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The presence of even one Republican appointee often makes Democratic appointees much more moderate. Republican appointees often become much more moderate when even a single Democratic appointee is there.
We now know that ideological amplification is pervasive on federal courts––that it can be found in numerous areas, including sex discrimination, affirmative action, campaign finance law, disability discrimination, environmental law, labor law, and voting rights.
It turns out that ideological amplification occurs in many domains. It helps to explain 'political correctness' on college campuses—and within the Bush administration. In a recent study, we find that liberals in Colorado, after talking to one another, move significantly to the left on affirmative action, global warming, and civil unions for same–sex couples. On those same three issues, conservatives, after talking to each other, move significantly to the right."
The relevance of this idea to the blogosphere is pretty obvious. On a website dedicated to supporting the policies of President Bush, a commenter who despises the president either doesn't show up at all or, if she decides to take a flier, finds her views—along with her personality, her character, her intelligence, and her friends, family members, and pets—instantly subjected to a barrage of, shall we say, critical scrutiny. Such a person is likely to get the message and flee into the welcoming, consoling arms of Kos or Atrios. And of course the mirror image of this scene is enacted on the left–wing blogs. With the dissenters driven away, the Faithful who remain reinforce and, as Sunstein says, amplify one another's views, with the result that the community of that blog becomes more monolithic and more extreme. As Sunstein writes in another post, the regular readers of and commentators on certain blogs tend to produce "echo chambers" or "information cocoons"—they insulate themselves from alien ideas and (even more important) unpleasant facts.
Among the ideas that get amplified in such an environment, one of the most pernicious and (alas) common is the idea that people who are not among the Faithful deviate from the True Path not just because they make different political judgments, or have different beliefs about how best to form a just political order, but because they are, well, evil. One predictable effect of ideological amplification is the transformation of opponents into enemies. Which leads us to Sunstein's second key concept—one which (to my knowledge anyway) he hasn't directly linked with ideological amplification, but which I want to contend is intimately related to it, as a potential antidote. That concept is political charity.
Sunstein's discussion of this subject seems to have begun with his claim that in the aftermath of the midterm Congressional elections in 2006 President Bush and Rick Santorum—who had just been defeated by Bob Casey in his attempt to be re–elected as a Senator from Pennsylvania—behaved graciously in defeat, giving credit of various kinds to their opponents:
"Santorum's concession speech was, in its way, quite remarkable. Showing no trace of bitterness, he began by praising Bob Casey, saying that he was a fine man and that he would do a fine job for Pennsylvania. He specifically asked his supporters to give a round of applause to Casey, and when the applause was tepid, he added, spontaneously and with evident sincerity, 'Come on, give it up, give him a round of applause!' "
Some commenters on this post were outraged by the very idea that people they disagreed with on political issues could behave graciously. "As for myself, however, I will continue to hold Santorum in the basest contempt," wrote one; "Rick Santorum is a loathsome creep," another affirmed. But Sunstein stuck with the idea, and in later posts suggests that Senator Barack Obama exemplifies, in many of his speeches and writings, virtues very similar to that which he credits to Santorum at his moment of defeat. In a later post Sunstein spells out the key components of political charity:
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