The Partisan Mind

While I'd like to think that the TSA's recent policies have crossed
some sort of "line" that crosses partisan boundaries, there's much in
this essay that rings true to me.  Parties make us stupid.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/opinion/29douthat.html
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The Partisan Mind
By Ross Douthat
Published: November 28, 2010

Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush had been president when the
Transportation Security Administration decided to let Thanksgiving
travelers choose between exposing their nether regions to a body
scanner or enduring a private security massage. Democrats would have
been outraged at yet another Bush-era assault on civil liberties.
Liberal pundits would have outdone one another comparing the T.S.A. to
this or that police state. (“In an outrage worthy of Enver Hoxha’s
Albania ...”) And Republicans would have leaped to the Bush
administration’s defense, while accusing liberals of going soft on
terrorism.

But Barack Obama is our president instead, so the body-scanner debate
played out rather differently. True, some conservatives[0] invoked
9/11 to defend the T.S.A., and some liberals denounced the measures as
an affront to American liberties[1]. Such ideological consistency,
though, was the exception; mostly, the Bush-era script was read in
reverse. It was the populist right that raged against body scans, and
the Republican Party that moved briskly to exploit the furor. It was a
Democratic administration that labored to justify the intrusive
procedures, and the liberal[2] commentariat that leaped to their
defense[3].

This role reversal is a case study in the awesome power of the
partisan mindset. Up to a point, American politics reflects abiding
philosophical divisions. But people who follow politics closely —
whether voters, activists or pundits — are often partisans first and
ideologues second. Instead of assessing every policy on the merits, we
tend to reverse-engineer the arguments required to justify whatever
our own side happens to be doing. Our ideological convictions may be
real enough, but our deepest conviction is often that the other guys
can’t be trusted.

How potent is the psychology of partisanship? Potent enough to
influence not only policy views, but our perception of broader
realities as well. A majority of Democrats spent the late 1980s
convinced that inflation had risen under Ronald Reagan[4], when it had
really dropped precipitously. In 1996, a majority of Republicans
claimed that the deficit had increased under Bill Clinton[5], when it
had steadily shrunk instead. Late in the Bush presidency, Republicans
were twice as likely as similarly situated Democrats to tell pollsters
that the economy was performing well[6]. In every case, the external
facts mattered less than how the person being polled felt about the
party in power.

This tendency is vividly illustrated by our national security debates.
In the 1990s, many Democrats embraced Bill Clinton’s wars of choice in
the Balkans and accepted his encroachments on civil liberties
following the Oklahoma City bombing, while many Republicans tilted
noninterventionist and libertarian. If Al Gore had been president on
9/11, this pattern might have persisted, with conservatives resisting
the Patriot Act the way they’ve rallied against the T.S.A.’s Rapiscan
technology, and Vice President Joe Lieberman prodding his fellow
Democrats in a more Cheney-esque direction on detainee policy.

But because a Republican was president instead, conservative partisans
suppressed their libertarian impulses and accepted the logic of an
open-ended war on terror, while Democratic partisans took turns
accusing the Bush administration of shredding the Constitution.

Now that a Democrat is in the White House, the pendulum is swinging
back. In 2006, Gallup asked the public whether the government posed an
“immediate threat”[7] to Americans. Only 21 percent of Republicans
agreed, versus 57 percent of Democrats. In 2010, they asked again.
This time, 21 percent of Democrats said yes, compared with 66 percent
of Republicans.

In other words, millions of liberals can live with indefinite
detention for accused terrorists and intimate body scans for everyone
else, so long as a Democrat is overseeing them. And millions of
conservatives find wartime security measures vastly more
frightening[8] when they’re pushed by Janet “Big Sis” Napolitano (as
the Drudge Report calls her) rather than a Republican like Tom Ridge.

Is there anything good to be said about the partisan mindset? On an
individual level, no. It corrupts the intellect and poisons the wells
of human sympathy. Honor belongs to the people who resist
partisanship’s pull, instead of rowing with it.

But for the country as a whole, partisanship does have one modest
virtue. It guarantees that even when there’s an elite consensus behind
whatever the ruling party wants to do (whether it’s invading Iraq or
passing Obamacare), there will always be a reasonably passionate
opposition as well. Given how much authority is concentrated in
Washington, especially in the executive branch, even a hypocritical
and inconsistent opposition is better than no opposition at all.

At the very least, the power of partisanship means that there will
always be someone around, when Americans are standing spread-eagled
and exposed in the glare of Rapiscan, to speak up and say “enough!”

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on November 29, 2010, on
page A25 of the New York edition.

[0] http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/253829/let-s-give-thanks-tsa-marc-thiessen
[1] http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/11/23/tsa
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/23/AR2010112305163.html
[3] http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/45522.html
[4] http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/04/red-and-blue-economies.html
[5] http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/01/cable_news.php
[6] http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/11/how_polarized_are_we.html
[7] http://www.gallup.com/poll/143717/republicans-democrats-shift-whether-gov-threat.aspx
[8] http://www.slate.com/id/2275430/

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