Last week I wrote an essay analyzing the legacy of Karl Rove. My argument was that one of Rove's biggest problems - and indeed a major failure of this White House - was the failure to do all that could be down to control his and his boss' image.

I received more than a few emails in response to the essay. Many of them echoed the thoughts of this emailer:

I'm in direct disagreement with your attempt to present Karl Rove as a normal guy. Rove has a serious lack of ethics. He doesn't have sense of right or wrong as much as some ideas about the limitations of his power. With Rove the end has always justified the means. Ethically he is a mirror image of Richard Nixon. God help us if he is the common denominator of our society. Do you really believe that we have sunk so low? The best adjectives to describe Rove might be capable, vindictive and mean-spirited. He has screamed at people that he would crush them if they failed to do his bidding, he has boasted of spying on other campaigns, and he has run dirty campaigns such as the one which discredited John McCain. And apparently he has been undone by the nature of his character or he wouldn't be leaving in such a quick manner with little or no explanation.

I quote this at length not for its analytical insight. It is pretty much standard anti-Bush boilerplate. Rather, I quote it as a way to contrast this line of thinking with my own methodology here on the blog.

On this blog, I endeavor to adhere to what I call a "good faith assumption." What I mean by that is the following. It is, I think, impossible to draw inferences about a human being's character based upon his public persona, i.e. the set of data points that come to us through the media. We just cannot do it. We only get a tiny glimpse of a human being via the news. And, what is more, there are good reasons to believe that the person we see on TV or read about in the newspapers is quite different from the person who exists when cameras or tape recorders are not in front of him. And so, we cannot draw conclusions about a person's soul from the data that we glean from press reports.

So, where does that leave us? Well, I think it leaves us with the good faith assumption. I'll describe it this way. Most people with whom I am well acquainted are people who act in good faith most of the time. This is true even of the people that I do not like. Those people may have acted wickedly in an instance that has aroused my anger. They may even have some real moral flaws - but that does not mean that they do not generally try to do right by other people. It's the same for all of us. All of us are indeed capable of genuinely evil deeds from time to time. But, most of the time we act in good faith in our dealings with other people. Because I know this about people whom I know personally, it stands to reason that the same is true of people I do not know personally - in this case, political actors. Political actors might be less likely to act in good faith than, say, nurses. I am not sure - though I do know that the public has an unnecessarily skeptical view of politicians and their attendants. However, even if we were to agree that politicians are less likely to act in good faith than the average non-politician, we would still have to admit that most of the time they - just like everybody else - are acting in good faith.

Combining these two facts - limited data plus a priori knowledge of good faith - gives rise to the good faith assumption. Not only do I have good reasons to believe that politicos, just like almost everybody I know, are acting in good faith most of the time, I also lack a reliable dataset that speaks to their intentions. Thus, I should assume that, in whatever actions I observe (via the media) them do, they have acted in good faith. Surely, sometimes they do not. But, because my knowledge of them is strictly mediated, I have no way to differentiate good faith actions from bad faith actions. And I know a priori that most of their actions are in good faith. Thus, I should assume that all observed actions are in good faith unless I have compelling evidence to the contrary.

This is why the argument I quoted above does not do it for me. There is nothing more than whispers and innuendo masquerading as evidence in the emailer's excerpt. This is not enough. The good faith assumption means that people I do not know get the benefit of my doubt. They get this because I know, a priori, that most people are deserving of this doubt. And so, if my goal is to analyze political actors as accurately as I am able, I should assume that people I do not know are similarly deserving unless there is clear and compelling evidence otherwise. A few pseudo-documentaries occasionally run on the Sundace Channel are insufficient evidence in the face of this assumption.

Don't get me wrong, mind you. I am not being pollyannaish. The good faith assumption does not mean that I go into a situation assuming that all and sundry are angels. Not at all! For my analysis of Karl Rove, the good faith assumption means the following. I assume that Karl Rove is a political operative - nothing more and nothing less. Politics is a messy business - one that Americans inherently dislike. Rove is a partisan political operative who was engaging in the timeless tradition of American politicking. If he was a Democrat, Republicans would be screaming bloody murder about him just as Democrats are now. The reason, ultimately, is that Democrats think that only Republicans politick and Republicans think that only Democrats politick. Both sides are half right. Just like many professional Democrats, Karl Rove has been politicking lo these many years - not, I assume, undermining the very institutions of our republican democracy, etc. This is what one side always says when it observes the other side politicking.

