Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Robert Wright, unreflective stereotype   posted by Razib @ 8/30/2006 10:40:00 PM
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A few weeks ago I watched the Robert Wright Ann Althouse diavlog. One thing that struck me was that in the beginning they addressed Althouse's political ideology (i.e., was she a libertarian?). Althouse offered that she considered herself an independent, who voted for Feingold and Bush in 2004, splitting her ticket. Up until that time she has uniformly voted Democrat. She observed that her own experience is that when she did not toe the right-wing line she was ignored, but when she agreed with the Right they praised her. In contrast, the Left ignored her because of their disagreemants on several issues. The general opinion was that the Left shunned heretics and the Right sought converts. Interestingly, Wright spent the rest of the diavlog being surprised when Althouse expressed liberal views on particular topics, and even hopefully mooted the possibility that she could "come back" to "their side." This, throughout an interview where she had expressed a host of different views, some on Wright's "side," and also offered that historically she tended to vote Democrat. Watch the whole thing, and this is not meant as a criticism (I don't really create except as a data point in favor of what Althouse has referred to), but Wright seemed to exemplify exactly the tribalist purity which Althouse claimed was a problem on the Left, ignoring their commonality.

Anyway, I don't comment much on politics on this blog because I have nothing to say, but I was pretty shocked that Wright behaved in such a manner even after addressing this tendency with Althouse.