What is Obama doing right?

In reading the interview with Rick Perlstein by the Chicago Review of Books this statement about how Rick conducts his history of conservatism jumped out at me.

...if you can’t feel what they feel, then you can’t take them seriously as political opponents. You see only the flimsy intellectual foundations and miss the motivating power of strategically harnessed resentment. From Adlai Stevenson to John Kerry, high-minded liberals have acted as if they were blind to the root feelings that feed the followers of politicians like Nixon and Bush. Instead, they alternate between expecting a fair fight on the issues (and getting swiftboated instead) and imagining that once people realize what a bad person Nixon or Bush is, the people will turn against him.

There is a lot in that statement.

Decision-making by resentment or logic

First, as is so often clear in many conservative policy decisions and their justifications, conservatives make the decision about what they want to happen first, then build a justification for it.

An example of this is the ideological concept that the free market solves all problems and is always better than government solutions. This is not an idea, it is an ideological presumed truth, never to be questioned. Whether real markets between independent buyers and sellers exist is never questioned, it is simply assumed that anytime a buyer pays a seller for something it is a free market. Also, the high cost of collecting data on other market transactions so that each transaction is embedded in the pattern of all other similar transactions taking place at the same time is ignored. These costs will exist anytime a real market transaction occurs, even if it is just like the dozen or so others just like it before and after. The fact that by sacrificing a little of the flexibility of a market decision in exchange for an administrative decision to follow routine could sharply lower the cost of the product or service to where market-based competitors cannot effectively compete is ignored intellectually (but not in business practice.) Similarly, government is dismissed because it operates with relatively rigid bureaucratic rules, and therefore can never be as good as a free market. The fact that human beings cannot mentally process large amounts of data without breaking it down and routing it to specialists who handle especially defined parts of the overall situation and therefore need an organizational structure that incorporates departments and specialized work roles in order to function is ignored. So is the fact that all large organizations, including all large business organizations, have the same human limitations of data processing and thus require bureaucracy in order to function.

Conservatives ignore the complications. They are interested in getting the job done the way their ideology directs, and the ideology is not to be questioned. This is emotional decision-making. The decision is made first, and then justified. But since the decision was actually made emotionally based on faith in the ideology, all discussion of the complexities and possible points of failure which the ideology excludes are ignored by conservatives.

A second example is religious Creationism or its Trojan horse, Intelligent Design. The Bible states that the earth was created by God in seven days. That is the decision. The justification is a sales pitch to attract believers to accept the previously made decision, and any facts that contradict that decision must be ignored or repressed. The key is that for conservatives, the decision is made first and the explanation for the decision is then built to sell the decision to other people. Facts to be used in that explanation are limited to the facts the "prove" the decision was correct, and facts either predicting failure or showing that the policy has failed are ignored or actively repressed.

This approach to decisions is difficult for liberals to understand. Liberals collect facts and then develop theories that both explain those facts and suggest where to look for additional explanatory facts. They also look for facts that show the theory has failed and when those are found, attempt to develop a new and better explanatory theory that includes the facts that contradicted the previous theory. Theories thus grow out of history and experience, and do not take on an aura of perfection the way ideologically justified programs do. The high degree of emotional involvement in the theory that justifies an emotionally made decision doesn't exist for liberals. In fact, they are always looking for facts that disprove an existing theory so that a better one can be built to replace it.

What is the difference between conservatives and liberals? Whatever it is, it appears to be something each is born with. Psychologists would say that liberals have a personality structure that includes a Tolerance for ambiguity. "Ambiguity tolerance is the ability to perceive ambiguity in information and behavior in a neutral and open way." A liberal who makes a decision recognizes that the decision is imperfect and may well be wrong, either in detail or overall, and so he will build in measures to help recognize both problems and failure.

