The New York Times maintains two conservatives in its stable of weekly columnists: David Brooks and Russ Douthat. Both are Bill Buckley acolytes and both are well worth reading. A week or so ago, Douthat offered some observations under the title “The Partisan Mind,” which Lucius Flatley thought worthwhile. He brought the column to last week’s coffee seminar. It was the topic of the day.
Douthat chose the recent range of comments on the TSA security provisions – the body scanning of airline passengers – as an illustration that opinions are frequently set because of who is performing the action rather than on the true facts of the case. He said that liberals would have been outraged at the new procedures if they had been put in place by George Bush. They would have called them “another assault on civil liberties.” At the same time, conservatives would have leaped to the defense, accusing the liberals of “being soft on terrorism.”
However, since Obama is in charge, the body scanning debate played out differently. The populist right “raged against the body scans” and the “Republican party moved briskly to exploit the furor” – while the liberals leaped to the defense of passenger groin grabbing.
Douthat went on to say, “This role reversal is a case study in the awesome power of the partisan mind set. … Instead of assessing every policy on its merits, we tend to engineer the arguments 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.”
Or, that the “outs”want to become the “ins” – as Lucius observed.
Douthat goes on to say that this wrenching of perception is seen not only in matters as inconsequential as pat-downs, but is potent enough to influence our views of broader realities. A majority of Democrats believe that inflation increased under Reagan, while in fact it had dropped. A majority of Republicans claimed that the deficit had increased under Clinton, while it had in fact dropped. Late in the Bush presidency, Republicans were twice as likely to tell pollsters that the economy was performing well, while Democrats were more likely to offer reverse opinions.
In the 1990s, Democrats largely embraced Clinton’s wars of choice in the Balkans and accepted the encroachment on civil liberties after the Oklahoma City bombing, while Republicans blathered about an imperial presidency. Then, come the Bush years, the positions reversed. The conservatives accepted an open-ended war on terror while Democratic partisans “took turns accusing Bush of shredding the Constitution.”
Stated broadly, most liberals seem to accept indefinite detention of accused terrorists and body scans as long as a Democrat is overseeing then. And millions of conservatives find those two actions a risk if Janet Napolitano is in charge.
In 2005, Gallup asked the public whether it considered the government “to pose an immediate threat.” Some 57 percent of Democrats felt that it did, versus only 21 percent of Republicans. In 2010, Gallup repeated the question and this time only 21 percent of Democrats worried about government, while 66 percent of Republicans doubted its good intentions.
The partisan statements by some of our political leaders chill the soul. When Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate, answers a question as to his intentions of dealing with our national problems by saying that his goal for the next two years is to ensure the defeat of the president; and when Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader of the House, in response to a question about the report of the bi-partisan commission on government economy, announces that it is “dead on arrival, hell no!” then some tires need to be changed on the national bus.
Lucius quoted Douthat’s closing thought: “On an individual level, the partisan mindset 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.”
Maybe that thought should be passed to our two Maine senators the next time a filibuster is ordered by their leader, Sen. McConnell.
Devil’s Dictionary ?quote of the week
PATRIOT: A herd member who compensates for a lack of self-respect by identifying with an abstraction.
Rodney Quinn, a former Maine secretary of state, lives in Gorham. He can be reached at rquinn@maine.rr.com.
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