Politics and cults.

A political movement that cannot respond to criticism isn’t a political movement. Really it’s just a cult. A mini-cult, we might call it, perhaps, driven by personality or by the shiniess of an idea rather than a sober understanding of how political ideas actually work and how they change things.

It’s very easy to spot such mini-cults. In response to criticism, the subject of the critique is exchanged for one of the mini-cult’s choosing. This is invariably because they have no response but need to cover their tracks. It's the sense that the position has been opposed emotionally, rather than criticised honestly, that is the necessary process for the minicultist, because their attachment to their own position is primarily emotional rather than arrived at through self-critical apprehension.

Time and attention is spent on long-winded arguments in which the subject changes every sentence. (Sound familiar?) The mini-cult needs only to seem to be repelling bad ideas to itself.

Such mini-cults exist all over the political spectrum and are often the only real way anything can be achieved politically. Obama would never have got into power and sorted out Obamacare without his sexy graphics and the aspect of his fanbase that likes to feel good rather than think straight, so in a sense we at least partially owe Obamacare to them.

But these little mini-cults all share the same problem, there is often very little integrity to their theory, as it almost always springs from a desire to reach for explanations of political phenomena that make them feel good, in some way, about themselves.

Human brains produce junk. LOTS of it.

The only way to get to a sensible political theory is to treat politics as a real part of the real world and apply the same laws guiding our analytical processes that we do to every other part of the world, i.e. scientifically, and the FIRST thing you do in science is not to see how your theory might be RIGHT but to see how your theory might be WRONG.