LAST weekend saw the launch of Vox, a new online news site founded by the one-time wunderkind political blogger, Ezra Klein. For the happy occasion, Mr Klein, Vox's editor-in-chief, has produced an interesting think-piece, "How politics makes us stupid", in which he provides a diverting overview of recent experimental work on the hardy human propensity to shield tribal political faith from rational scrutiny. That Mr Klein's essay ultimately runs aground, tangled in its own question, may shed some light on the promise of Vox and its aspiration to help readers really understand the news. Mr Klein's essay is chiefly dedicated to explaining the work of Dan Kahan, a professor at Yale Law School. Mr Kahan and his colleagues have conducted a spate of experiments that show how our ability to reason soundly, particularly about political subjects, is undermined by the need to protect our core beliefs. Mr Klein writes:

Kahan calls this theory Identity-Protective Cognition: "As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values." Elsewhere, he puts it even more pithily: "What we believe about the facts," he writes, "tells us who we are." And the most important psychological imperative most of us have in a given day is protecting our idea of who we are, and our relationships with the people we trust and love.

That is to say, when it comes to belief, correspondence with our comrades trumps correspondence to reality. Mr Klein observes that ongoing partisan polarisation has made the problem worse, such that "Each party has its allied think tanks, its go-to experts, its favored magazines, its friendly blogs, its sympathetic pundits, its determined activists, its ideological moneymen". This is worrying because "these people are also affecting, and in some cases controlling, the levers of government". Government is controlled by partisans, and partisans are, more than ever, nestled inside identity-protective cocoons of congenial analysis.

Mr Klein is understandably distressed by this state of affairs:

If the work of gathering evidence and reasoning through thorny, polarizing political questions is actually the process by which we trick ourselves into finding the answers we want, then what’s the right way to search for answers? How can we know the answers we come up with, no matter how well-intentioned, aren’t just more motivated cognition? How can we know the experts we’re relying on haven’t subtly biased their answers, too? How can I know that this article isn’t a form of identity protection? Kahan’s research tells us we can’t trust our own reason. How do we reason our way out of that?

Excellent questions all. And Mr Klein, to his credit, fails to arrive at any satisfying answers. He presses deeper into Mr Kahan's research, and even probes the good professor's personal strategies for maintaining objectivity, all to little avail. "Washington is a bitter war between two well-funded, sharply-defined tribes that have their own machines for generating evidence and their own enforcers of orthodoxy," Mr Klein concludes. "It’s a perfect storm for making smart people very stupid." Just so.

Yet Mr Klein, himself a stoutly partisan Washingtonian, can hardly leave it at that, and he ends the article floundering for a bright side. Mr Klein does detect a "silver lining" in the idea that voters hurt by policies based on bad evidence will eventually punish the responsible party. The silver of the lining soon tarnishes, though, once Mr Klein comprehends that democratic feedback is impotent when "politics becomes so warped by gerrymandering, big money, and congressional dysfunction that voters can’t figure out who to blame for the state of the country".

So we're screwed? Mr Klein offers only this cryptic sign off: "If American politics is going to improve, it will be better structures, not better arguments, that win the day".

The outrage of gerrymandering, of the filibuster, of the overrepresentation of thinly-populated states in the Senate, of lax campaign-finance regulations, are all preoccupations of Mr Klein and others similarly taken by the romance of ideal democratic procedures, and there is certainly a great deal to say in favour of "better structures". But is there a path to "better structures" that does not run through "better arguments"? Alas, no.

My sense is that the impulse behind Vox is a profoundly honourable one based on what Mr Klein at the outset of this piece calls the "More Information Hypothesis". The hypothesis is that in the presence of more, better and more lucidly presented information, the democratic public will improve the performance of its signature deliberative tasks. The design of Vox, especially its innovative use of evergreen explanatory "cardstacks", would seem to be the More Information Hypothesis embodied. Yet Mr Klein's introductory essay at the helm of his new publication appears to debunk the hypothesis on which the entire enterprise seems to be founded. If it's really true, as Mr Klein would have us believe, that we are basically deaf to information we'd rather not hear, no matter how clearly and colourfully conveyed, then what's the point of Vox?

'Vox' is of course Latin for 'voice'. Mr Klein's strange inaugural essay may seem an inauspicious beginning, but I detect a note of hope. If there is one force capable of combating "identity-protective cognition" it is the rare and precious disposition Keats called "negative capability"—"when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason..." Politics makes us stupid in no small part because of its incompatibility with negative capability—with the tolerance for ambiguity, uncertainty, and simple not-knowing that earnest truth-seeking requires. Now, there is more than a hint of "irritable reaching" in Mr Klein's call for "better structures"; he can't seem to reside wholly comfortably in the realm of uncertainties. Still, Mr Klein did have the audacity to launch a new publication presumably meant to shore up American democracy through access to better information with a lengthy meditation on the pointlessness of doing just that. That's negative capability! Coming as it does from our nation's capital—that dark eye of "a perfect storm for making smart people very stupid"—Mr Klein's unexpected plunge into the bracing waters of self-doubt comes as a bright and promising sign for Vox and its audience.