@Maw is entirely right and anyone who looks to psychology to explain politics is a moron.

Maw is entirely right and anyone who looks to psychology to explain politics is a moron. — StreetlightX

Ah, well, that's cleared that up. 25 years of wondering whether I and my colleagues were morons and I could have just asked...

You're welcome.

You're welcome. — StreetlightX

I doubt that. But hell, I'm paid an awful lot of money for my moronic guesswork so at least I've got something to cushion the blow... it's a wonder there's not more astrology consultants in the courts, corporations and civil service, they too could benefit from whatever mass deception I've inadvertently manged to weave.

But hell, I'm paid an awful lot of money for my moronic guesswork so at least I've got something to cushion the blow... it's a wonder there's not more astrology consultants in the courts, corporations and civil service, they too could benefit from whatever mass deception I've inadvertently manged to weave. — Isaac

There are highly paid economists too, so... :wink:

There are highly paid economists too, so... — ssu

Indeed. And Astrologers no doubt. wasn't treating the matter as a serious discussion.

Though one wonders whom it is we should be consulting in matters of economics, psychology, or sociology. Roll dice presumably...

Though one wonders whom it is we should be consulting in matters of economics, psychology, or sociology. Roll dice presumably... — Isaac

I'm beginning to think that consulting the Communist Manifesto would be the default procedure around here ...

I do not need to see the book to find out who the author is. I am not accusing you of anything. I am simply pointing to what has been said about him. — Fooloso4

Well, you are accusing me by implication: the author is a "Nazi", his book must be promoting "Nazism" (as well as "Odinism" and "anti-semitism"), therefore I must be a "Nazi" for reading the book or for daring to mention it. Guilt by association, in other words. Wasn't that what the Nazis (and the Stalinists) did?

If the author was a far-left Marxist or Stalinist, would your argument be the same? Or is far-left extremism OK to you?

And look at other comments on here, like "anyone who looks to psychology to explain politics is a moron".

Political psychology is an established academic field, so there must be lots of "morons" around.

Plus, psychology aims to understand human behavior in all kinds of situations, so why should politics be any different? Is it because some people are afraid of having their political thoughts and behavior scrutinized? Is that why they are trying to suppress discussion by attacking people and calling them names???

To be clear, any attempt to psychologically map out an explanation for why and how conservatives and liberals or whatever political appellation believe what they believe is nonsense. It's about as vague as astrology and just as predictive. — Maw

Not at all. It may be vague in general outline but less so once you've looked into the more detailed facts of it. Most scientific theories start off about "as vague as astrology and just as predictive". If we dismissed everything before even considering or discussing it there would be no science.

Trial, error, modification, refining, certainty, that's how thought and knowledge progresses. But it often starts with a "vague" suggestion or proposition.

Is that why they are trying to suppress discussion by attacking people and calling them names??? — Apollodorus

The only name calling was my reference to Bolton. I said he was a schizo. You seem to be taking that personally.

He's also a rotten koala turd.

Is that why they are trying to suppress discussion by attacking people and calling them names??? — Apollodorus

That in itself is a psychological reaction. So now all you have to is to statistically correlate it with voting habits, donation receipts, and riot-partaking, and bang, you can establish on this alone about 26 different kinds of political profiles that have predictive value and sharp delineation.

Movements generally get defined as leftist if they challenge existing structures and norms. This is more likely to seem looney.

It's worth noting that all sorts of things have been tradition at some point or another. Female genital mutilation, human sacrifice, animal sacrifice, inter cousin marriage, prescribed royal incest, etc. Sometimes going against the flow and being loony for they times isn't a bad idea.

It's evident from where the author comes and what his personal stance is. Without having read the book (and it doesn't seem interesting), but by just looking at the quotes from the book, the vitriolic stance is quite evident. Nearly all quotes (that can be found for example here) talk about "The Left" as one all encompassing actor. And what Bolton thinks about the left is obvious from quotes like this:

The Left, laid bare of its ideological façade wrapped about by theories on economics and sociology, is simply a means of dragging humanity down to the lowest denominator in the name of ‘equality’.

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery’.

I basically hate this approach: it doesn't take into account just how different let's say Western social democrats are from Western marxists and how those are different from Chinese marxists or the supporters of the leftist populist Maduro (and earlier Chavez) in Venezuela. The left isn't just Marxism-Leninism or Maoism.

Perhaps here the obvious error is that a similar psycho-history could be made about "the right", and very likely you would get similar results. It's basically scientism is used as a veil for a rant against the political movement you hate.

