That’s The Way, Uh Huh, Uh Huh, I Like It, Uh Huh, Uh Huh

by tristero

If ever you want to know how to respond to the likes of David Brooks, I can’t think of anything better to recc’d than this letter by Drew Westen in response to Brooks’ review:

To the Editor:

My first response to David Brooks’s review of my book, “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation” (Aug. 26), was mild amusement. The review was playfully sarcastic, and I must admit my own appreciation for that genre. And how else could you respond to a review that argues for objectivity in politics after beginning with the words: “Between 2000 and 2006, a specter haunted the community of fundamentalist Democrats. Members of this community looked around and observed their moral and intellectual superiority.”

Then once the e-mail started pouring in, asking how I could possibly have made the arguments attributed to me, it became clear that Brooks had succeeded in inoculating thousands of potential readers against a book that some effective political communicators (e.g., President Clinton) had enthusiastically endorsed because of the ways it suggests Democrats talk about abortion, gays, guns, terrorism, taxes, race and a host of other issues that have cost them at the polls.

As summarized by Brooks, my central thesis is that Democrats should campaign using “crude emotional outbursts” and guttural noises, preferably interrupting debates by “barking” and “exploding” about their opponent’s history of drinking if he has one (or, better yet, if he doesn’t). He then wonders how I might explain Howard Dean’s failure to win the 2004 Democratic primaries against the more emotionally subdued John Kerry. (Of course, he wouldn’t have had to wonder if he’d simply gone to the index and looked under the entry “Dean, Howard.”)

Brooks never mentions that the book is a 400-page scientific and historical argument against precisely what he offers as a counterthesis, expressed in this rhetorical question: “Is it possible that substance has something to do with the political fortunes of parties? Could it be that Democrats won in the middle part of the 20th century because they were right about the big issues — the New Deal and the civil rights movement? Is it possible Republicans won in the latter part of the century because they were right about economic growth and the cold war? Is it possible Democrats are winning now because they were right about whether to go to war in Iraq?” This all sounds so, well, “fair and balanced” — until you think about it. Democrats’ stand on civil rights has cost them dearly since Richard Nixon discovered the race card in 1968. Al Gore lost despite an unrivaled period of prosperity and growth. And Democrats actually voted for the Iraq war resolution in 2002 (perhaps convinced by the objective arguments of none other than Mr. Brooks) and won in 2006 only when they started to talk passionately about Iraq.

But for Brooks, the “core problem with Westen’s book is that he doesn’t really make use of what we know about emotion.” As a professor of psychology and psychiatry who has been contributing to the scientific literature on emotion for over 20 years, I don’t know who exactly “we” is, but I have to hand it to him: he put that knowledge to pretty good use in leaving readers with a bad taste in their mouths about a book they hadn’t read. Which illustrates the central thesis of the book: that a little knowledge about emotion can go a long way in politics.

Drew Westen

Atlanta

I will say one thing about the Bush era. From Brady Kiesling’s deeply moving resignation letter to Colin Powell on the eve of the Bush/Iraq war- which should be in any collection of great American documents – to Dr. Westen’s wonderful letter, the Bush administration has inspired some truly wonderful writing in opposition to it.