I think that this, ultimately, points to why one needs to dislodge oneself of the psychological hold of political partisanship if one wishes to understand how our system actually works. This is not to say that one needs to stop voting, or that one needs to start splitting one's ticket. Both parties offer us reasonably clear and divergent policy alternatives. If one or the other suits you better, go with it. I do. This is also not to say that there is no such thing as right and wrong in politics. Dislodging oneself of the partisan worldview does not necessitate political nihilism.

Rather, it implies the following. Both political parties offer us a ready-made worldview, a lens through which we can look at our political environment and make sense of it. I take these worldviews to be the creations of electorally ambitious political actors whose goals are to acquire half plus one of the votes in the next election. These partisan worldviews are a means to these ends. Thus, they are explicitly crafted to induce us to political action. One way that we can be induced to political action (especially in a system, such as ours, that is usually "rigged" to prevent any single election from producing significant policy results) is if we believe that our political universe contains heroes and, of course, villains. The demonization of Karl Rove (and, for that matter, Hillary Clinton) is therefore part and parcel of a partisan worldview. Like I said, its purpose is to induce a response from us. It makes us mad. It gives us a sense of righteousness. And so on. That makes us more reliable party voters, or more generous party donors.

The problem with these worldviews is that they are morally and philosophically simplistic. Here, I am not talking about liberalism and conservatism - the two great American political philosophies. Rather, I am talking about "Republicanism" and "Democratism." These are philosophies as well. Both boil down to the idea that, in the great march of American history, our side is in the right and their side is in the wrong. Our side grasps the Truth - and the other side is filled with the ignorant who do not understand It, or the evil who deny It. Like I said, morally and philosophically simplistic. Accepting a partisan woldview gives us a ready-made answer to any and all political questions we might think to ask ourselves. However, it does not mean that those answers have much grounding in the complicated reality that is American political life.

If you're a partisan Democrat (i.e. one who embraces what I call "Democratism") - ask yourself if you know anybody in your personal life who is as evil as you think Karl Rove is. Or, ask yourself whether - when you got to know somebody you thought was that evil - you found out that he wasn't that bad after all. Maybe these are signs that people aren't really that evil, and that you have been offered and have accepted a worldview that really does not square with the world as you know it outside the time you spend consuming political information. Republicans can do the same, as I said, with Hillary Clinton. Really, do they make people that evil?

I would suggest that, when we start to embrace what I have been calling the good faith assumption, we start to see politics differently. Rather than an epic struggle of good versus evil (with our side, of course, being the good guys), it starts to look like a conflict between competing interests that is managed by a federated system that is animated by duly constituted elections that are fought over by political actors who do what political actors do: politick.

In other words, the good faith assumption is a step towards appreciating more fully exactly what Mr. Madison was on about when he wrote the following:

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts...The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.

What we see as the great moral march of just crusaders led by our fearless party leaders against the evil and/or ignorant opposition, Mr. Madison seems to think of as a faction that, if left unchecked, would lead to the demise of true republican government. We should think about that when we get so frothy-mouthed by our partisan worldviews. Mr. Madison imagined us getting frothy-mouthed, and resolved himself to divide political power six ways from Sunday to stop us from ruining our fragile republican experiment amidst our frothy furor. What does that tell us?

The psychological embrace of a partisan worldview is easy and satisfying. Both partisan narratives are easy to understand. Each helps us make judgments about a whole host of things for which we lack direct referents. Each is psychologically satisfying. Few things in life are more pleasurable than righteous anger. However, neither is all that valid on an empirical level. Embracing one might enable us to identify one actor as good and another as evil. It might allow us to feel good about ourselves. But it will not move us any closer to the reality of our politics. In fact, it will move us further from it.