Why Now?

In a sense, this is a long lead time to begin thinking about the 2012 US elections within the context of critical thinking (or any other context for that matter).

After all, we’re still months away from the actual election season. Yes, the Republican nomination race is on and both the campaigns and the news networks would like us to see our political passions (and contributions and viewership) pick up ever faster and ever earlier. But for most voters the real game begins once we know whose names will be on the ballot. But it is just during such a lull that a critical thinking analysis should begin.

For one thing, it allows us to introduce important critical thinking principles, techniques and ideas that will become useful later (such as cognitive biases, logic and fallacies, elements of rhetoric and argumentation, etc.) before they are applied to specific political speeches and campaign strategies. But it also allows us to begin political discussions before partisan passion overwhelms the possibility of critical discourse.

For it is during this period before the candidates are known and we voters are forced to choose sides that we are at our most open-minded. By nature, most human beings like to think of ourselves as independently minded. And even people who have never voted outside of party lines (whose vote in 2012 is so taken for granted that the campaigns aren’t likely to even come to their states), for this brief moment can at least imagine that their mind is open with regard to whom they will vote for.

Sure, they may have never and will likely never for “that other party” under any circumstances. But they can at least imagine a theoretically perfect candidate for them, and further imagine a situation (such as an incumbent deciding to not run or the emergence of a third party) that would make choosing this perfect candidate a possibility. And as long as they are willing to entertain the possibility of doing something other than voting along predictable lines, there exists a window in which to have a conversation before all choices are certain and passion makes analytic discussion more and more difficult.

Not that emotion will be irrelevant during any point of this exercise. As we will find out, being a critical thinker does not mean turning yourself into a Vulcan and looking at the world through the prism of logic alone. Emotion plays an important role in our thinking as do other “illogical” components of our mental makeup (including the seemingly anti-logical notion of faith).

It’s just that there comes a time during a campaign when all options are known and people begin dividing themselves into armed camps and build fortifications against facts and opinions that don’t comply with their beliefs. At that point (which is still months away) critical thinking is still possible, but finding someone to argue with becomes ever more difficult.

If it sounds like I know of what I speak, that’s because this is actually the second time I’ve done a project like this, albeit along different lines and based on a different schedule. So tune in next time for “The Return of Undecidedman.”