The PoliTick: The Sad Pathology of a Daily Kos Author

So I read this. The Sad Pathology of the GOP Frontrunners. I found it less than objective and less than helpful to the debate, unless of course you're a Democrat looking to have your bias confirmed. (There's irony for ya, Frank Vyan Walton.)

What happens when you hear only what you want to hear.

I do think narcissistic personality disorder seems a good fit for Trump, but I don’t see it applying to Carson or Fiorina. Confirmation bias is a problem for virtually everybody wtih an ideological attachment to a point of view; I encounter it on just about a daily basis on Facebook argument threads. Carson in particular strikes me as relatively humble and not nearly as quick to irritability when challenged as Trump.

His defenders, however, are not required to hold to his standards of humility and decorum.

In any event, it certainly cuts both ways, as Walton's article both fails to point out and demonstrates in spite of itself. For an example, consider how frequently the “birther” controversy is portrayed as a conservative shibboleth, despite the much-publicized (and published, in this book) fact that the rumor of Obama’s Kenyan birth originated in Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff. To date, no liberal I’ve ever discussed the matter with has ever acknowledged this. (And of course, the controversy will remain alive so long as the videos of speeches, by both him--disputed, of course--and Michelle, mentioning him being born in Africa, are still around.)

The article is definitely highly partisan, as the paragraphs on the Bush administration demonstrate. The administration didn’t cook up claims of WMDs. WMDs were found, repeatedly, and our men were exposed to the chemical agents within them while handling them, as was revealed in a rather spectacular media circus earlier this year (although articles about the finds themselves go back as far as 2003 on my own bookmarks list). The only error in the administration’s assessment was that the program wasn’t “active and ongoing” at the time the munitions were found. The active, ongoing program was trucked over the Syrian border, and those weapons have since been used on civilians during the civil war there. Saddam gave Hans Blix and his personnel the runaround for months in order to orchestrate that export, which was witnessed by at least one CNN reporter who commented on the caravan’s border crossing at that time. The point was to keep Iran convinced that the WMD program was still active and ongoing, so that Iraq could retain its threatening posture. Saddam’s security personnel planted intelligence to that effect.

Of course, many Democrats opposed the invasion on general principle. Not all, to be sure, and not all Republicans supported it. What's nice about opposing something like an invasion is that if anything goes wrong, you can claim to have predicted it, and thereby support your position in post-facto fashion, regardless of what your actual objections were at the time. It's a way of claiming victory where none really exists.

Kinda like this.

This isn’t to say that the administration was free of error. There were intelligence failures, but the big one—that Saddam was hanging on to his WMD program—was one that fooled most of the world’s intelligence networks, not just our own, and therefore not just because of confirmation bias. My own sharpest criticism was that the runup to the invasion was far too long and overblown. The administration should have simply made its decision and acted on it. There hasn’t been a declaration of war since the end of WWII, since the UN now pretty much governs our foreign policy, and that’s not something I’m happy with, but if I were to leave my own druthers out of it for a moment, and talk strictly about consequences, the fact is that the invasion was a resounding success, and the occupation was a horrible morass. Saddam had months with which to seed his Baathist followers with weapons and explosives, because of all the debate and handwringing. Leaving aside the right or wrong of preemptive warfare, had the invasion simply taken place immediately upon identifying the credible threat of terror training camps in the northern wastes of Iraq, the occupation wouldn’t have gone the way it did. The insurgents weren’t, as a rule, Islamists driving out the Crusaders (although they did successfully recruit Islamists using propaganda to that effect). The insurgents were Baathists trying to regain control of their government.

But to blame the WTC attacks on Republicans is the worst sort of sophistry, especially considering the Clinton-era intelligence failures that played into it. The “couldn’t be true” effect afflicts Americans in general, not presidents of any particular party.

The most irritating thing about the article, frankly, is the fact that comments appear to be closed (or perhaps only available to Kos subscribers). I'd like to paste this weblog entry, entire, as my rebuttal.

