Horizon

Ben, I'm about to pirate most of your post here, but a couple of comments: 1) one of your links to Language Log is incorrect; and 2) if you lay the map of religious denominations county-by-county along side a map of Bush/Kerry voters county-by-county, it isn't so persuasive. Yes, Mormons tend overwhelmingly to vote Republican, but there's a shaft of Kerry counties running up the Mississippi River from New Orleans almost all the way to its origins that isn't represented by any index of religious influence. I suspect that it's largely because black Baptists, like African Americans generally, tend to vote Democrat overwhelmingly; and, if you group all Baptists together, they get colored Republican.

Thank you for the notes, Ralph.

Some of us here at Horizon have a long, proud tradition of sneering at historical map analogies, so I'm pleased to see you join in.

I suspect Ann Coulter is much more well known than Harry Reid.

But really, though, I think Chris Bowers makes an excellent point. Probably a solid majority of voters base their decisions on their own self image. If a candidate projects a character (easily faked by any decent politician) which people feel positively towards, many many people are very likely to vote for that person and just trust them on the rest.

If this is true, then the problem, if you think there is one, might come down to gullibility. We are, after all, very gullible people: we continue to respond to TV ads that are plainly designed to manipulate us by an industry full of experts with their own titles. And so it is when it comes to politics. Mr. Bowers is right that "wonks" need to understand this.

I like this from Gopnik's article:

Far fewer people were killed by the guillotine than in the Napoleonic battles of Austerlitz and Borodino.

And what does this prove? Are people wrong in thinking that the means and ends of a death matters in some non-statistical way? This reminds me of people who say that the total number of Americans killed in the Vietnam war was around the amount of Americans killed each year in auto accidents.

So?

For better or worse dying in battle and being executed (or dying in a car wreck) do not seem exactly equivalent, as much as some might like to blur that distinction.

And now I'm thinking about it, especially after reading this article on US incarceration rates, particularly this quotation from the New Left Review:

To understand these phenomena [the disproportionate representation of African Americans in US prisons and its causes, presumably], we first need to break out of the narrow “crime and punishment” paradigm and examine the broader role of the penal system as an instrument for managing dispossessed and dishonored groups. And second, we need to take a longer historical view on the shifting forms of ethno-racial domination in the United States. This double move suggests that the astounding upsurge in black incarceration in the past three decades results from the obsolescence of the ghetto as a device for caste control and the correlative need for a substitute apparatus for keeping (unskilled) African Americans in a subordinate and confined position—physically, socially, and symbolically.

All such moves, as intellectually exciting or infuriating (depending on your politics) as they may be, rely on the willful flattening of important distinctions, among other questionable strategies.

Am I wrong in thinking that Foucault was an early master of this?

The thing about voters and their own self image is that it comes into play both positively and negatively, and we rarely pay attention to the latter.

Take religious identity. A friend of mine from German/Slovenian Catholic family in the midwest once told me he'd always assumed that voting Democratic was just a part of being Catholic, along with fish on Fridays and having an accordionist at any family gathering. I'd call that sort of cultural party identification a positive one, in that its adherents incorporate partisan support into their identity without any sort of conscious analysis of positions, platforms, or rhetoric. This seems very well studied as part of campaign strategies.

The negative identification comes in when a person views their religious identity as something totally orthogonal to their political identity. Perhaps it influences their opinions on some issues, but there's no melding of their party loyalties and religious identity. At least, not until they are asked to choose between the two — usually via careless or provincial rhetoric.

All such moves . . . rely on the willful flattening of important distinctions,

While you're certainly right that it's insane to equate the imprisonment of a convicted felon with the segregation of someone who was born with the wrong skin color, the mushiness of some of our drug laws have had the effect the quote is getting at. See the 1999 Tulia sting, for example. That said, the proper counter for overreach by unjust law enforcement should be a more careful delineation of guilt from innocence, rather than the quote's declaration that there is no difference.

I don't see what relevance that case has to the issue of incarceration rates and drug laws. Unless I am missing something, there is nothing about that case which hinges on drug laws in particular. The problem appears to be an unreliable witness and apparently a racist or at least corrupt sheriff.

the mushiness of some of our drug laws have had the effect the quote is getting at

This is exactly what I mean. This kind of argument implicitly argues that "the effect" is all that matters. As long as this effect is consistent with a particular ideology, it is assumed to be true and no further argument for or against the claim is seen as necessary. Its mere statement is sufficient, regardless of how many alternative explanations for the same data there may be and regardless of how outlandish the explanation may appear. In fact, the more outlandish the claim the more it is valued, mainly, I believe, because the more outlandish the conceit the more clever the author seems. Why else would this be John Donne's most famous poem?

It's all aesthetics, when you get down to it. I keep pointing this out but no one takes me seriously. Arguments are aesthetic objects. Thoughts have aesthetic value. And this has more to do with our evaluation of arguments than we would like to admit.

Note that I am not talking about how arguments are presented, though obviously that is important as well.