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Imagine, for a
moment, that George W. Bush had been president when the Transportation
Security Administration decided to let Thanksgiving travellers choose
between exposing their nether regions to a body scanner or enduring a
private security massage: Democrats would have been outraged at yet
another Bush-era assault on civil liberties; Liberal pundits would have
outdone one another comparing the TSA to this or that police state; and
Republicans would have leaped to the Bush administration’s defense,
while accusing liberals of going soft on terrorism.

But Barack Obama is
our president instead, so the body-scanner debate played out rather
differently. True, some conservatives invoked 9/11 to defend the TSA,
and some liberals denounced the measures as an affront to American
liberties. Such ideological consistency, though, was the exception;
mostly, the Bush-era script was read in reverse.

It was the populist
right that raged against body scans, and the Republican Party that
moved briskly to exploit the furor. It was a Democratic administration
that labored to justify the intrusive procedures, and the liberal
commentariat that leaped to their defense.

This role reversal
is a case study in the awesome power of the partisan mindset. Up to a
point, American politics reflects abiding philosophical divisions. But
people who follow politics closely – whether voters, activists or
pundits – are often partisans first and ideologues second. Instead of
assessing every policy on the merits, we tend to reverse-engineer the
arguments required to justify whatever our own side happens to be
doing. Our ideological convictions may be real enough, but our deepest
conviction is often that the other guys can’t be trusted.

How potent is the
psychology of partisanship? Potent enough to influence not only policy
views, but our perception of broader realities as well.

A majority of
Democrats spent the late 1980s convinced that inflation had risen under
Ronald Reagan, when it had really dropped precipitously. In 1996, a
majority of Republicans claimed that the deficit had increased under
Bill Clinton, when it had steadily shrunk instead. Late in the Bush
presidency, Republicans were twice as likely as similarly situated
Democrats to tell pollsters that the economy was performing well. In
every case, the external facts mattered less than how the person being
polled felt about the party in power.

This tendency is
vividly illustrated by our national security debates. In the 1990s,
many Democrats embraced Clinton’s wars of choice in the Balkans and
accepted his encroachments on civil liberties after the Oklahoma City
bombing, while many Republicans tilted noninterventionist and
libertarian. If Al Gore had been president on 9/11, this pattern might
have persisted, with conservatives resisting the Patriot Act the way
they’ve rallied against the TSA’s Rapiscan technology, and Vice
President Joe Lieberman prodding his fellow Democrats in a more
Cheney-esque direction on detainee policy.

But because a
Republican was president instead, conservative partisans suppressed
their libertarian impulses and accepted the logic of an open-ended war
on terror, while Democratic partisans took turns accusing the Bush
administration of shredding the Constitution.

Now that a Democrat
is in the White House, the pendulum is swinging back. In 2006, Gallup
asked the public whether the government posed an “immediate threat” to
Americans. Only 21 percent of Republicans agreed, versus 57 percent of
Democrats. In 2010, they asked again. This time, 21 percent of
Democrats said yes, compared with 66 percent of Republicans.

In other words,
millions of liberals can live with indefinite detention for accused
terrorists and intimate body scans for everyone else, so long as a
Democrat is overseeing them. And millions of conservatives find wartime
security measures vastly more frightening when they’re pushed by Janet
“Big Sis” Napolitano (as the Drudge Report calls her) rather than a
Republican like Tom Ridge.

Is there anything
good to be said about the partisan mindset? On an individual level, no.
It corrupts the intellect and poisons the wells of human sympathy.
Honor belongs to the people who resist partisanship’s pull, instead of
rowing with it.

But for the country
as a whole, partisanship does have one modest virtue. It guarantees
that even when there’s an elite consensus behind whatever the ruling
party wants to do (whether it’s invading Iraq or passing Obamacare),
there will always be a reasonably passionate opposition as well. Given
how much authority is concentrated in Washington, especially in the
executive branch, even a hypocritical and inconsistent opposition is
better than no opposition at all.

At the very least,
the power of partisanship means that there will always be someone
around, when Americans are standing spread-eagled and exposed in the
glare of Rapiscan, to speak up and say “enough!”

© 2010 New York Times News Service