'Unknown Unknowns' and Picking Political Sides:Right vs Left

Published on October 10, 2004 By blogic In Politics

I have no idea if I'll get any responses to this post. Bush supporters sometimes respond to my concerns about Bush with heated comments about how one sided I am, but less often acknowledge my posts arguing that both major candidates lie, and it's the voters' fault, that left wingers and right wingers are more similar than either side wants to admit and my exhaustive coverage of MemoGate.

The title is from an insightful -- no sarcasm intended -- Rumsfeld quote:

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

An old theory of mine is that political opinions are like religious beliefs -- our views are based on premises that can't be falsified, which means they're basically matters of faith. For example, communists will always argue that there's no historical proof that communism doesn't work, since the Stalinist Soviet Union and Maoist China were both totalitarian states, not communist ones. Similarly, any attempt to convince a free market devotee that free markets don't always work will invite a response that there's no way to know that, since no true free market has ever existed.

This is all exacerbated by the fact that the world changes quickly, liberal democracy is relatively young, and the number of countries (i.e., case studies) is fairly small. In a statistical sense, we're working with a small sample, margins of error are high, conclusions have low significance, and the world changes so quickly that even good old results may not be accurate for the present or the future. It's enough to drive a social scientist to tears.

You'd think the Left could use the Twentieth Century to demonstrate that Welfare Capitalism just works, but the Right can counter with the quick economic growth of the Nineteenth Century Robber Baron era, and I've read Libertarian science fiction arguing that we'd all be much better off now -- including, and I'm not making this up, the dolphin citizens -- without welfare capitalism's regulations.

Since I don't see any way -- at least yet -- to prove from history which approach works best, arguing politics is like arguing religion. None of us can really be sure if we're right. All we have is faith. This is why most of us share the politics beliefs of our families or our communities. In other words, instead of arriving at our political beliefs through reasoning, we use reason to defend political beliefs we're already formed.

And that's why red state citizens overwhelming support Republicans, and blue state citizens overwhelmingly support Democrats, and why claims that either Right or Left wingers think more insightfully -- or coherently -- simply fall apart.

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