In a 1959 book entitled The House of Intellect, Jacques Barzun opined the U.S. government was more stable than the governments of many other other nations because Americans just didn't pay much attention to politics. It was in the countries that intellectualized politics — like France — he said, that people were always rushing to the barricades.
1959 was, you will surely recall, very near the end of Dwight Eisenhower's second term. The very next year Jack Kennedy debated Richard Nixon on TV — the first debate of that kind ever — and we were off to the races.
Political assassinations (Jack, Bobby, and Martin); Lyndon's Vietnam; the civil rights movement; Iran I, Iran II*, and Afghanistan; The Donald; January 6 — and a bunch of stuff I've probably left out.
Now comes an academic paper called “Political Self-Confidence and Affective Polarization” — ouch — which, as described in The Washington Post…
shows that Americans with the highest levels of self-described political knowledge and capabilities are also the most polarized and intolerant of the opposing party. “We propose that people’s feelings of self-assurance within politics can have a darker side,” write Carey E. Stapleton of the University of Massachusetts and Jennifer Wolak of Michigan State University.
In other words, it's too much thinking that's got us into the mess we're in.
As the forementioned paper concludes, “'those who doubt their ability to really effect change in politics ... show less psychological commitment to inter-party battles.' That can be a good thing."
*I, like W, got my i's wrong here. It was Iraq.
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