Emotion, not logic, drives politics

A major interest behind a fair number of California Moderates posts was to see if arguing that emotion, i.e., political or religious ideology, (i) significantly drives people's political beliefs and world view and (ii) resonates with the public. In part, this blog was  an experiment to test the American appetite for logic and reason in politics. That was a conscious poke with a stick in the eye of the sleeping dog to see if it would wake up and bite. Would those logic/reality arguments resonate with the public? Well, within the confines of this obscure blog, they didn't. Maybe on a large scale these things might resonate.

Given the response so far, it looks like the sleeping dog (i) doesn't care, (ii) does care but is too busy to afford to pay much attention, (iii) is not educated enough or cannot think clearly free from emotional distortion, (iv) disagrees and/or (v) has a special (personal) interest in injecting emotion into politics (distort reality). Item (v) is a real killer - it has endless cash and some of the finest and/or wealthiest minds in America supporting it. Those are some of the main ingredients in the toxic stew called contemporary American politics. American politics since the end of the second world war betrayed and failed the U.S. public. Emotion is a key reason why it failed.

A reasonable conclusion: There are powerful incentives to inject emotion into politics. Emotion dominates politics because it serves special interests, not the public interest. That's political business as usual. That has already delivered to most of the American public a significant decrease in median income (about 9.8% since the start of the recession in 2007). If U.S. politics remains the same sloppy, emotional, irrational enterprise that it is now, we are going to see if (i) politics as usual can fix the messes it created, (ii) the situation rights itself despite business as usual or (iii) we go over the cliff and take a bigger and/or permanent hit to our standard of living. Time will tell.

Of course, if the situation rights itself despite their inept or even counterproductuive efforts, ideologues will claim full credit for the success. That too is just politics as usual.