POLITICAL BIAS: DRONES AND VOTES

This morning on Chris Hayes’ show Up on MSNBC truly was a mixed bag. The first part of the program about drones was an irredeemable disaster based on ungrounded information and extreme naive left wing prattle well below the standards of the show. In stark contrast, the second part of the program dealt with extremely provocative and important work done by two political scientists David Brookman and Chris Skoveron. Skoveron was one of the guests on the show for this part of the program.

During the drone discussion, the guest disparaged the Obama administration for abuse of civil rights with such asinine statements implying that the program targeted 16 years old U.S. Citizens and wantonly targeted innocent people setting in restaurant—implying that the evil President targeted them because they went to a restaurant. They even implied that this could happen in any lunch counter in the continental United States. They ignored the fact that the 16-year-old boy was not the target but several people he was with were terrorist operatives who were the targets. That was bad enough but in addition, Chris Hayes even lowered himself to say Obama could redeem himself if he would only stop fighting terrorists; take the Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King approach to foreign policy. Where Hayes would draw the line in terms of measures he would or would not apply, he did not mentioned—that would be the hard stuff.

Their arguments were so illogical that I looked for another explanation. All I could come up with was the premise that their altruistic bias was so strong it defied normal logic. Some innate sense or genetic bias of wanting to help and not hurt people for any reason prevented them using more rational reasoning.  Their extreme altruism forced them not to be able to see their shared liberalism.

Following this idiocy, the guests discussed one of the best political science papers I know about. The essence of the paper was contained in one sentence in the summery as:

Moreover, there is a striking conservative bias in politicians’ perceptions, particularly among conservatives: conservative politicians systematically believe their constituents are more conservative than they actually are by more than 20 percentage points on average, and liberal politicians also typically overestimate their constituents’ conservatism by several percentage points.

People who read my blog (firetreepub.blogspot.com) know that I am an advocate of evolutionary psychology and that our individual politics or political behavior reflects our personalities; in a genetically determined way. It also means we can modify but not change these basic biases one-way or another according to our social environment.

This finding was both surprising and shocking but supportive of my premise. Read the following in Winner-Take-All Politics written by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, two well-placed political scientists. They suggest that most people do not vote from a knowledge base.

“This is the dirty little secret of our profession, among political scientists, that most voters are woefully ignorant about politics is completely uncontroversial, and has been for decades. The survey evidence on this subject is overwhelming. Yet it is not something widely disseminated, and a good deal of effort in the discipline is devoted to scrounging for reasons why the severe knowledge deficits of voters don’t matter all that much, and why Washington will be attentive to voters’ demands even if most voters are not well informed and not paying all that much attention”.

Which begs the question, “If this is true, then on what do these people base their vote?”  The premise of these political scientists trash the often-heard proclamations made by a successful politicians, which is that the people who voted for him or her are the “smartest” people. Perhaps what this paragraph means is that their genes dictated a  big part of their politics. The politician, his rhetoric or his actions, do not matter as much as he/she might think, which strongly reinforcing my premise.

Read the next sentence in the Brookman-Slovokon’s article summary:

These findings suggest a substantial conservative bias in American political representation and bleak prospects for constituency control of politicians when voters’ collective preferences are less than unambiguous.

How else can one explain why a working person would vote Republican; thus, vote, against their own interest. 

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