Pseudobeliefs may serve any number of functions I’m using the phrase “symbolic belief” for the ones that either work as a public expression of some associated attitude, or play some role in defining the holder’s self-conception. The classic case of a “symbolic belief” is what Orwell dubbed “doublethink”: propositions you profess publicly, maybe even sincerely believe you believe, even while, on another level, there’s some part of you that knows better, so that the false belief doesn’t actually get you into practical trouble.
It’s obviously too stringent to make it a condition of ascribing belief that people act on all the logical and practical implications of holding it, but when the disconnect is too profound, I think we’re justified in characterizing some of these as pseudobeliefs, one subset of which is what I want to call “symbolic beliefs.” I mean, what would you do if you were really-and-truly convinced that something like that were true? Take up arms? Throw yourself into a quest for conclusive evidence? Move to Canada? Something, probably-or if you wouldn’t, at any rate, some non-trivial proportion of the people who shared the belief would-or so I’d imagine. Yet I can’t help but notice that, however much people may have expressed intense disdain for Bush, you did not really see a lot of behavior consistent with millions upon millions of people being seriously convinced that their president was a treasonous mass murderer. president deliberately allowed (if not engineered) the murder of thousands of American civilians for his own nefarious purposes. Now, probably some of those people interpreted this in a very broad sense and were thinking about the report that summer warning, in very general terms, that Al Qaeda was “determined to strike in U.S.,” but assume a hefty chunk literally meant that they thought a sitting U.S. As my colleague at Democracy in America notes, comparable numbers of Democrats during the Bush Administration told pollsters that they thought Bush had foreknowledge of 9/11-or at any rate were uncertain about whether he did.
Now, certainly it would be unsettling if a significant chunk of the population had abandoned the realm of reasonable disagreement for racially-tinged conspiracist fantasy. And while in most regions of the country, upwards of 90 percent know that he was, fewer than half of respondents in the South were willing to say so with confidence. More than a quarter of Republicans purport to believe that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and even more proclaim themselves unsure.
It’s hard not to be disturbed by a recent poll suggesting that Birther Madness, while still marginal among Americans on the whole, has moved from fringe to mainstream in certain select demographics.