Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | 324.973 WES | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
The Political Brain is a groundbreaking investigation into the role of emotion in determining the political life of the nation. For two decades Drew Westen, professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, has explored a theory of the mind that differs substantially from the more "dispassionate" notions held by most cognitive psychologists, political scientists, and economists--and Democratic campaign strategists. The idea of the mind as a cool calculator that makes decisions by weighing the evidence bears no relation to how the brain actually works. When political candidates assume voters dispassionately make decisions based on "the issues," they lose. That's why only one Democrat has been re-elected to the presidency since Franklin Roosevelt--and only one Republican has failed in that quest.
In politics, when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins. Elections are decided in the marketplace of emotions, a marketplace filled with values, images, analogies, moral sentiments, and moving oratory, in which logic plays only a supporting role. Westen shows, through a whistle-stop journey through the evolution of the passionate brain and a bravura tour through fifty years of American presidential and national elections, why campaigns succeed and fail. The evidence is overwhelming that three things determine how people vote, in this order: their feelings toward the parties and their principles, their feelings toward the candidates, and, if they haven't decided by then, their feelings toward the candidates' policy positions.
Westen turns conventional political analyses on their head, suggesting that the question for Democratic politics isn't so much about moving to the right or the left but about moving the electorate. He shows how it can be done through examples of what candidates have said--or could have said--in debates, speeches, and ads. Westen's discoveries could utterly transform electoral arithmetic, showing how a different view of the mind and brain leads to a different way of talking with voters about issues that have tied the tongues of Democrats for much of forty years--such as abortion, guns, taxes, and race. You can't change the structure of the brain. But you can change the way you appeal to it. And here's how...
Author Notes
Drew Westen received his B.A. at Harvard, an M.A. in Social and Political Thought at the University of Sussex (England), and his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at the University of Michigan, where he subsequently taught for six years. For several years he was Chief Psychologist at Cambridge Hospital and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. He is a commentator on NPR's "All Things Considered" and lives in Atlanta.
Reviews (1)
New York Review of Books Review
BETWEEN 2000 and 2006, a specter haunted the community of fundamentalist Democrats. Members of this community looked around and observed their moral and intellectual superiority. They observed that their policies were better for the middle classes. And yet the middle classes did not support Democrats. They tended to vote, in large numbers, for the morally and intellectually inferior party, the one, moreover, that catered to the interests of the rich. How could this be? Serious thinkers set to work, and produced a long shelf of books answering this question. Their answers tended to rely on similar themes. First, Democrats lose because they are too intelligent. Their arguments are too complicated for American voters. Second, Democrats lose because they are too tolerant. They refuse to cater to racism and hatred. Finally, Democrats lose because they are not good at the dark art of politics. Republicans, though they are knuckle-dragging simple-tons when it comes to policy, are devilishly clever when it comes to electioneering. They have brilliant political consultants like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, who frame issues so fiendishly, they can fool the American people into voting against their own best interests. This literature was never taken seriously by sophisticated Democrats, but it thrived nonetheless. Still, you'd think it would be pretty much extinct now that Democrats are winning and Republicans are in the midst of a historic meltdown. But Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University, has come forth with a late entry in the field, and his book, "The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation," is enjoying a vogue. He takes an interesting dollop of neuroscience and uses it to coat the conventional clichés of the Why Democrats Lose genre. Westen begins by noting that recent research has shot holes through the theory of the dispassionate rational mind that emerged from the 18th-century Enlightenment. People rely upon emotion to drive the decision-making process and reach conclusions that make them feel good. Reason and rationality, therefore, play a limited role in political decisions. "The dispassionate mind of the 18th-century philosophers," Westen says, "allows us to predict somewhere between 0.5 and 3 percent of the most important political decisions people will make over the course of their lives." He then goes on to assert that Democrats have been losing because they have been appealing to the rational part of the mind. They issue laundry lists of policies and offer arguments with evidence. They don't realize how the images they are presenting set off emotional cues that undermine their own campaigns. For example, the right side