A thing which actual has been done already, actually.

A fitting example would be Theodor Adorno's "The Authoritarian Personality". There the member of the Frankfurt School (yes, that Frankfurt School) makes a "F scale", for pre-fascist personality, and goes on to measure traits like conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, power and "toughness", destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and exaggerated concerns over sex.

And of course, Adorno downplayed his Marxist roots and if we believe Apollodorus, Bolton doesn't either openly write about his influences either (which would be logical).

In the end I simply do not find this useful. Psychohistory doesn't work when your just looking for what are considered character flaws or negative traits.

In a rare occasion I would agree with here. Done with a different attitude, using psychology can perhaps be useful.

Done with a different attitude, using psychology can perhaps be useful. — ssu

That was exactly my original assumption and I still believe this to be the case. Unfortunately, emotions and political activism tend to intervene and before you know it the discussion gets dragged into the gutter.

By the way, my topic was not Bolton but the fact that something like a political "left" and "right" exists along with the ever-rising tension between them.

Personally, I tend to believe that society must urgently depoliticize itself and start taking a more holistic view of itself and of its problems. The interests of the whole, not of political factions or special interest groups must be made the primary concern.

Why have alternative governments of the right and left, each trying to cancel what their predecessor implemented, when a single, consensus-based government might do the same job with less friction and without wasting billions on elections, etc. ?

It's worth noting that all sorts of things have been tradition at some point or another. Female genital mutilation, human sacrifice, animal sacrifice, inter cousin marriage, prescribed royal incest, etc. Sometimes going against the flow and being loony for they times isn't a bad idea. — Count Timothy von Icarus

By the same token, some traditions may be worth keeping. By definition, when you introduce a change, you can't predict its impact in all its ramifications. You may yet come to regret the change you've made. And the way things are currently going, changes - some intended, others less so - are happening at a speed and to an extent that they threaten to get out of control, like a vehicle travelling at increasingly higher velocity along uncharted ways and with the rising likelihood of ending in a crash. Civilizations come and go and sometimes the cause is self-inflicted. There can be no harm in taking a step back and doing some thinking before it's too late.

Well, you are accusing me by implication: — Apollodorus

Not at all. I believe you when you say that you did not know about him. My point is that he is a questionable source. It may not be overt, but I strongly suspect that he would not write a book on people, culture, society, and politics without those views shaping what he says.

If the author was a far-left Marxist or Stalinist, would your argument be the same? — Apollodorus

Yes.

I doubt that. But hell, I'm paid an awful lot of money for my moronic guesswork so at least I've got something to cushion the blow... it's a wonder there's not more astrology consultants in the courts, corporations and civil service, they too could benefit from whatever mass deception I've inadvertently manged to weave. — Isaac

That just describes other lucrative, but bullshit industries such as economics, evolutionary psychology, neuromarketing, etc. How much do you think Larry Summer gets paid despite constantly being wrong? Either way, what's the problem? You get paid good money from clueless individuals or corporations to produce nonsense. I think that's great.

Not at all. It may be vague in general outline but less so once you've looked into the more detailed facts of it. Most scientific theories start off about "as vague as astrology and just as predictive". If we dismissed everything before even considering or discussing it there would be no science.

Trial, error, modification, refining, certainty, that's how thought and knowledge progresses. But it often starts with a "vague" suggestion or proposition. — Apollodorus

Political psychology is not new.

Everyone is conservative about what he knows best. If you read the Saint-Simonians one could come away thinking socialism was entirely reactionary.

Oh yes. Wonder how would Nietzsche do here. — ssu

He'd be banned for excessive use of exclamation points. Well, I'd ban him for that, anyway.

Without having read the book (and it doesn't seem interesting), but by just looking at the quotes from the book, the vitriolic stance is quite evident. — ssu

Judging from those quotes, the stance is also old, and tired. Nothing new there.

Oh to be young and innocent. — StreetlightX

Touché. I was really fishing to see how far our friend Apollo has gone down the rabbit hole, if he’s a Big Lie subscriber.

anyone who looks to psychology to explain politics is a moron — StreetlightX

Studying the mind to help explain behavior sounds reasonable to this (me) moron.

Studying the mind to help explain behavior sounds reasonable to this (me) moron. — praxis

Well the promise of political psychology is more complex than that. What the OP and the book in question is describing here is a trait-based framework where personal traits such as "authoritarian" or "cooperation" or "openness to change" or "cosmopolitanism", "introversion-extroversion", "agreeableness", "curiosity" and a potpourri of other traits (and in the case of the book in question, narcissism) can explain or predict a person's political orientation, attitudes, or policy preferences. This is bunk.

