The philosopher David Hume had it right: Reason is the slave to the passions, not the other way around. Recognizing the primacy of passion in everything we do has profound implications for politics. Reason is the middle manager in decision making, not the CEO. Policies are nothing but the frontmen for values. You listen to the middleman's "pitch," but you go straight to the top when it's time to choose. You go, in other words, to your emotions — particularly your moral emotions — when you pull a lever in the voting booth.
Yet for the last 40 years virtually every Democratic candidate for president — Bill Clinton is the notable exception here — has solicited popular support based on laundry lists of issues and positions. Their basic assumption: people who take voting seriously "choose candidates by examining their positions on the issues and coolly calculating their relative costs and benefits." This is the "dispassionate vision" of the voter's mind, and Westen says it's dead wrong.
Meanwhile, a raft of successful Republican campaigns have been based on the competing, "passionate vision" of the electoral mentality: "voters are moved by the feelings that candidates and parties elicit in them and are guided by their shared values and goals."
That passionate vision is exactly what drew oldstyleliberal to John F. Kennedy in 1960, the winner of the first presidential race your blogger was old enough to follow. JFK, a Democrat, defeated Richard Nixon primarily because voters tapped into his clear vision, values, and goals, while the future that Nixon would lead us into remained inscrutable (mainly because the perspiring Republican standard bearer appeared ill-at-ease, even mendacious, when caught in the harsh glare of the lights at the historic Kennedy-Nixon TV debate).
So oldstyleliberal, who favors Democrats, passionately hopes the likes of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and the others vying for the Oval Office in 2008 will pay close heed to Westen's insight.
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