of John Edwards's mouth tends to curl up. "Humans innately dislike facial asymmetries," Westen observes, "and this should have caught the eye of his advisers." In Connecticut, Ned Lamont ran a commercial showing Joe Lieberman morphing into George Bush, but in the ad Lieberman was smiling. "Smiling faces innately activate parts of the brain (and facial mimicry on the part of the observer) that reinforce happiness, not distaste." Republicans, Westen continues, are brilliant at using words and images that set off emotional cascades. Ronald Reagan used the word "confiscation" in reference to taxation, and was able to persuade people to agree to lower taxes. He called Nicaraguan contras "freedom fighters" and was able to secure them funding. Westen urges Democratic candidates to go for the gut, and includes a number of speeches that he wishes Democratic candidates had given. He wishes, for example, Al Gore had hit George Bush harder for being a drunk. He wishes Gore had interrupted a presidential debate and barked at Bush, "If someone is going to restore dignity to the Oval Office, it isn't a man who drank his way through three decades of his life and got investigated by his father's own Securities and Exchange Commission for swindling people out of their retirement savings." At another point, he imagines Gore exploding: "Why don't you tell us how many times you got behind the wheel of a car with a few drinks under your belt, endangering your neighbors' kids? Where I come from, we call that a drunk." If Democrats would go for people's primitive passions in this way, Westen argues, they'd win elections. This thesis raises some interesting questions. First, why did someone with so little faith in rational inquiry go into academia, and what does he do to those who disagree with him at Emory faculty meetings, especially recovering alcoholics? Second, the states of upper New England and the Pacific Coast regularly used to vote Republican in presidential elections but now they generally vote Democratic. Did people in those states become less emotional, and therefore more amenable to the Democrats' rational appeals over the past few decades? If so, has this led to a drop in Valentine's Day purchases, at least compared with people in passionate states like Nebraska? Third, how did John Kerry beat Howard Dean in the Democratic primaries? Was it because of his Oprah-esque displays of emotional intensity? Fourth, is it possible that substance has something to do with the political fortunes of parties? Could it be that Democrats won in the middle part of the 20th century because they were right about the big issues - the New Deal and the civil rights movement? Is it possible Republicans won in the latter part of the century because they were right about economic growth and the cold war? Is it possible Democrats are winning now because they were right about whether to go to war in Iraq? And if substantive policies correlate with political fortunes, what does that say about the human mind? Finally, if voter decisions are driven by the sort of crude emotional outbursts Westen recommends, and if, as he writes, "a substantial minority of Americans hold authoritarian, intolerant ideologies driven by fear, hate and prejudice that are fundamentally incompatible with Democratic (and democratic) principles," then shouldn't we abandon this whole democracy thing? Shouldn't we have a coup, led perhaps by the Emory psychology department, which could prevent the brutish and hate-filled from ever gaining control? IT'S rare that one comes across a book that raises so many questions. Of course it's rare that one comes across a book that so avidly flatters the prejudices of its partisan readers. The core problem with Westen's book is that he doesn't really make use of what we know about emotion. He builds on the work of Antonio Damasio, without applying Damasio's conception of how emotion emerges from and contributes to reason. In this more sophisticated view, emotions are produced by learning. As we go through life, we learn what cause leads to what effect. When, later on, we face similar situations, the emotions highlight possible outcomes, drawing us toward some actions and steering us away from others. In other words, emotions partner with rationality. It's not necessary to dumb things down to appeal to emotions. It's not necessary to understand some secret language that will key certain neuro-emotional firings. The best way to win votes - and this will be a shocker - is to offer people an accurate view of the world and a set of policies that seem likely to produce good results. This is how you make voters happy. Why have Democrats been losing? Because, Westen says, they appeal to the rational part of the mind. David Brooks is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.
Table of Contents
Introduction | p. ix |
Part 1 Mind, Brain, and Emotion in Politics | |
1 Winning States of Mind | p. 3 |
2 Rational Minds, Irrational Campaigns | p. 25 |
3 The Evolution of the Passionate Brain | p. 45 |
4 The Emotions Behind the Curtain | p. 69 |
5 Special Interests in Mind | p. 89 |
6 Trickle-up Politics | p. 117 |
Part 2 A Blueprint for Emotionally Compelling Campaigns | |
7 Writing an Emotional Constitution | p. 145 |
8 Aborting Ambivalence | p. 171 |
9 Gunning for Common Ground | p. 193 |
10 Racial Consciousness and Unconsciousness | p. 219 |
11 Death and Taxes | p. 249 |
12 Hope, Inspiration, and Political Intelligence | p. 283 |
13 Positively Negative | p. 317 |
14 Terror Networks | p. 349 |
15 Civil and Uncivil Unions | p. 377 |
Acknowledgments | p. 421 |
Notes | p. 423 |
Index | p. 427 |