Studying the mind to help explain behavior — praxis

You can study the mind to explain behavior but you can't study the mind to explain the ends to which that behavior will be put ('behaviour' here being a weasel word meant to capture apparently literally any action at any scale in any circumstance, presumably). Politics is an ecological phenomenon first and foremost, and the idea that it is built up of units of psychologies - as it were - is to completely misunderstand both the mind and politics. Psychology acts as a constraint on how politics plays out (one can speak of crowd phenomena or susceptibility to attention-capture say), but it sure as hell has no determining role in what kind of politics comes into play. Not to speak of anything as crude as 'left' and 'right'. Americans don't even know what the fuck 'left' means, to even begin with. Anyone who thinks they can wring 'hates refugees' or 'wants more social security' out of studying phenomena at the scale of the mind is, I repeat, a moron. If you can get paid for it, more power to you.

Politics is an ecological phenomenon first and foremost, and the idea that it is built up of units of psychologies - as it were - is to completely misunderstand both the mind and politics. — StreetlightX

I would think if anyone would realize this, you would. Postmodern psychologies study the ‘mind’, that is , the psychologically embodied , ecologically embedded mind, inseparably from environment. As you know, Protevi , borrowing from Deleuze , calls it the bio-political mind. But I think calling behavior ecological isn’t enough. One has to recognize a certain normative autonomy of organism-environment functioning that doesn’t just treat political action as arising out of an anonymous plural’we’.

One has to recognize a certain normative autonomy of organism-environment functioning that doesn’t just treat political action as arising out of an anonymous plural’we’. — Joshs

Sure, but it's environments all the way down. Even the organism is an environment. If there's autonomy - and I agree there is - it's an environment with different thresholds and with different relative speeds in constant loopy feedbacks and feedforwards with other environments across membranes at different scales.

Are there situations in which you think either side remain unaware of the arguments of the other, despite the mudslinging. It seems unlikely to me that if one were to ask a right wing political science graduate or economist what the arguments of their left wing counterparts are, they would be unable to answer. Most are quite conversant with the arguments of the other. — Isaac

Let me see if I understand this. Are you making a distinction between being aware of the other side’s argument,and understanding that argument in the way that they intend it? Or are you assuming that to parrot back to the other their talking posts is equivalent to sharing thr other’s interpretation of the meaning of the political stance? Are opposite sides in today’s polarized political scene misreading each other, or reading each other accurately and disagreeing about other issues (namely moral stance and motivation) ?

Well the promise of political psychology is more complex than that. What the OP and the book in question is describing here is a trait-based framework where personal traits such as "authoritarian" or "cooperation" or "openness to change" or "cosmopolitanism", "introversion-extroversion", "agreeableness", "curiosity" and a potpourri of other traits (and in the case of the book in question, narcissism) can explain or predict a person's political orientation, attitudes, or policy preferences. This is bunk. — Maw

AFAIK open-ness has some discriminatory power regarding conservative political opinion (eg here), but that's a far cry from an individualist causal reading (trait open-ness and personality psych -> political belief).

It seems to me you're reacting against the latter, individualistic "mental traits determine political activity/ belief/affiliation" belief, and not necessarily the idea that political ideologies and psychometric quantities can covary.

“The Psychology of Politics: How does psychology make sense of the madness of politics?”

By Lisa J Cohen, Psychology Today

“The extensive media coverage of politicians' lives provides ample opportunity for clinicians to make inferences about politicians' psychological traits. Notably, the conclusions that different clinicians draw are quite similar. One of the most common traits that clinicians talk about is that of narcissism […] Interestingly, attitudes toward the 5 categories of moral concerns[1] may also influence political beliefs. In other words, political conservatives and liberals may emphasize different categories of moral instincts from one another […] This study helps us understand why people with equally strong moral convictions may vehemently disagree on political issues such as abortion, capital punishment and flag burning.

1. Harm/care, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, Purity/sanctity, and Fairness/reciprocity.

So, politics does have something to do with psychology after all, But it takes a "philosophy forum" to deny it ...

Here's another interesting piece from Live Science;

Firstborn Siblings Are More Conservative, New Study Finds

And, of course, we all know how the media has been branding its political opponent Donald Trump as suffering from some "narcissistic personality disorder".

I can buy that