Conservatives tend to be different. They have an ambiguity intolerance. This "... was defined in 1975 as a 'tendency to perceive or interpret information marked by vague, incomplete, fragmented, multiple, probable, unstructured, uncertain, inconsistent, contrary, contradictory, or unclear meanings as actual or potential sources of psychological discomfort or threat.'" That discomfort or threat will drive many people to a degree of anxiety. Anxiety creates "... the feelings that we typically recognize as fear, apprehension, or worry."

If making a decision and being aware that it is certainly imperfect and maybe wrong leads to fear, apprehension, or worry, then a very effective solution is to find a leader who will make the decision and who declares that the decision is perfect. Then the conservative needs only to justify a decision which he already knows to be perfect because his authority has told him it is. Not only is that decision presumed perfect, any effort to analyze it in detail that might lead to finding flaws in ti will also lead to that same ambiguity and anxiety that assuming the decision was perfect relieved him from.

Liberals without empathy for conservative feelings are blind to the different approaches to decision-making

Liberals running for office tend to reduce policy and decisions to sets of non emotional facts and expect the fact to speak for them. Conservatives are making decisions based on ambiguity intolerance and resentment that their feelings are ignored. This is exactly what was being said when voters said that Bush was someone that they could be comfortable drinking a beer with, while both Gore and Kerry were considered out of touch elitists. This is what the poll question "Do you feel that the (named candidate) is like you?" gets at.

The campaign approaches of the Democratic candidates

Obama offers rhetoric that suggests he understands how the conservatives feel, while Clinton is offering in-depth logical policy positions and Edwards is appealing to those liberals who consider conservatives to be bad people and who reject everything that is conservative because it has proven itself to be so destructive to America.

I'd say that Obama is avoiding describing conservatives as bad people and instead is trying to show that he recognizes and respects their feelings. He is also avoiding presenting much policy. Clinton is offering herself as best able to deal with the swiftboating the Republicans will conduct and as having more real Senate experience so that she can better deal with Congress. Edwards is offering his progressive ideas to counter the failed policies of thirty years of the Reagan Revolution.

Will Obama's approach work?

It's a shame we can't get all the characteristics in one candidate. The polls suggest that Obama has an appeal to independents using this approach, while Edward's results suggest that since he is going after the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party, he's just not getting enough traction to get the nomination. The constant refrain that Hillary is "too polarizing" suggests that she is touching a raw nerve by ignoring the emotional needs of the conservatives.

Since it looks like the decision is between Clinton and Obama now, with each beginning to adopt some of Edwards' ideas, I'm not sure which approach will work. I do think that recognizing and empathizing with the feelings that drive conservatives will make America a lot less polarized place politically. But will Obama's approach work to get him elected, and if elected, will it make him a successful President.

Those are two separate questions, and while I have some guesses, I really don't know the answer. But I do think that the quotation I started this piece with should be carefully considered by Democrats as we all move to elect a Democratic President.

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Addendum 2:55 PM CST
This is from a strong pro-Obama supporter, Mark Kleiman.

Perhaps I haven't made myself clear. If (probably when) Hillary is the nominee, I'm sending her the maximum contribution and working my butt off to get her elected.

I'm angry about the tactics the Clintons are using in this race largely because they make things harder in November, whoever is the nominee. But while it would be nice to elect an inspirational, potentially transformational President who knows how to make a speech and knows that waterboarding is torture without waiting for his Super-Duper Top Secret briefing, it's essential to prevent four more years of Republican misrule.

If Clinton is nominated, my advice to my fellow Obamites is: Think about the Supreme Court. Think about war with Iran. Think about global warming. Think about the abuse of science. Buy yourself a clothespin. And then do the right thing. This is not a year for sulking in your tent.

And I'm dead certain that Barack Obama is going to be leading the charge.

We Democrats need to keep our priorities straight. Right now we squabble among ourselves, but once a nominee is chosen, he or she is the Democratic nominee and the goal is to defeat the Republican. Whoever it is, they will need all of us to beat back the true forces of darkness who are even now working to destroy the American Republic.