Anchors Aweigh!

No, not the nautical kind, the psychological kind. And, shamefully enough, the title of this post is also a song reference. Moving along, as many students are doubtless aware, there has been a movement amongst the Democratic rank and file of late to force the party to stop pandering to "centrists" and refocus on the liberal agenda all us diehards believe in. The intellectual justification goes beyond "Me me me! Do what I want!" though. Two prominent strains to this justification are the anchor strain and the values strain.

To me, all the most interesting aspects of psychology and politics deal with how people make decisions without comprehensive information, and anchors offer a great perspective on it. The idea is that there are some areas where most people just don't have any information of their own - say deaths caused by the occupation of Iraq. They've heard some estimates in the range of several dozen thousand, maybe 100,000. Then Johns Hopkins goes and reveals that it's closer to 700,000, and it's so far out of the range people are used to thinking about (i.e., that they are already psychologically anchored to) that they don't believe it. As the WaPo link above indicates, this phenomenon does not have to be bad, though.

The anchor strain of logic for pulling Democrats to the left goes that ever since the party lost Congress in 1994, it has tried to move a little more to the right in order to peel off just enough Republican voters to retake it. In so doing, the public essentially gets two right-wing visions: one that's real and well articulated, and one that seems like it's pandering to get your vote. Faced with this situation, you go for the real one, but more importantly, your frame of reference is anchored to right-wing policy frames. Then when someone comes along with a good liberal policy, it seems so far out of the range you're used to considering that it can't even be seriously considered. This argument has been partially vindicated by recent scholarship showing that over the past thirty years or so, people have consistently mischaracterized the Democrats as leaning further left than they do, suggesting that people's definition of "left" may be something just past whatever Democrats actually offer.

The values strain builds on the work of my main man George Lakoff. Liberals and conservatives work off distinct moral systems, liberals' based on nurturant parent metaphors and conservatives' based on strict father metaphors. But the two sides have enough accessibility to each other that they can still be mutually conceptualized - as a liberal, it's not like I can't understand what a strict father is. So when conservatives talk conservative values, it activates my conservative cognitive chanels, and when liberals talk liberal values it activates conservatives' liberal cognitive chanels. But when the Democrats give up on liberal talk and go for "centrist" talk, the voter is left with only his or her conservative cognition activated and therefore votes conservative.

And, in fact, Republicans have taken advantage of this fact by basing their ruling philosophy on the strategy of limiting choices. They keep yapping about a liberal media bias in order to anchor us to the idea that what we thought was non-partisan is actually too liberal, trying to force us to see conservative and really conservative as the only acceptable options. They don't let Democrats bring any bills to the floor, because that way it looks like only Republicans have any ideas. Then they spend a few years intimidating Democrats out of offering any alternative to Bush on Iraq, helped out by Democrats (like I Voted for Kodos whipping boy Rahm Emanual) who try to avoid running campaigns on the Iraq issue. But fortunately most Democrats have by now realized that Iraq is totally screwed up and worth holding Republicans accountable on, so when Democrats didn't give in to the Rove line about the need to Stay the Course, it ended up looking really stupid.

To the extent anchoring has been employed recently as a campaign tactic, I would say it is working, since Democrats are capturing more and more centrists despite (because of?) their more leftist appeals. But outside of campaigns, the stakes couldn't be higher. It turns out that on torture, Bush's re-positioning of the worldwide anchor is having the completely predictable, and tragic, effect everyone else anticipated: foreign regimes around the world are justifying torture as OK because the US does it. Hopefully the anchor strategy will stick in domestic campaigns and change in the international human rights arena.