The American Prospect‘s Paul Waldman has done us all a great favor by reading and interpreting the latest batch of “campaign books” from prospective 2012 presidential candidates, including Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and Tim Pawlenty. And after duly noting the relatively low political value of such books, and the low standards governing the genre, he offers some key insights about what they reveal about the Republican zeitgeist of the moment:

Despite their surface differences, the books raise some common questions. How do we answer key policy questions? How important is God to our politics? Is Barack Obama merely wrong about everything, or is he actively attempting to destroy our country? Just how great is America?

Actually, that last question is something the candidates all agree on: America is stupendously great, awesomely great, so great that “great” doesn’t begin to describe its greatness — and Obama just doesn’t get it.

Aside from a peculiar emphasis on “American exceptionalism” that appears to exempt this country not only from healthy self-doubt but from ordinary logic and the lessons of human history, notes Waldman, the books are dominated by an equally unreflexive attitude towards the 44th president, who is always wrong:

In their attempts to understand Obama, the candidates again and again reach the conclusion that when Obama does or says something they like, he’s either shrewdly hiding his real intentions or has been cornered by political reality. When he does or says something they don’t like, he has revealed his true self. So Romney can claim, without any supporting evidence, that “another of President Obama’s presuppositions is that America is in a state of inevitable decline,” just as Palin avers that Obama “seems to see nothing admirable in the American experience.” How do they know this? Well, they just do. None of the candidates provides any quotations in which Obama apologizes for America because he never actually has. And don’t bother bringing up the hundreds of speeches in which Obama has lavished praise on this country, because as Romney says, “President Obama is far too gifted a politician to say in plain words that America is merely one nation among many.” However, if we take some things Obama has said out of context and make a series of absurd leaps in logic to arrive at the worst possible interpretation of them, then we will learn the truth.

America is great, and Obama wants to destroy it. That’s the overriding theme of proto-candidates working in the most expansive format they’ll ever use.

As it happens, I was involved as a “ghost” in a “campaign book” for a candidate running against an incumbent president in 2004, and I can tell you that George W. Bush’s sins and shortcomings were in the background, not the forefront, of the policy-heavy tome. And while the book was full of invocations of America’s greatness, they were deployed not to congratulate Americans for their superior virtue, but to encourage them to meet common challenges, most of which have yet, seven years later, to be seriously addressed.

It’s an open question as to whether GOP presidential candidates can make it all the way through the nomination process–and for the winner, all the way to November of 2012–on a message that essentially tells Americans there is nothing wrong with their society that firing Barack Obama can’t fix. I guess if you get all your information from Fox News, that’s a credible argument. But for everyone else, a positive agenda that goes beyond telling a suffering nation and world that they need to shut up and salute the flag (and oh yes, cut taxes and regulations allegedly afflicting their economic masters, from whom all good things come) might prove necessary.

Crossposted at The Democratic Strategist

Book Review: Going to Extremes, by Cass Sunstein

Back in 2005, a trio of researchers conducted a little experiment on deliberative democracy. They assembled groups of six citizens and asked them to get together to talk about a few politically charged issues (civil unions, affirmative action, global warming). Half the groups were made up exclusively of political conservatives, and half were made up exclusively of political liberals. The result: in almost every group, the individuals took on more extreme positions after talking with the folks who already agreed with them.

Similarly, a study of judicial decision-making found three-judge panels that were all Republican rendered more conservative decisions and three-judge panels that were all Democrat rendered more liberal decisions.

The above experiment and study form the take-off point for Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide, by Cass R. Sunstein, a smart book (now available in paperback!) that sets forth a pithy summary of how group polarization happens. It’s an especially useful guide to the obstacles to open-minded thinking for those of us who are trying to chart a course toward a more moderate politics, and so worth understanding.

The quick takeaway point is that what matters most is information. If you only hear one side of the argument, you are likely to strengthen your convictions that the one side you hear is the correct side. And the more your convictions are strengthened, the more you are likely to seek out only that one side and disregard anyone who comes to you with alternatives. In short, a powerful reinforcing feedback loop.

“A great deal of what we believe, like, and dislike,” writes Sunstein, “is influenced by the exchange of information and by corroboration.”

Sunstein explores a number of entry points into these kinds of reinforcing cascades of corroboration. A surprisingly large number of the entry points have more to do with social instincts than anything else. Individuals defer to other individuals who are of higher status; they defer to family and friends and social groups. Most people want to be liked, and most people have an intuitive sense that a good way to be liked is to agree – or sometimes to even do those whose respect they wish to gain one better. Groups are particular prone to follow confident people – even if those confident people are wrong.

Once people start in on a particular belief path, they tend to be on the lookout for information that confirms what they already think: “Consider the well-established finding that after purchasing a product, people tend to seek out information confirming that their purchase was a sensible one.” And once caught in a cascade of confirmation, it’s hard to get out of it. Sociologists call it “homophily” – a process by which people feel more connected to that which is similar to them.

