I’m hoping anyone who was not already an avid Stone reader (the New York Times column moderated by the guest on this week’s podcast) is now becoming a regular visitor to the site.
Personally, I’m finding the contributions of regular columnist Gary Gutting particularly interesting and relevant to subjects brought up on Critical Voter. But the remarkable Harvard psychology professor and all-around big thinker Steven Pinker has a piece in today’s Stone that illustrates two important subjects covered on this site.
The piece, entitled Why Are States so Red and Blue? tries the answer the question of why our electoral map has stayed so stable for the last several decades, with states that voted Republican or Democrat predictably doing the same year after year.
In the first half of the article, Pinker makes the argument that political ideologies provide a placeholder that can help guide people on a wide range of issues. He then proceeds to lay out the nature of the two predominant ideologies in America today: Conservativism and Liberalism.
While his argument and interpretations are open to critique and even criticism, the point I’d like to highlight is that the author has put the effort into describing each ideology in a way that would likely be accepted by a thoughtful holder of either political persuasion. In other words, he has employed the Principle of Charity or (as Kevin deLaplante might put it) has assumed the role of an actor whose job it is to portray a Liberal or a Conservative ideas in a way that would convince a sincere holder of either political belief system that the author understands where they are coming from.
Far from discrediting him as a wishy-washy, on-the-one-hand-and-at-the-same-time-on-the-other, “No Label” un-ideologue, the presentation Pinker makes provides his argument enormous credibility. For by using the strongest arguments of Conservatives and Liberalism as his starting point, his own arguments cannot be easily dismissed as biased (as would a story that began with a reasonable description of one political party and a parody of the other).
Having said this, the author’s piece does end up suffering due to bias. Just not political bias.
In this case, the author has spent the last several years working on a book entitled The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined which makes the controversial argument that our current day and age represents the least violent period in human history and that this lowering of violence is the result of the spreading of modern political beliefs and economic principles.
Pinker’s thesis has already raised a number of hackles, the nature of which I won’t go into (although you can read some serious debate on the subject here).
But the point I’d like to make is that Pinker’s fascination with the subject (understandable since he’s been thinking about, writing about and defending it for so long) has caused him to interpret a phenomenon (the sorting of voters into politically like-minded states) through the lens of an issue (violence) that might not be as important as the author thinks it is.
Yes, Western states are places where men once had to take the law into their own hands, and thus people who live there (especially those whose families were involved with maverick industries such as ranching and wildcat oil drilling) will gravitate towards political ideologies that emphasize rugged individualism (vs. descendents of farmers who might think in terms of cooperation and community).
But then why should Southern states (which were every bit as agricultural as Northeastern ones) ally with the cowboys of the West vs. their fellow farmers of the North? Perhaps their history of slavery and plantations can square the circle, but this might only serve to shore up an argument that suffers from other weaknesses.
For instance, how does Pinker’s formula square the South’s swing from Democratic to Republican since the 1960s? The common wisdom is that Democratic-led desegregation caused this switch, which (even if you want to argue that common wisdom) at least highlights the fact that contemporary political events and party dynamics play more of a role than historic determinism going back a century earlier.
We could go on in this manner (looking at shifts in population as industries moved south and west, for example, or thinking about how people have sorted themselves into like-minded communities at the local as well as state level of the last few decades) to find other reasonable explanations for the stability of our current red-blue political map.
Pinker’s explanation deserves a seat at the table, but only alongside these and other additional or alternative explanations. And anyone holding one of these positions needs to examine the biases they may be bringing to that table, including biases towards ideas you care about enough to have written a best-selling book about them.
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