Julian Sanchez on how the birthers don’t really mean what they say:
Now, certainly it would be unsettling if a significant chunk of the population had abandoned the realm of reasonable disagreement for racially-tinged conspiracist fantasy. But I’m not panicking quite yet. As my colleague at Democracy in America notes, comparable numbers of Democrats during the Bush Administration told pollsters that they thought Bush had foreknowledge of 9/11….Assume a hefty chunk literally meant that they thought a sitting U.S. president deliberately allowed (if not engineered) the murder of thousands of American civilians for his own nefarious purposes. Yet I can’t help but notice that, however much people may have expressed intense disdain for Bush, you did not really see a lot of behavior consistent with millions upon millions of people being seriously convinced that their president was a treasonous mass murderer.
I mean, what would you do if you were really-and-truly convinced that something like that were true? Take up arms? Throw yourself into a quest for conclusive evidence? Move to Canada? Something, probably—or if you wouldn’t, at any rate, some non-trivial proportion of the people who shared the belief would—or so I’d imagine. It’s obviously too stringent to make it a condition of ascribing belief that people act on all the logical and practical implications of holding it, but when the disconnect is too profound, I think we’re justified in characterizing some of these as pseudobeliefs, one subset of which is what I want to call “symbolic beliefs.”
Read the whole thing. Of course I believe that we should take it to the next level: among non-politicians, allegiance to even concrete policy proposals are “symbolic beliefs:” often more about group affiliation and local status competition rather than rational calculation about the optimal action.
