I think your comment at the CFR event really hit the nail on the head -- at least as it applies to the foreign policy elite -- that the most important differences of opinion are within the two parties, not a strictly partisan Republicans versus Democrats polarization. Should U.S. foreign policy deal primarily with relations between sovereign states, or with forcing changes in how other states govern themselves internally? Does the U.S. have a historically unique mission to spread its virtues to the rest of the world, sometimes by force if necessary? These are questions which would draw sharply different answers from prominent thinkers within each party -- Brzezinski, Cliff Kupchan, etc in with Scowcroft and Haass; and Anne-Marie Slaughter in with Bill Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz (on these questions, but obviously not on some others, such as the role of international institutions and international law, where the neocons and liberal "muscular idealists" are still divided). On those two questions, there's a growing convergence between liberal "muscular idealists" in the Democratic party, and neoconservative Republicans, and I'd argue, a growing convergence between more 'realist' Democrats and likeminded Republicans.

If I were to advise President-elect Clark (or whomever) in 2008 on who to select for National Security Advisor, and I had to choose between Ivo Daalder and Richard Haass, I think that would be a pretty clear choice for me, and the decision would have nothing to do with partisan labels.

Outside the policy elites -- the folks buying copies of "Let Freedom Ring" ("f--- yeah!!!")and "Bushwhacked" at B. Dalton's, I think the polarization might be a bit more clear.

But, I also think recent polling data from CFR/Public Agenda supports the view that a foreign policy message based on the sort of "ethical realism" outlined in Lieven's National Interest piece this summer could resonate with the majority of public opinion -- whichever party chooses to run on it. Particularly among Democrats, I think there's a big disconnect between a large chunk of the party's foreign policy elite (the now-dominant faction) and the party's grassroots...

Looking forward to your "longish article" -- do you know where you're going to publish it yet?

To build a majority, Democrats need to win over values voters and to national security minded voters. Democrats have to show the necessary resolve to lead a war on terrorism and protect America's borders. Democratic House Whip Steny Hoyer recently released a policy document which points the way for Democrats to once again become the party of national security. Link to PDF http://tinyurl.com/a98wr

I think you have a bad graphic because it mixes serious and unserious books. Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot and "Dude, Where's my country just don't reach the same level of thought and seriousness of the more scholarly, The Great Unraveling, Soft Power and The Clinton Wars. And certainly those books do not address the issues with the same seriousness of more scholarly publications by those authors.

Many of the publishers like "Crown Forum" and Regency game the bestseller list and you can tell by looking at the asterisks. The books ship, but it is the bulk sales that put them on top. As for the seriousness of any of the books on that list, give me a break.

Does the connection between books also in part reflect bulk sales? Just asking.

Is it really possible to glean the nuances of GOP/DEM foreign policy by reading books marketed to the most rabid partisans?

Steve,

Yes, Valdis Krebs has been doing some great work in social netwook analysis for a number of years in reference to your "this chart stunned me".

FWIW here's a few factoids on knowledge sharing and collaboration.

- The true cost of acquiring information (time wasted looking for it) and the cost of not knowing (Katrina, 9/11, Poultry Flu etc.) are both greatly underestimated.

- People cannot readily differentiate useful information from useless information, and feel overwhelmed with content volume and complex tools (info overload, and poverty of imagination)

- People only accept and internalize information that fits with their mental models and frames (Lakoff's rule)

- People seek out like minds who entrench their own thinking (leads to groupthink)

GADDIS--COLL--MANN

I was delighted to see that smart folks in both camps read John Lewis Gaddis, Steve Coll and James Mann.

Perhaps what the chart tells us is that too many policy authors are excessively partisan. When wise, thoughtful and empirically grounded authors write, the literate public reads them.

There may still be hope for the realist center in American political discourse.

JohnStuart

I agree with earlier posters that this chart is a bit suspect. There are a lot of serious and topical books that should be on this chart and "filling in the middle" that are missing. For example, where is:

- Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power
- Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom
- Max Boot, Savage Wars of Peace
- Niall Ferguson, Empire
- Ken Pollack, The Threatening Storm
- Tom Friedman, Longitudes and Attitudes
- Tom Barnett, The Pentagon's New Map
- Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong?
- Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism
- Peter Bergen, Holy War, Inc.
- John Keegan, Intelligence in War

All of these books sold well, so a lack of sales should not be an excuse for excluding them. Instead, you have the extreme ends of this populated by unserious books, with only rare exceptions (Nye's Soft Power, Brzezinski's The Choice). I feel like the person who created the chart made little effort to discover the intelligent discourse that should populate and fill in its middle.

PLEASE DON'T NITPICK THE METHODOLOGY WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING IT

The author is very transparent about the methodology: the top 100 political books on Amazon were used. The data was gathered in late April 2004. Two books are linked in the social network if they were purchased by the same person.

This is standard social science, not a conspiracy.

Please read before you criticize.

JohnStuart

JohnStuart -

I did review the methodology before posting above, and I understand it completely. And after thinking about this some more, I still think that this is a flawed sample, for a few reasons:

1) It's not clear how Amazon files books under the 'political' category. It seems to omit many politically-relevant historical or social science books, but capture all of the "throwing raw meat to the base" titles.

