"...what’s so stunning about all of this is the tremendous gap between what scholars are learning about politics and politics itself."

March/ April/ May 2014The Origin of Ideology

Are left and right a feature (or bug) of evolution?

By Chris Mooney

Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences
by John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith, and John R. Alford
Routledge, 304 pp.

Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us
by Avi Tuschman
Prometheus Books, 500 pp.

"In the end, what’s so stunning about all of this is the tremendous gap between what scholars are learning about politics and politics itself. We run around shutting down governments and occupying city centers—behaviors that can only be driven by a combination of intense belief and equally intense emotion—with almost zero perspective on why we can be so passionate one way, even as our opponents are passionate in the other.

To see politics as Hibbing, Smith, Alford, and Tuschman see it, by contrast, is inevitably to want to stop fighting so much and strive for some form of acceptance of political difference. That’s why, even though not all of the answers are in place yet, we need their line of thinking to catch on. Ideological diversity is clearly real, deeply rooted, and probably a core facet of human nature. Given this, we simply have no choice but to come up with a much better way to live with it."