It also omits some pretty essential information about the ideological divide, a subject which has concerned Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt as well. I always know when I’m reading a left-wing take on the science, as it always emphasizes this “fear based” aspect of conservativism and neglects the “moral dimension” aspect of liberalism. A truly objective take on the psychology of ideology would acknowledge what Haidt and Pinker have asserted on the subject. Pinker has pointed out—has in fact devoted an entire book to—the fact that leftism has a vested interest in denying certain aspects of human nature, that it relies heavily on the “nurture” side of the nature / nurture debate and in so doing denies the existence of human universals, and rejects the premises that we are innately violent and rapacious animals. This article would seem to suggest that the left isn’t above accepting that human nature exists, when it suits their purposes. (I’ve often expressed the blindness on both sides of the spectrum as relating to how each side relates to human nature. Getting public policy right is a matter of truly understanding the nature of society, and that in turn is a matter of truly understanding human nature. And conservatives will never truly grasp human nature until they acknowledge that we’re essentially apes; liberals will never truly grasp human nature until they acknowledge that we’re hierarchical, aggressive, territorial, competitive, pack-hunting apes.)

But whereas religious conservatives are generally interested in promoting a vision of the world they truly believe, many liberals appear to be deliberately distorting reality in order to secure votes for their party. You see this frequently in the context of economic debate, for instance, as well as in any of the more radical isms currently infesting our national discourse.

What Haidt found, during his global study of morality, is that it comprises dimensions that liberal academia have never admitted. Sociology profs have long asserted that morality is about “doing the right thing” by way of ensuring fairness and reciprocity in our actions. That is part of morality, yes, but only part. Haidt identified several other dimensions, that are now acknowledged as human universals, in societies ranging from the foraging tribes of Amazonia through the pastoralist tribes of lowland New Guinea, to civilizations both primitive and industrialized. (“Universal” here means only that it is found in every society, rather than in every individual. Pinker suggests that some kind of differential selection takes place in order to ensure that roughly half the individuals in any group are born with the neurological predisposition to be liberal, and half with the predisposition to be conservative. If true, then this mechanism would seem to be some kind of quasi-isotonic structure for promoting stability in society, by encouraging some individuals to agitate for change while others hold fast to tradition. This would be consistent with the general behavior of complex-adaptive systems, which all have the tendency to evolve, but which all also contain internal servomechanisms, coupled to negative feedback loops, that restrain the rate of change.)

So in addition to fairness / reciprocity—the subset of morality which can be generally regarded as “ethics”—there are other aspects of morality that are concerned with purity, sanctity, group loyalty, adherence to tradition, and so on. The point of morality, in an ethological sense, is to promote group cohesion, and it accomplishes this by promoting rules whereby individuals can identify each other as members of the group. The more culturally “like each other” we are, the more willing we are to engage in group defense, sharing, and other forms of altruism. What Haidt has found is that liberals tend to consider only fairness and reciprocity when evaluating moral issues. They ask the question “is this harming anyone?” and if the answer isn’t an immediate “yes,” they conclude that the action isn’t immoral. They ask the question “is this fair?”, and if the answer isn’t an immediate “no,” they conclude that the action is moral. Conservatives, by contrast, engage all five (or six, depending on who you ask) dimensions when evaluating moral issues. This is why both sides are at an impasse; liberals literally cannot understand the thought processes that conservatives engage in on some issues, and conservatives regard liberal thought processes as oversimplistic, even childish on those same issues. (As one of my uber-liberal friends told me during one debate, “It’s like we’re speaking two different languages.”)

But to point this out in an article of this kind would be to acknowledge that liberals lack nuance in moral processing, and that would defeat the purpose of an article intended to impugn the conservative thought process.

Is it fair to its subject matter? I don’t know enough about Fiorina to be able to say whether it applies to her. But I suspect that anybody running for national office will eventually have to develop a thick-enough skin that some personality traits akin to narcissistic personality disorder will emerge.

If I were to try to apply Walton's "rhetorical" approach to the current administration, I might come up with something like this:

...but I'm not sure I'm that mean-spirited. However, in the spirit of the resounding 2015 electoral victories for the Republican party, including the TEA Party, I do have to share this.