Anyone who believes that Americans make decisions primarily on facts and reason needs to stop and reflect on the content of most ads - their content relies little to none on facts and reason, instead playing up emotions and personal dreams (eg. cruising alone down a beautiful mountain or seaside highway, vs. stuck in an urban traffic snarl).
Westen, an unabashed Democratic partisan, clearly recognizes this; however, it is not new material, the groundwork having been established at least decades ago by Abraham Maslow's "hierarchy of needs." Further, the material is presented in a much easier to read and shorter version in Frank Luntz's "Words that Work." Vance Packard's 1970s "Waste Makers" also plowed this ground long ago. Westen does, however, add scientific support for this thinking through MRI brain scans conducted while partisans view materials contradicting their beliefs about favored and unfavored candidates. He also goes on to suggest alternative campaign strategies (eg. Gore hammering Bush for decades of drunkenness, as well as SEC investigations) instead of rational presentation of issues - however, similar suggestions have been offered by other writers as well.
Westen's best contribution in "The Political Brain" is not in his central thesis, but the numerous illustrations of how candidates could improve their emotional appeal to voters.
The message here is simple: People are creatures of emotion, as proved by psychology, and Democrats had better campaign on the basis of that realization. Republicans have won because they are careful to work with it.
This is no surprise. The goodies are in the details. Westen and a few other political psychologists have found lots of specifics--techniques that work: finding out what people really want, and how to engage them and write winning campaigns. Much of this is really new and exciting psychology.
As a political maverick, I find the partisan tone annoying, but it's his choice. What matters is the science, which is good. The real criticism of the book is that he buries the best and newest psychology in the later chapters, on specific issues, and fronts the book with some rather lame stuff. In particular, he traces a lot of the psychology to Darwin, Skinner, and Freud. But Darwin is somewhat irrelevant here (except for saying emotions are innate), and Skinner and Freud are largely discredited today. Moreover, Westen cites them for things they didn't do. Freud is credited with discovering the unconscious, which discovery Freud explicitly acknowledged to his mentor Charcot. Another problem is that the bald assertion that we are creatures of mindless emotion is so cynical it makes Machiavelli look like Pollyanna; the truth is more charitable to humanity, since it is that humans combine emotion and reason, but this, too, emerges only in those later chapters.
It is worth speculating on how all this happened. How did the Republicans turn from the limousine party to the Party of Hate (a phrase Westen should have coined and used)? How did the Democrats lose the force of FDR and Truman? The answer is that the Republicans became the party of oil, agribusiness, real estate, and the like, and found it expedient to recruit the most bigoted and uneducated voters (as well as the more old-line rich). I may sound "liberal" here, but it's my conservative midwestern upbringing that makes me outraged; what happened to honor, patriotism, decency, civility, courage, and other conservative virtues? The Republicans who take as their leaders Bush and Cheney, and as their spokespeople Anne Coulter and Bill O'Reilly, have abandoned these virtues. They betray the Constitution and whip up hate for base reasons. Peter Viereck and Barry Goldwater are rolling in their graves.
Meanwhile, the Democrats were seduced by the needs for huge campaign funds, and have increasingly tended to abandon ordinary working-class people in pursuit of the more forward-looking elite. This exposes the Democrats to the "latte-drinker" charge, but much worse is that it makes them scared of the forthright, open, reasonable yet emotional politics of the old Democratic Party.
What a mess.... If anyone fixes it, it will be through taking account of Westen's book. Yet, also, Gore's even better book, THE ASSAULT ON REASON, is a needed counterplay. We--by "we" I mean conservatives, moderates, and liberals who still have a shred of honor and loyalty to ideals--had better combine emotion and reason to take the country back.
