Minor Thoughts from me to you

How could members of the Supreme Court possibly seriously consider the argument that ObamaCare’s individual mandate to purchase health insurance is unprecedented and unconstitutional? The quality of the arguments? The presence of a genuine legal debate? No, if you ask the law’s liberal cheerleaders, there can only be one answer: pure partisan politics.

From the beginning, ObamaCare’s backers presumed that the nation’s legal institutions would be on their side—and wouldn’t require much effort to convince. Going into this week’s Supreme Court arguments over the fate of the 2010 health care overhaul, liberal analysts were supremely confident. Since the law’s passage, they’d been predicting that the law would pass constitutional muster with ease. In February 2011, Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe reassured readers of The New York Times that even conservative justices would not buy the challengers’ arguments, insisting upon the “clear case for the law’s constitutionality.” Andrew Koppelman, writing in The Yale Law Journal Online, declared the mandate’s constitutionality “obvious.”

Liberal analysts maintained their enthusiasm even after multiple losses in the lower courts. The case against the mandate is “analytically so weak that it dissolves on close inspection. There’s just no there there,” wrote former New York Times legal correspondent Linda Greenhouse a few days before the arguments began.

What can explain liberals’ widespread failure to anticipate the Court’s wariness of the mandate? Research conducted by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests one possible answer: Liberals just aren’t as good as conservatives and libertarians at understanding how their opponents think. Haidt helped conduct research that asked respondents to fill out questionnaires about political narratives—first responding based on their own beliefs, but then responding as if trying to mimic the beliefs of their political opponents. “The results,” he writes in the May issue of Reason, “were clear and consistent.” Moderates and conservatives were the most able to think like their liberal political opponents. “Liberals,” he reports, “were the least accurate, especially those who describe themselves as ‘very liberal.’”

Anecdotally, this mirrors my experiences in Madison and at the University of Pittsburgh (two very liberal environments). I've found some liberals that I can have rational, political discussions with. On the whole though, most liberals in Madison seem unable to accept that conservatives (or libertarians) act from any motive other than greed, hate, stupidity, or pure evil.

Many of them seem unable to understand conservative rationales or arguments, so they act as though conservatives have no rationales or arguments. It can make for a toxic atmosphere, where the easiest road to peace is the one where you just keep quiet.

But what fun would that be?

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