Are the people stupid?

Charles Krauthamer in The Washington Post looks at how the left interprets political disagreement. When the left disagrees, it is noble dissent on behalf of the people, who are too stupid to know what's good for them. When the right disagrees, it is obstructionism in the service of cynicism: 

This being a democracy, don't the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Don't they understand Massachusetts?

Well, they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.

Liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate have been, post-Massachusetts, remarkably unguarded. New York Times columnist Charles Blow chided Obama for not understanding the necessity of speaking "in the plain words of plain folks," because the people are "suspicious of complexity." Counseled Blow: "The next time he gives a speech, someone should tap him on the ankle and say, 'Mr. President, we're down here.'"

A Time magazine blogger was even more blunt about the ankle-dwelling mob, explaining that we are "a nation of dodos" that is "too dumb to thrive."

Obama joined the parade in the State of the Union address when, with supercilious modesty, he chided himself "for not explaining it (health care) more clearly to the American people." The subject, he noted, was "complex." The subject, it might also be noted, was one to which the master of complexity had devoted 29 speeches. Perhaps he did not speak slowly enough.

Then there are the emotional deficiencies of the masses. Nearly every Democratic apologist lamented the people's anger and anxiety, a free-floating agitation that prevented them from appreciating the beneficence of the social agenda the Democrats are so determined to foist upon them.

That brings us to Part 2 of the liberal conceit: Liberals act in the public interest, while conservatives think only of power, elections, self-aggrandizement and self-interest.

It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good. A 2002 New York Times obituary for philosopher Robert Nozick explained that the strongly libertarian implications of Nozick's masterwork, "Anarchy, State, and Utopia," "proved comforting to the right, which was grateful for what it embraced as philosophical justification." The right, you see, is grateful when a bright intellectual can graft some philosophical rationalization onto its thoroughly base and self-regarding politics.

This belief in the moral hollowness of conservatism animates the current liberal mantra that Republican opposition to Obama's social democratic agenda -- which couldn't get through even a Democratic Congress and powered major Democratic losses in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts -- is nothing but blind and cynical obstructionism.

By contrast, Democratic opposition to George W. Bush -- from Iraq to Social Security reform -- constituted dissent. And dissent, we were told at the time, including by candidate Obama, is "one of the truest expressions of patriotism."

No more. Today, dissent from the governing orthodoxy is nihilistic malice. "They made a decision," explained David Axelrod, "they were going to sit it out and hope that we failed, that the country failed" -- a perfect expression of liberals' conviction that their aspirations are necessarily the country's, that their idea of the public good is the public's, that their failure is therefore the nation's.

James Yuill-- This Sweet Love

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Dirty Projectors-- Stillness is the Move

Man behind Tintin

Growing up in Morocco, my favorite comic book was Tintin, the swashbuckling globetrotter series that is being adapted into a feature film by Steven Spielberg. The New Republic reviews two biographies of the elusive creator of the series, Remi.

After the war, as he sought to defend himself from charges of incivisme (which may be roughly translated as “disloyalty”), Remi explained his conduct during the war as a kind of aesthetic quietism. Artists such as himself, he argued, had no special obligation to take a stand against political evil: they had a higher calling. This stance did not prevent him from being arrested, nor did it get him out of jail—his fame as the father of Tintin eventually got the charges dropped—but it did apparently assuage his own conscience. To the end of his life, he took virtually no responsibility for his wartime behavior.

Even as a collaborator, Remi was relatively innocuous. His worst crime was going along where he ought to have resisted. He is a study not in the banality of evil but simply in the banality of the banal. But Tintin himself is anything but banal, and Assouline devotes much of his book to analyzing him. Over the last decades of his life, Hergé worked hard to revise the Tintin adventures into a single, seamless tale. He erased as much as possible the evidence that his hero had changed between his first appearance in Le Petit Vingtième, in 1929, and the publication of Tintin and the Picaros in 1976. Assouline digs beneath this reverse-engineered unity to reveal a Tintin who evolved a great deal over time. He traces how Hergé developed and gradually added new characters to Tintin’s “family,” from the irascible Captain Haddock to the daft Professor Calculus. Politically, he charts the boy hero’s transformation from a political partisan fighting communism, Belgian colonialism and American capitalism in his first three adventures (all bugbears of the Catholic right in the early twentieth century) into a populist champion of the little guy, battling gangs, cartels, and villains. He even charts a deepening of Tintin’s emotional engagement, which culminated in 1960 in Tintin in Tibet, a highly personal book with echoes of Hergé’s real-life friendship with a Chinese art student, Chang Chong-Chen.

Girls

Easy equals true?

Well, as any advertising copywriter could have told you, it turns out that the human brain has a lazy streak, as you can see in this report from the Boston Globe:

One of the hottest topics in psychology today is something called “cognitive fluency.” Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard. On the face of it, it’s a rather intuitive idea. But psychologists are only beginning to uncover the surprising extent to which fluency guides our thinking, and in situations where we have no idea it is at work.

Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process - even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it - can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities. Similar manipulations can get subjects to be more forgiving, more adventurous, and more open about their personal shortcomings.

Because it shapes our thinking in so many ways, fluency is implicated in decisions about everything from the products we buy to the people we find attractive to the candidates we vote for - in short, in any situation where we weigh information. It’s a key part of the puzzle of how feelings like attraction and belief and suspicion work, and what researchers are learning about fluency has ramifications for anyone interested in eliciting those emotions.

“Every purchase you make, every interaction you have, every judgment you make can be put along a continuum from fluent to disfluent,” says Adam Alter, a psychologist at the New York University Stern School who co-wrote the paper on fluency and stock prices. “If you can understand how fluency influences judgment, you can understand many, many, many different kinds of judgments better than we do at the moment.”