America’s political divide is psychological, not ideological

Episode Summary

Politics in the United States and everywhere else has always been about policy—which party wants to do this, which party wants to do that. But in the 21st century, a new dimension has been added: true and false.

That reality has become a serious problem for left-of-center political parties, because they have traditionally oriented themselves around an affinity for science and reason.

As a result, right-wing parties with policies that are inherently anti-populist—policies that take money from the middle class and the poor and give it to the rich—are nonetheless able to get the votes of many lower- and middle-income people. Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, and a host of other right-wing authoritarian leaders are proof that this is indeed the case.

We’re going to talk about these questions in today’s episode with Eric Oliver, a political science professor at the University of Chicago. He argues that American politics has become divided along epistemic and psychological grounds between “intuitionists” who think with their guts and “rationalists” who prefer science and logic.

Originally the divide between the two epistemologies cut across political partisanship, but since he came along, Trump seems to have attracted the support of former Democratic intuitionists like Robert Kennedy Jr., a trend that Oliver and his co-author Thomas J. Wood all but predicted in their 2018 book, Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics.

You can also check out his podcast, 9 Questions, which will soon be distributed additionally via the Flux podcast network.

The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full page.

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

02:19 — The intuitionist and rationalist spectrum

07:04 — In