Interesting reply. The problem with examining this is that it’s really hard to objectively examine who holds the most crazy ideas: Ideally you would just pick X random crazy ideas and then see who holds them the most, but human brains are no good at this.
Instead what I do is look at the presidential elections and debates and see what the important people of each party actually say. You have to admit that the republican primaries were absolutely nuts, and the same cannot be said of democratic primaries. Of course Mitt Romney suddenly became much much more moderate as soon as he won the primaries, but to me this indicates that there is currently far more pressure among republicans to espouse crazy beliefs when talking to their base at least. What’s worse, I suspect that a large number of republican candidates really believed what they were saying, though I suspect that Romney was just being pragmatic. As soon as he won the primary, Hotelling’s law ensured that he had to make a swift jump to the middle to stand a chance, which he duly did.
Interesting reply. The problem with examining this is that it’s really hard to objectively examine who holds the most crazy ideas: Ideally you would just pick X random crazy ideas and then see who holds them the most, but human brains are no good at this.
Instead what I do is look at the presidential elections and debates and see what the important people of each party actually say. You have to admit that the republican primaries were absolutely nuts, and the same cannot be said of democratic primaries. Of course Mitt Romney suddenly became much much more moderate as soon as he won the primaries, but to me this indicates that there is currently far more pressure among republicans to espouse crazy beliefs when talking to their base at least. What’s worse, I suspect that a large number of republican candidates really believed what they were saying, though I suspect that Romney was just being pragmatic. As soon as he won the primary, Hotelling’s law ensured that he had to make a swift jump to the middle to stand a chance, which he duly did.