Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Pico has already given an extensive list of examples, and as Aaron Barlow shows this is precisely what Horowitz does (Ward Churchill = all profs are America-hating Stalinists), but I wanted to add a few more, and indeed a few more thoughts on its effectiveness.

I would add, first, that the love affair with the anecdote is not limited to the Malkins and O'Reillys, but extends to "reasonable" conservatives as well (never write reasonable conservative without scare-quotes around one or both of the words).  It is, for example, how David Brooks makes a living, throwing together a few examples of this or that and from this reaching broad conclusions about the red heartland (=religious, straight forward, honest, and "real") and blue coastal elitists (=Hollywood, latte drinking, Volvo -- oh, hell, you saw that old Club for Growth commerial).  IANAS (I am not a sociologist), but if I were, I would cringe, or vomit, or both, every time I hear Brooks's moralistic anecdotal junk described as "sociology."

(For that matter, this disease, of mistaking the particular for the whole, isn't limited to "conservatives" per se -- it is, of course, what characterizes Tom Freidman's interview-with-cab-driver based grand assertions about The State of the World today.)

It is also relentlessly used in a more naked political sense by GOP operatives, e.g. in the occasional performances featuring the one kind of middle class family that really benefited from some recent tax-cut that really only benefited the extremely rich, or the staged-down-to-the-pauses-b etween-words town hall spectaculars in which some well prepared supporter gives their story as a prelude to their unwavering thanks/support for the president.

On the one hand, there is no way to get around the power of the anecdote -- people react much more directly to emotional "human" stories than they do to cold statistics, and in a sense it wouldn't hurt our cause if we on the Left made more effective use of it (Clinton seemed to have a good handle on this, "Son of a Millworker" Edwards understood its power, and the rise to prominence of Cindy Sheehan was at least in part due to the compelling story she told).  Over the weekend, Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake showed how one example of a family's suffering post-Katrina can re-engage people with the continuing human disaster there.

But while recognizing the undeniable power of the story/anecdote (and I do:  as I said, IANAS, in fact, I'm an historian), we should also be aware of this particular favorite logical fallacy of the wingnut chattering class and be prepared to expose its fraudulent underbelly, as Aaron Barlow, pico, and others have already started to do. -- Stu