Why politics are stupid

But Silva was surprised to learn that many blamed themselves for their situations and believed that relying on others could only result in disappointment. After the book was published, it bothered Silva that she never pressed her subjects further on their politics to see how they might be connected to their worldview.

Silva spent over a year interviewing townspeople. She gained their trust, forged relationships, and spent time in their homes and at community meetings.

In an interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Silva describes a community that is racially diverse, hardworking and politically aware. But its residents are also deeply distrustful and shoulder immense amounts of pain and alienation. Can you talk a little bit about what inspired you to study working-class Americans? I was the first person in my family to graduate from college, and I experienced some self-doubt and discomfort when I tried to integrate into the world of academia.

In my position between two worlds — growing up with more working-class roots, and then building a professional middle-class life — I would cringe whenever I saw upper middle-class people treat working-class people with casual condescension or indifference.

It sometimes seemed like the very colleagues who most loudly proclaimed their commitment to social justice were the ones treating the administrative assistant like their personal secretary or complaining about the cost of their housekeeper.

Getting people to open up to me. I started off talking to white people. You spent months conducting interviews. Then the election happened, and Trump won. All of a sudden, there was a lot of interest in the very sort of community you had just spent time in.

It seemed like there was one dominant story: older white men, angry and in pain, were feeling bad about not having jobs and blaming racial minorities or foreigners. But Kahan would never deny that identity-protective cognition afflicts him too.

In fact, recognizing that is core to his strategy of avoiding it. Recognizing the problem is not the same as fixing it, though. I asked Kahan how he tries to guard against identity protection in his everyday life. Dan Kahan. Wikimedia Commons. At one point in our interview Kahan does stare over the abyss, if only for a moment. He recalls a dissent written by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in a case about overcrowding in California prisons. Scalia dismissed the evidentiary findings of a lower court as motivated by policy preferences.

Scalia is a highly ideological, tremendously intelligent individual with a very strong attachment to conservative politics. The question seemed to rattle Kahan a bit. The threat is real. Washington is a bitter war between two well-funded, sharply-defined tribes that have their own machines for generating evidence and their own enforcers of orthodoxy. The point of politics is policy. They experience it as a tax bill, or a health insurance card, or a deployment.

A political movement that fools itself into crafting national policy based on bad evidence is a political movement that will, sooner or later, face a reckoning at the polls. There, the reckoning will be for future generations to face. If American politics is going to improve, it will be better structures, not better arguments, that win the day. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all.

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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. What result does the study support? People who used the skin cream were more likely to get better than those who didn't. People who used the skin cream were more likely to get worse than those who didn't. Sean Hannity. Sign up for the newsletter Sign up for The Weeds Get our essential policy newsletter delivered Fridays.

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She hosted her own talk show The Susan Powter Show in the s. Tell us what you like and we'll recommend books you'll love. Sign up and get a free ebook! Trade Paperback eBook. For the economic outlook of , we have no doubt: it is politics. The cover of this Monthly Report features the four large capital cities where political events will undoubtedly determine our economic future in Washington D.

In Washington D. Ironically, it would be better if he does not keep his electoral promises. Now close to full employment, the US economy does not need such a strong fiscal impulse as the one endorsed by Trump during his campaign while in trade, imposing import duties on goods from China and Mexico would more than likely trigger trade wars that would be extremely costly for the world economy.

Fortunately we do not expect either to come about.