Politics makes us dumb

Two questions for the morning after: Who’d you vote against yesterday? And are you feeling smarter yet, now that the fog of politics is lifting?

The day after Election Day is, perhaps, not the most opportune time to point this out, but despite our lionization of citizenship and participatory democracy, politics often brings out the worst in us. I don’t mean politics can be a dirty business, though it can. What I’m referring to now is the fact that political battle very literally makes us worse at being people – it makes us less rational creatures.