Prompted by the Libby verdict, a fascinating piece from the Washington Post's "Department of Human Behavior" appeared Monday, titled "Disagree About Iraq? You're Not Just Wrong -- You're Evil."
First the basics: "The contours of th[e] debate [over Iraq] are straightforward. Opponents of the war believe passionately that President Bush, his neoconservative allies and a complicit Congress deliberately misled the nation into war. Supporters of the president and the war concede that mistakes were made..., but say this involved no attempt to hoodwink the nation.
"Antiwar groups declared that the Libby trial laid bare the Bush administration's smear campaign to discredit a war critic.... Supporters of the administration and the war declared the trial showed that Bush had done nothing to mislead the nation and that war opponents are being paranoid."
Then it really starts to get interesting:
"From a psychological perspective [it] is not that supporters and critics disagree, but that large numbers of people on both sides claim to know the motives of people who disagree with them."
A good hook. Then came the jab:
"A wide body of psychological research shows that on any number of hot-button issues, people seem hard-wired to believe the worst about those who disagree with them."
But after the jab came what I'd tally as a wildly missed cross:
"It is important to note that the experiment does not establish which version of Bush's motives is true. It is possible, in other words, that everything you believe about Bush's motives is true and everything that your opponents believe is false. But a number of studies suggest people ought to be cautious about such conclusions. Studies have found, for example, that people believe that those who disagree with them are less informed and that those who agree with them are better informed. On issues in which information is widely available, people concede that their opponents are knowledgeable but insist that their conclusions are self-serving and biased."
Ah, there's what is at the heart of the missed blow: "self-serving and biased." At least in the war "debate," much of the relevant "psychological research" folds like a sophistic house of cards, because, without chewing up a couple gibabytes repeating it here, the record shows beyond any doubt that, indeed, "Bush, his neoconservative allies and a complicit Congress deliberately misled the nation into war." There simply is no legitimate debate on this; no two, roughly matched opponents; no equivalency in objectivity. We have, instead, a knockout decision. It's over.
And that's where it gets even more fascinating, psychologically speaking. For even though many Bush supporters know what others know, they continue to rally -- but only, I've noticed, when they're being pummeled against the ropes.
If you read this commentary regularly, you know I'm also fascinated by talk radio and its chorus of True Believers. Nothing speaks of BushSpeak like the cattle herd of Fox News loyalists who ring up their AM radio station to bellow the latest party line. Yet here, I've noticed a curious shift of late.
When it comes to the Bush administration, the herd has largely gone quite. In fact, whenever yet another major story breaks that lends even more excess evidence on the administration's wretched degeneracy, the story is a virtual guarantee that callers will register opinions about the local schools, or state legislature, or latest gardening techniques -- anything but Bush Inc. One reasonably assumes they're too damned embarrassed.
So I call to stir the pot. Only then does their bloodied partisanship commence (and almost invariably suited up not so much in defense of George Bush as in retaliatory scorn of Bill Clinton). One recent morning I called simply to note their silence on all things Bushie and further note -- poke, poke -- that it must be a product of shame. One by one the Clinton-hating Bush-lovers then frothed in unison; but still, they had to be poked -- and hard. Otherwise they preferred to ignore the whole mess. In short, Bush's willing defenders are thinning out to a true, lunatic fringe that sounds more lunatic than ever.
What to conclude? Theologian and all-round genius Reinhold Niebuhr once put it succinctly: "Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure."
In other, less eloquent words, the right's strident partisanship is inversely proportionate to its defensibility. And that, it would seem, is what's at work these days in the right's embarrassed little minds.
So stoke the fire, to mix more metaphors. Maybe they'll blow.