The political brain: the role of emotion in deciding the fate of the nation.
| Author | Rutherford, Jonathan |
| Position | Book review |
Drew Westen
PUBLIC AFFAIRS, 2007
What will be the fate of Labour in 2008? There was a sequence of events in 2007 that stick in my mind. In his speech to the Labour Party conference, Gordon Brown confidently promoted himself as a stentorian father of the nation. He would rise above the political fray, bringing to his people 'British jobs for British workers'. And then he U-turned on the election and was faced with David Cameron's verbal pummelling during Prime Minister's Question Time. Visibly shaken by the younger man, he fumbled his way back into his seat. The scene spoke more than words ever could about defeat. Brown won the rational argument, but he lost the emotional conflict. In the game of politics reasoned argument cannot match a powerful symbolic message. And the story ran like an oedipal drama of the patriarch deposed that will have resonated in the psyches of those who witnessed it. Brown, and with him the New Labour project, had just lost the future. Temporary or otherwise, it was a defining moment that shifted the political advantage to the Conservative Party.
If we want to understand the significance of these kinds of symbolic events, Drew Westen's excellent book is a good place to start. The Political Brain is about how voters' political choices are shaped by their emotions. Emotions are not tangential to our lives, they are the foundation of language and rational thought. First a feeling then a word. Emotions, conscious and unconscious, bind individuals into groups and society. What drives people is not rational thought and calculation but wishes, fears and values. Westen's central point is that successful political campaigns 'compete in the marketplace of emotions and not primarily in the marketplace of ideas.' Words, images, sounds, music, backdrop, tone of voice are likely to be as significant to the success of a political campaign as its content. We need to pay close attention to the positive and negative images and emotions that are becoming associated with candidates in the minds of voters, whether or not they are aware of them. In other words, successful political campaigning is about being attuned to what is being felt, but remains unspoken.
Westen is a frustrated Democrat. His book is a debunking of a Democratic Party politics which has been wedded to rationality and rationalising argument: 'We're a party that talks like technocrats when people are asking us questions about the meaning of life', he says...
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