Today In Bullshit

Probably the biggest downside to having professional training in psychology is learning to cope with the cringe response as mainstream news and opinion types contort the discipline in idiotic ways to support arguments that mostly aren't worth making. A sterling example of this is an article published today on Slate as part of an ongoing series on "how your unconscious mind shapes you" that attempts to explain today's heated political climate by comparing the collective partisanships of the left and right to a married couple seeking counseling. The author, Shankar Vedantam, draws on research on predictors of marital conflict and dissatisfaction (conducted by John Gottman, the biggest name in the marital therapy field) to enlighten us on the fact that the "right" is expressing anger toward the "left" while the "left" is expressing contempt toward the "right," which by the way, is provably more toxic to the health of a marriage, and therefore worse for society by the logic of Vedantam's incredibly tortured analogy.

The first point to make here is one that's so obvious that Vendantam acknowledges it himself in the second to last paragraph of his article: opposing political persuasions are nothing like a marriage. The point of marriages are to help facilitate bonds of love and support between partners, which can be threatened by an excess of disagreement and dispute. Politics is about disagreement and dispute. If it wasn't, there'd be no need for multiple political points of view.

I suppose Vedantam might make the argument that our political discourse today is uniquely marked by anger on one side and contempt on the other, and that the emotional tone is baked in unconsciously to one's political leanings (this may be the point that he's making in the article, but it's difficult to tell because it's such an incoherent piece of work). That doesn't wash, though, because political tone, like everything else in politics, varies dramatically based on who's in power and who's out of it. Think back to the bygone days of the 2004 election, when Republicans controlled the executive and legislative branches. At that time, the Democratic base was at the peak of a nearly decade-long angry fist shake at George W. Bush. Meanwhile, the Republican base was sneering at John Kerry for having the sheer balls to be a decorated Vietnam veteran. Do those emotions sound familiar?

The thing that really gets me about this article is that it pulls the old trick of analyzing our "political discourse" without actually much, if any, reference to those who hold political office. I suppose if your sample size for liberal thinking is a smattering of blogs and Keith Olbermann, you could make the argument that contempt for the right is a dominant emotion, but wouldn't it be a good idea to mention President Barack Obama, who ran on promises to pursue bipartisan compromise and has, with severely limited success, actually tried to do so? This "both sides are at fault" thinking has gotten almost comical in an age where Senate Republicans have filibustered close to a hundred bills in the past 20 months.

So, no, marriage counseling can't tell us anything about liberals and conservatives.