Can Republicans be rational?
By Fareed Zakaria at the Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/can-republicans-be-rational/2016/09/29/21e64ae2-867a-11e6-92c2-14b64f3d453f_story.html?utm_term=.1cb651402e62
"SNIP...............
These dynamics have reminded me of Jonathan Haidt’s seminal book, “The Righteous Mind.” Haidt, a social psychologist, used exhaustive evidence to explain that our political preferences are not the product of careful analytic reasoning. Instead, they spring from a combination of moral intuition (instinct) and a tribal affiliation with people who we believe share these instincts. We use reason, facts and analysis to affirm our gut decisions.
If you think this is true of other people and not you, consider the example of Peter Thiel, a billionaire technology entrepreneur and investor who co-founded PayPal and funded Facebook. He is an extremely intelligent and well-read person, with mostly libertarian views. He strongly supports Trump, for a truly bizarre reason. He asserts that Trump’s most significant statement during this campaign, revealing his worldview, was “to declare that government health care can work.” He quoted Trump praising the Scottish and Canadian systems — one a nationalized system, the other a single-payer network — as proof of his remarkable willingness to think heretically and challenge Republican dogmas about government.
Now, another interpretation of Trump’s remark would be that it was a stray comment, thrown off the top of his head, signifying almost nothing. Remember that Trump took five different positions on abortion in three days. NBC News calculates that he has changed his position 124 times on 20 major issues since the campaign began. In Monday’s debate, he took two contradictory positions on the “no first use” policy of nuclear weapons in 30 seconds. And most important, after that offhand reference, Trump backed down from his support for government health care, instead only reciting Republican orthodoxy about the evils of Obamacare.
So an intelligent libertarian has chosen to support a man whose main — and utterly consistent — public policy positions are anti-free trade and anti-immigration and who has promised to appoint socially conservative judges to the Supreme Court because he is convinced that Trump is actually a closet admirer of Britain’s nationalized health-care system. I cannot think of a better example of Haidt’s thesis that we come to a decision first and reason our way to it afterward.
................SNIP"
= new reply since forum marked as read
