I've heard many people in the DKos community and elsewhere talk about how critical this election is for the direction of our country.
As I watched last night's debate and reflected on their responses to the Character question, I had an insight into an approach to the world that is, I believe, contributing to the extreme polarization that we have seen this cycle.
This is probably not a unique insight, but for what it's worth, I thought I'd share it.
Bush's mental model about the world seems to be that there is a Truth that is both absolute and knowable. The Truth must be taken on faith and should not be questioned. It is the same for everyone no matter what their point of reference is. If the facts contradict the Truth, then the facts must be wrong and may be safely ignored. A person who does not agree with the Truth is misguided and must be corrected or barring that, discredited and ultimately silenced. A person who does not express a consistent view of the world - is a "flip flopper" and sends "mixed messages" - does not have faith in the Truth.
One can argue about whether or not his history of alcoholism and his drug use or his religious beliefs lead him in this direction - I would argue that the worldview is widespread in our culture and that the religious beliefs and addictions are a symptom of these mental patterns more than a cause. The same rigidity is applied to his relationship with the Divine, and the addictions serve to mitigate the cognitive dissonance that must be suppressed to maintain this worldview.
The alternative that Kerry represents is a more flexible view of reality. There are absolute principles - honor, integrity - and there are theories about the truth that must be in alignment with the principles. But there is no Truth about the world that is, itself immutable. We welcome dissent because it enables us to better understand the truth about the world. We recognize that different observers have different reference points, and that leads to different understandings of the truth. When the facts contradict our theories, we change our theories and then take action in alignment with our principles.
This was brought home to me when a caller on C-Span last night very sincerely said that Pres. Bush was our father, and good fathers give consistent messages to their children: don't jump on the couch. I have no doubt that the caller really believed that was the same as George Bush invading Iraq to let the world know that we won't stand up to terrorists - because GWB says that Hussein was one, and therefore we have to be consistent about how we deal with him or we will appear weak.
Of course, I'd turn that around to say - if you let your children ride their bikes without helmets and then find out that is very dangerous, do you continue to let them ride without helmets for the sake of consistency? Or do you buy them helmets and then consistently reinforce the new rules based on what you just learned?
It's the kind of thing that drives both the right and the left up a tree. It's how we can watch the exact same video and get such different impressions from it. It's why just challenging the attacks on their merits didn't work in 2000 and isn't working now.
I think that this is why this election is so scary to me. I'm soundly in Kerry's paradigm - and I can't comprehend how we can run a country in a complex world based on some notion of Absolute Truth.
We've experimented for four years with this paradigm, and we have war, economic problems, escalating domestic issues such as education and healthcare - oh, and a few people who got extra money back on their taxes.
The good news is that the facts are stubborn. As much as GWB surrounds himself with people who tell him otherwise, you cannot tell someone they have a job if they don't. You cannot tell someone that they are better off if they aren't. You cannot tell someone that the U.S. will not abuse its power after Abu Graib and Guantanamo.
Although Bush's paradigm is widespread, I don't think it is so common that America is a lost cause. We have four more weeks to remind the rest of the country that we need to run our country on facts not beliefs about reality.