Are You Ready for Some Football? (The Hidden Tierney)

It's Super Bowl weekend, and that means it's open season for linking Bowl-sized football metaphors to just about anything. NYTimes columnist John Tierney trots out the ol' football fan/political partisan chestnut in his Saturday column, Smells Like Team Spirit (full column accessible to Times Select subscribers):

To understand what's wrong with politics today, take a good look during the Super Bowl at the Steeler fans with their Terrible Towels. Imagine what's happening inside their minds as they wave the gold rags. This is your brain on partisan politics.

This is the level of rational deliberation measured by Emory researchers who scanned the brains of devout Republicans and Democrats contemplating statements by George Bush or John Kerry. When faced with contradictions by their party's leader, the partisans responded like the Pittsburghers who still refer to Franco Harris's dubious touchdown in 1972 as the Immaculate Reception.

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When a rabid fan watches his team, his brain reacts as if he's on the field. (The deluded Seahawks fans actually call themselves The 12th Man.) The fan's testosterone surges when his team wins and plummets when it loses. One study found that both male and female fans of a college basketball team suddenly rated themselves as more sexually attractive when their team won.

After an impressive play, the levels of dopamine in fans' brains spike similarly to the brain's response to cocaine. When their team wins, their level of arousal — as measured by heart rate, brain waves and perspiration — is comparable to their reactions to erotic photos or pictures of animal attacks. (Don't ask why killer animals are as stimulating as pornography. That's beyond my expertise.)

Deluded Seattle fans? Yes, Tierney is from Pittsburgh, so there's no quarter. But many Seattleites would probably agree--we are fatalistically deluded. But, back to Tierney after the jump...

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When their team loses, serious fans tend to blame bad luck or bad referees, the same coping mechanism observed by the Emory psychologists who studied political partisans. When the Democrats or Republicans were confronted with contradictory statements by their party's candidate, the parts of their brain involved in reasoning and judgment took a break while the emotional centers lit up.

"People were feeling distressed," says Drew Westen, the lead researcher, "and they were latching onto any kind of beliefs that would make them feel better." The brain then turned off its negative emotions and activated the feel-good circuits.

"If their candidate does something slimy or contradictory, they deny it, and their brain rewards them with the same kind of dopamine victory signal that sports fans get," Westen explains. "The moral in politics is that you really have to make conscious efforts to avoid self-deception. It makes it pretty hard to learn anything if your brain is telling you that every fumble by your team was actually a bad call by the referee."

Hmmm. This behavior sounds familiar. But this is Tierney, so I'm not expecting any aspersions cast to the right...

Most Americans aren't wildly partisan, but they're stuck with a national political debate led by the new tribes at the extreme of each party: the voters who commune on talk shows and blogs, the politicians in gerrymandered districts who play only to the party faithful.

As these extremists have come to dominate Congress, the State of the Union address has been looking more and more like the Super Bowl. The lawmakers haven't started painting team colors on their faces yet, but Republican supporters of the Iraq war did show their solidarity at last year's speech by holding up purple fingers.

This year the Democrats came close to doing the wave when they ecstatically rose to cheer the defeat of Social Security reform, and the audience got into the spirit by introducing team jerseys. The Capitol police ejected Cindy Sheehan and a Republican congressman's wife for wearing dueling T-shirts, but the police later acknowledged they should have been allowed to stay.

So next year we should have more T-shirts and more innovations — maybe team hats, which the Capitol police told me would be acceptable.

Extremists who commune on blogs, huh? Look, I'm a liberal/progressive/pro-civil-rights-for-all kind of American who wants to ensure that everyone gets fair access to health care, economic opportunity, and environmental protection. I don't believe I'm an extremist. And frankly, I'm not sure that someone like Tom DeLay is an extremist--he's just a callow opportunist who governs for himself and the business interests who support him and has a tenacious pit-bull disposition to attacking any kind of discussion to the contrary.

Partisanship and contrary opinion isn't isn't in and of itself extremist (and certainly not a bad thing, in my opinion). But partisanship does require dialog and a coming together from time to time to work on real opportunities that will help the community at large. And yes, there are probably some obstructionist Democrats you could point to. But you have to admit that it's been damned impossible to get any dialogue going in the midst of the hubristic scorched earth policy of the BushCo administration and their Senate/House lackeys (i.e., Frist, Hastert, DeLay, Blunt). But until we can get some traction toward dialogue and we can moderate between the two sides, I guess I'll continue with my extremist ways.