David Roberts has a very nice essay on American politics, framed as an analysis of what nerds don’t get; but it’s not just nerds who seem weirdly blind to the reality here.

One problem with the essay, however, is that Roberts never really explains why people who pride themselves on their ability to think things through slide into lazy cliches when it comes to politics. And that’s important: just lecturing Silicon Valley types on the need to get serious about politics won’t work if there are deeper reasons smart people get stupid when politics enters the picture.

Here’s how I see it: it’s about self-image. Tech types like to imagine themselves above the fray, operating on a higher plane than those grubby political types. But if you get serious about US politics, you realize that this is actually an irresponsible pose. As Roberts says, the parties are not symmetric, and wisdom does not lie somewhere between the extremists on both sides. In fact, policies that the tech elite support, like carbon taxes, are supported only by the left wing of the Democratic Party; the entire Republican Party is controlled by climate denialists, and anti-science types more broadly. And in general the modern GOP is basically anti-rational analysis; it’s at war not just with the welfare state but with the Enlightenment.

But for an ubernerd to acknowledge this reality would be to sound, horrors, partisan. And so they refuse to go there; all their belief in data and careful analysis gets set aside when it comes to politics, because the political data — and there really are a lot of data on all this — tell you what they don’t want to hear.

As readers might guess, I face some personal frustration here. When it comes to economics, I try to base what I say on evidence and on models that have stood the test of confrontation with evidence; but I often encounter people who assume that I’m just a left-wing version of Stephen Moore. Why do they believe that? Have they actually looked at my analysis and track record? No, they just know that I’m much more critical of the right than of the left, and they assume that this means ipso facto that I’m biased. But what if in modern America the right is much more wrong than the left? Not a possibility they’re willing to contemplate.

So are efforts to change this futile? I hope not. Roberts may well have the right approach: keep stressing the evidence of political asymmetry. Maybe, maybe, someone will listen.