Filibuster CartoonsTitle: The political preferences of professions (click to view)
Date: January 9, 2012
The thing about Ann Coulter is that it's impossible to understand her mean-spirited flamboyance and rhetorical excesses unless you remember that she used to be a lawyer, where such skills are prized. The thing about Bill O'Reilly is that you won't really get his loud, bossy, strictness unless you remember he used to be a high school teacher. And the thing about Keith Olbermann is that his extreme overreactions to everything are the predictable outbursts of a former sports announcer.
I've long been interested in the idea that all politics is basically personal, and that the partisan ideology one eventually adopts is usually just a logical extension of some philosophy you already use elsewhere in life.
The most conventional example is the cliched "Christian conservative," whose identification with the Republican Party is but a mere outgrowth of his existing religious views on abortion, gay rights, school prayer, and so forth. As the party gets more religiously-influenced, in turn, it becomes increasingly common to see GOP politicians frame
every partisan debate — even on issues that the Bible is conspicuously silent about, such as raising the debt ceiling — though a black-or-white, heaven-or-hell moral dichotomy, since that's the mental framework they're already most comfortable using in the pews or at the pulpit.
But there are other religions in this world, too. I've noticed that a vast number of libertarians and Ron Paulites tend to emerge from backgrounds in computer programming or math, for instance, presumably because their fascination for an elegant, cold, unemotionally organized, ultra-rationalistic Randian universe syncs up quite nicely with the sort of elegant, cold, unemotional coding and equations they spend their days toiling over. Many comedians lean libertarian as well, though in their case I think it's the attraction of an untested "third way" philosophy. When you reject the conventional left/right axis, you have an essentially guilt-free base to bash the dopiness of both sides of any debate while simultaneously consolidating a general "everyone's nuts except me" worldview.
Much has been written about the leftist tendencies of the young, and how so much of this is a byproduct of general youthful optimisn and naivete (or stupidity, if you read the right-wing perspective). My own experience, however, is that an enormous amount of student leftism is spawned simply by the sort of socially anxious groupthink that tends to govern so much of life between the ages 18 and 25. In our current political zeitgeist, at least, conservatism is frequently (and more than a little ironically) associated with being angry, argumentative, irritable, and disruptive, while liberalism is the ideology of the calm, dispassionate status quo. Especially in the context of academia, self-identifying as a member of the right is one of the easiest ways to earn a reputation as an eccentric trouble-maker, and who invites
them to keggers?
From a personal perspective, the more time I spent drawing and writing about politics, the more I'm starting to understand the push towards bland, uncreative centrism that tends to motivate a lot of professional journalists. When you're constantly forced to read and follow and analyze and comment on every last little development of the political news cycle, there's a natural tendency to gradually stop thinking for yourself and allow the facts of the world to be entirely dictated by others; your sources, your editors, your contemporaries. You begin to see yourself as a mere conduit (or regurgitator) of information, and regard firm opinions as something
other people create to provide content for you. There are ideologues in journalism, of course, but I think the worst biases that trickle through the MSM are mostly a product of reporters who are too lazily moderate themselves to realize how badly they're being played by one side or the other.
Then you have your extreme fringe, your fascists, your communists, your terrorists and fundamentalists. Leaving aside the mentally ill, to be drawn to anything this extreme usually requires some severe degree of social isolation or misanthropy, excellent breeding grounds for elaborate and horrific ways to correct a world that done you wrong. Any ideology speculating that everything unjust in the universe is the sole product of a sinister, elaborate, hidden conspiracy will obviously have enormous traction with the sort of people who feel their own failures are frustratingly inexplicable, and who are already predisposed to see enemies everywhere. But even then, it appears some base fascination with efficient solutions to complex problems seems to be a common variable as well. A 2009 study, for instance, found that Islamist terrorists were
three to four times more likely to have backgrounds in engineering than any other field of study.
Of course, these are just a few of the subcultures I consider myself relatively well-versed in. In your own lives, have you noticed many instances of people whose political views are a predictable extension of the sort of thinking rewarded by their careers or communities? How rare is it for partisanship to be truly forged in a vacuum?
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