about why people might want to take drugs in the first place. Nor do we need to ask if the war on drugs might cause more problems than it solves. Nor do we need to ask if there might be other high-priority problems we ought to pay more attention to. These are all examples of systematic thinking that might lead us to question the "war on drugs" project-much less, of course, the obvious racism involved. But we don't even have to go there to see enormous problems with the "war on drugs" if we engage in systematic thinking as a matter of course.

When liberals-or even just reality-based professionals, such as criminologists, public health experts, etc.-try to raise such systematic concerns, they sequential response is simply to label them as "soft on crime," as "pro-drug," as lacking "family values," or something similar. It is simply inconceivable from within the sequential thinking framework that someone might agree with the assessment "drugs are destructive" and yet want to take a significantly different approach to dealing with them. It is even more inconceivable that someone might agree on the wisdom of reducing and controlling drug use without thinking that drugs are inherently evil, but only that they are inherently risky, and that the risk alone is reason enough to take prudential action.

Read the whole thing


Postively fascinating. And it backs up my thoughts that its not enough to stay in school. What we have to do is completely overhaul the curriculum, paying special attention to a proper accounting of history, as well as logic and critical thinking and statistical analysis as well, in order to properly raise the discourse of our current society, and thus its ability to see through political stage craft and bullshit and better direct its affairs. More tomorrow.