The Five Varieties of Bad Political Thinking

Reason ^ | March 2, 2010 | Michael Weiss

[El Sordo]

Anyone who has kept up with politics lately is no doubt aware that certain intellectual attitudes and habits recur no matter what the subject under discussion. The rise of the Internet has democratized what was once the purview of the professional opinion journalist, policy analyst, or historian and thus made certain tendencies in the debate over domestic and international politics into full-blown categories of bad thinking. By my count, there are five main varieties of these without which there would be far fewer cable news channels, blogs, documentary filmmakers, and entries on The New York Times bestsellers list for non-fiction. All varieties are subject to overlap.

Tragic Manicheanism. The metaphysical battle between good and evil has many engaged spectators, some of whom are so chronically assured of evil’s triumph that they appear to subconsciously root for it. This is the religious concept of original sin in political grammar. The tragic Manichean believes that everything one’s own government or society does is bad and that all those who oppose it are axiomatically good. A very childlike worldview, it nonetheless caters to a large swath of people who believe that passion is a valid substitute for evidence

[El Sordo]

Rest of article at: http://reason.com/archives/2010/03/02/the-five-varieties-of-bad-poli

[IronJack]

Highly articulate without being stuffy. Almost Buckley-esque in its biting eloquence.

[Cicero]

The terminology strikes me as muddled and confusing. “Tragic Manicheanism”? A better label for what he goes on to discuss is Marxist dogma. Howard Zinn was not a Manichean, he was a Marxist. He did not believe in a God of light and a God of darkness, he believed in the Dictatorship of the proletariat, which he hoped to bring about as a member of the Vanguard of the Proletariat.

Und so weiter.