By Lucas Pattan
If you’re a political science major at NYU — or a “Politics” major, as the department calls it — you either hate game theory or have grown to loathe it — those are the only two options available Scary movie 2 download. The department, which has become a refuge for professors who think alike, talk alike, and teach alike (thanks to its policy of professors choosing professors, which in itself is worthy of a rant), continues to refuse to adopt a more social/power-based take on how politicians and world leaders behave, despite the failure of game theory to prove itself on the world stage.
Game theory would work perfectly if it weren’t based on two faulty assumptions. One, all people are perfectly rational, and two, game theorists know what everything is “worth.” These two beliefs make game theory in politics worthless, because they end up only working in hindsight. You’ve heard this kind of rant before from a politics friend of yours, or the words have come out of your own mouth, but it’s important to call this lame duck what it really is: trivial, mismanaged academic positing with little or no political weight.
However, don’t try to tell this to one of the TAs or professors or department zombies, those students who have full faith in its teachings, for they will speak to you with nothing but disdain. The reason? No one out there has ever put together a cohesive argument for why game theory is bull, so it’s hard to legitimize our critiques. Well, at least that’s what I believed until I read “The Political Brain” by Drew Westen.
Westen’s a psychology professor at Emory who has spent years and years studying political decision-making in leaders and their constituents. His conclusion? Emotion, not rationality, is the key to politics. And he puts forth a pretty incredible set of case studies and examples in order to prove his point.
Why do I care so much about this book? Because, as a Democrat, I’m tired of losing. Westen approaches the issue of political power on the side of the Democrats (because he is intelligent) and states that until Democrats start caring about emotionality, they will lose. His evidence couldn’t be clearer.
Dukakis, Kerry, Gore: these were people who were so entrenched in policy facts, figures, and what the “rational” choice is for Americans that they failed to grab onto what Karl Rove, Lee Atwater, and, though he’s a Democrat, David Axelrod have always understood: people think with their hearts, not with their brains. The success stories of American politics, from Reagan’s Revolution, to Clinton’s “Man from Hope,” to George W. Bush’s divide-and-conquer strategy, have all relied on emotional responses from the voters, never from the “rational decision-making” the voters are supposed to make, under NYU’s model. Westen makes the humorous observation that when Democrats think rationality matters, they come off sounding like the “human resources department” of your company, not its CEO.
Here is a quick excerpt on this point that speaks directly to any politically-minded student who has chained themselves to this school’s incongruous poli-sci methodology.
“[An] irrational commitment to rationality has rendered the Democrats less, rather than more, likely to spread the truth. If you think about voters as calculating machines who add up the utility of your positions on ‘the issues,’ you will invariably find yourself scouring the polls for your principles. And as soon as voters perceive you as turning to opinion polls instead of your internal polls — your emotions, and particularly your moral emotions — and they will see you as weak, waffling, pandering, and unprincipled. And they will be right.”
President Obama won this election because he spoke to our emotions, hopes, and dreams, not our checkbooks or our medical bills. He was always accused by established party members of being too light on facts, too simplistic, too nebulous in his arguments and plans, the model old liberals had been running with for years and losing with for years. The truth is that Obama’s emotionality is exactly why he won (in one memorable exchange, a friend and I got into a discussion with a voter we were encouraging to vote for Obama. My friend pointed out that, if you make below $100,000 a year, you were guaranteed to get a tax cut under Obama’s fiscal plan, to which the courted voter asked, “Then doesn’t that mean anyone making under $100,000 should rationally vote for Obama?” To which my friend and I sighed and said, in unison, “In a perfect world”).
So pick up the book, read it, and find the closest politics major and convince them to avoid the zombie-creating department they have handed their minds and tuition dollars to. And always remember what the philosopher David Hume understood: reason is a slave to emotion, not the other way around.
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