James Madison on Why Politics Ruins Everything

Politics has a way of ruining everything. Even kind and intelligent people go through an instant metamorphosis when the conversation changes to politics. Their body language tenses up. Their word choices include more intensifiers. They say horrible things about strangers they would never say in a different context. Their mental processes change to in-group-vs.-out-group mode, as though we were hunter-gatherers again. 

And this sudden intensity can turn on and off almost instantly, like a light switch, as the conversation veers from topic to topic. It’s certainly unpleasant, and possibly unhealthy.

This very human foible may be what inspired James Madison to write in Federalist No. 55, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

The median voter is not a wise person, at least about politics. But even if he was, the effects partisan politics has on the brain can shut down rational thought in even the best and brightest.

Happy Election Day, everyone.