The problem, Sunstein argues (borrowing a phrase from Russell Hardin) is that most people have a “crippled epistemology” – they know very little to begin with, and if what they know supports their extremism, they have no way to know that their position is extreme.

Worse, “people often ignore powerful contrary evidence,” writes Sunstein. “When people’s false beliefs are corrected, they might become even firmer in their commitment to those beliefs.” (One famous example of this is described in Leon Festinger’s 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, about how members of a UFO cult become more resolute in its beliefs after the group leader’s prophecy that aliens from the planet Clarion would rescue cult members from an earth-destroying flood on December 21, 1954 did not come to fruition)

Sunstein worries that in the modern media environment, self-selection into different camps is easier than ever before. “Many people appear to be hearing more and louder versions of their own views, thus reducing the benefits that come from exposure to competing views and unnoticed problems…The Internet creates more dramatic ‘stratification.’”

The way out of polarization, of course, is the standard bromide of entertaining alternative viewpoints. Sunstein urges “humility and curiosity.” In fact, after reading this article, you should probably immediately go seek out a perspective you disagree with, entertain it, and let it create a slight sense of doubt in all your previous certainties.

But the truth is, you probably won’t go seek that out. Or even if you do, it’s unlikely you will come to doubt your previous ideas. One reason is that what you find will probably be written from a completely different perspective, meaning that it won’t have much to say to somebody who isn’t already a true believe from the opposite perspective.

At the very least, it is helpful to have a certain amount of self-awareness. Sunstein’s analysis of how easily and almost effortlessly one can get caught in a self-reinforcing feedback process of one-sidedness is a little bit scary. What’s remarkable is just how easily the mind closes, and how much constant work is required to fight against it. In other words: those of us who care about moderation have our work cut out for ourselves.

On Tuesday, I put together some data highlighting the fact that there was a strong correlation between how much Democrats’ partisan identification had declined in the last two years and how white a state is. Since then, I’ve received many comments accusing me of saying that Democrats’ problems exist only because white people are racist.

One comment was extremely aggressive: “The race-baiting on display by Mr. Drutman shows the void of his intellect and his morality since he is deliberately unwilling to find the real reasons Democrats are failing everywhere.” Here’s another: “Yet another incident of failure of the intellectual left in the US. Barack Obama was elected by white voters as well as non-white in 2008; rather than look at what changed to disgruntle these voters (INCLUDING ME!) they play the race card.” And a third (sarcasm alert): “But, here we have it. Solid facts! Whites are racist!”; and a fourth: “Keep playing the race card. Please do.”

First of all, this may seem obvious, but I was merely reporting the data. There is an undeniable correlation between the percentage of whites in a state and the decline in Democratic partisan ID advantage. It also doesn’t take a genius to look at the polling data and see that Democrats and Obama are doing poorly among white voters, especially especially southern and rural whites.

But what impresses me about these comments is how quickly they went straight to the “race card” and “race-baiting.” It’s clearly a sore spot.

Of course, as far as I can tell, there are plenty of honest reasons that one would no longer want to identify as a Democrat that have nothing to do with race. There are plenty of reasons to be frustrated with the Democrats, and plenty of honest philosophical disagreements over what policies would serve the country best. As I wrote in the initial post, statistically speaking, whiteness of a state explains only 13 percent of the decline in Democratic partisan identification advantage. What this strongly suggests is that there are many factors.

But as Ron Brownstein has argued, there is also an emerging “New Color Line” that may have more to do with policy preference than with race, even if the two are sometimes hard to disentangle: “From every angle, the exit-poll results reveal a new color line: a consistent chasm between the attitudes of whites and minorities. The gap begins with preferences in the election.” In particular, the white voters seem to be particularly concerned with the size and role of government.

And it then follows that there are must be ways to address the concerns of white voters without making it about race. America may be becoming a more diverse nation, but it’s not a majority-minority country yet, and whites generally vote at greater rates than minorities. So Democrats need to take this seriously. As my colleague Will Marshall recently noted:

Progressives need to engage white voters more directly on questions about the size and role of government. We should be serious about making government more accountable, about enabling citizens and communities to do more for themselves, and about reining in runaway federal deficits and debts. But we should also stand firmly for public activism to rebuild America’s productive capacities, particularly our run-down infrastructure, curb out-of-control medical costs and make the promise of equal opportunity real for all citizens.

In one sense, the comments I received are quite instructive. They suggest there are white voters out there who feel accused of racism if they vote Republican, and they don’t like that. But they are also quite depressing. They suggest that there are too many Republicans out there who can’t respond to a presentation of empirical data without accusing me (a white who remains a Democrat and Obama supporter) of implicitly accusing them of racism.

I’m a number-cruncher. I’m not a race-baiter.