Political fans

What does it mean to be a fan? The fact that the word is short for fanatic is a tip. To be a fan is to lose some degree of objectivity. Jerry Seinfeld once joked that managers and players come and go, so sport fans are really just supporting a uniform or "cheering for the laundry." Reading the commentary on the US presidential campaign, you certainly feel a lot of hot air being blown around by fans of both teams. (Full disclosure: (And isn't it interesting how quickly "Full disclosure" has become an iro comic meme?) 1. I am a registered Democrat and 2. In searching for the Seinfeld quote, I found that I'm not the first person to connect it with the current election. End of disclosure. Back to concealment.)

I've always been comfortable describing myself as a liberal, even though I'm not entirely sure what that means. It feels more like a fuzzy personality description than a political philosophy to me. The correlation between personality and politics is a contentious area. Just saying that there is a correlation draws the criticism that you're trying to "explain away" political beliefs as irrational. But there is a lot of valid, very interesting research in the area, some of which is reported in my friend Sam Gosling's book, Snoop, which you should all buy right now and I'll talk more about later.

On the much less rigorous side, I've been keeping a list for a few years now of gut-level beliefs that I hold (or more accurately, that hold me) that I associate with liberalism and that contrast with stated beliefs held by people I know who describe themselves as conservative. (The fact that I want to insert hundreds of caveats here may be a liberal characteristic, but I'm going to skip it, assuming that you know what they are, would make up better ones than I would or are willing to simply imagine a cloud of reservations swarming before your eyes making the following list hazy, flexible and plausibly deniable.)

Comments

[John Drake]

cheers! this post is extremely insightful on several levels... well done. i've tried to articulate the differences between US political mindsets for years, and this list is the best effort i've seen... thanks for sharing it. very cool.

[Jeffre Jackson]

I'd like to see these differences reduced to a minimal set of factual assumptions that could then be investigated. Of course, no one would agree to having their political opinions subject to empirical validation.