2) April 2004 is probably at or near the polemical high tide of the four year political cycle, right in the middle of primary season when people who buy political books are getting energized and are more partisan than in other periods of the political cycle. It's when publishers are putting out more partisan books than in other periods of the cycle.

I think it is absolutely fair to question the methodology because certain companies are known to "game" the best seller list to boost sales. By confining it to the "Best selling books" maybe that tells us only that the market for "rabid raw meat" books is greater than the market for serious books. Is the circulation greater for People Magazine? or Foreign Affairs? I rest my case.

On top of that, if you compare the numbers of people reading these books to those watching the night news, the book readers are a mere drop in the pond.

Hey folks, the above analysis is all DATA DRIVEN! I made NO choice on which books to include/exclude... I followed Amazon's numbers which reflect WHAT their customers are buying.

Commenters[above] listed several books as "should have been included". Those books were not included because their numbers were not sufficient to make it into the political top 100 of Amazon or their "also boughts". Several of those books mentioned had not been published at the time!

People "voted" with their dollars to create this data stream, this is not a depiction of "books shipped" -- which can be used to game the numbers.

I stand by my analysis.

I am not criticizing the analysis. I am criticizing the data set. Is there a single book on the right hand side that is neither a sychophantic tribute nor a whack job?

I don't think that these books are the font of serious information. For serious information, one should look to the "think tanks" such as AEI, Heritage, Brookings, etc. In terms of foreign policy differences, their position papers are defining the divide in foreign policy and outlook. These are not sold by Amazon. They are downloaded for free.

Traditional Democrats are mostly liberal interventionists. They look to build alliances and international institutions as a means of projecting American "Soft Power."

Many traditional GOP (like Pat Buchanon) are isolationists in the tradition of Taft prior to WWII. The isolationists are apoplectic about Iraq.

The neo-cons are military interventionists, but only in middle east policy. They are unilateralist in relations with other countries. They hope to sway world opinion by threat of military force and domination.

Most Americans are isolationist or liberal interventionists. Bush sold the Iraq War to Democrats as liberal interventionism but has instead pursued only military interventionism and unilateralism. Bush has failed to build institutions and alliances to address the political problems of Iraq, because Bush believes that our problems in Iraq can be solved with military force alone. Only after Bush is disabused of that idiotic notion can there be real progress in Iraq.

Very few Americans are hard core military interventionalists and now that the public is recognizing Bush Iraq policy for what it is, they want out. This is why Bush poll numbers on Iraq are so low.

I don't think this comes as any suprise to anyone. There was an article in the economist last week about this, [url]http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4484021[/url]Generally though I agree with most of your points

Greg.

I agree with most of your post (which I guess I'm also agreeing with steve by extention.) However I don't think that a "convergence" at the policy elites level is just happening now. I think it occurred almost a decade ago when both groups moved to the centre.

I think the biggest move was by the neo consevatives which really captured the centre ground by pushing this idea of infusing values into American foreign policy, seeing US as a force of good for the world. Although Clinton was more concerned with Humanitarianism rather than the lofty goal of transformation that the Neo conservatives have laid out, at their core they hold very similar values on many issues.
Actually I don't think this is limited to the US, as the EU is very much in the mind of pushing ethical foreign policies. If you read the EU security strategy, its word for word the same as the US national Security strategy, save for replacing the word preemtive with preventative. In European parliance, muscular idealism or neo-conservatism is described as "the normative power model" and is really the basis of the creation of the new European Security and Defence policy.

On the other hand, the idea of a realism convergence occurring is more of a sign of of this tradition's dying out. The end of the cold war, globalization, and the influence of non-state actors such as terrorist groups on international relations have brought into question many of its central tenets, despite what many of its main proponents would like to believe. To be honest, I think its better that it fades away anyways. This trend is also mirrored in Europe as the slow death of pacifism, or the "Civilian power model" in foreign policy.

Where the mainstream of the dems and the neoconservatives part is on the practicalities or nuances of foreign policy, what instruments to use, should we support the UN, ect. This disconnect has created vicious debate between the two sides. However it has been exceedingly difficult for the Democrats to mobilize voters on these practicalities, even though they are absolutely essential to the success or failure of a foreign policy. Kerry tried to do it during the election, (not exceedingly well I might add) and he failed miserably.

Where I think neo-conservatives clinch the race is not in their ideas but in how they vocalize them. I believe that they are able to connect to the population to a far greater degree than equivalent thinkers on the dems side.
Neocons eschew journals or longish polemical books on foreign policy, and rabidly publish in Newspapers and magazines. They also articulate their positions extremely well, enabling them to appeal to a wider audience. I really don't think Dems have been able to connect in the ways they have been able to.

Bahko I agree with you none of the books on that list could be considered "serious reading", but then again these books have rarely sold well and are quite expensive. If you want good topical academic literature you have to pay for it, pure and simple. Some maybe downloaded for free, but you're not going to geta wide reading. Personally I think the best option for a casual reader is to get a subscription to a good general journal. Journal articles are small enough to be easily readable, while condensed to cover all the main points.

I would say the best introductory journal (even though its not really a journal anymore) is Foreign Policy magazine, by the Carnagie endowment. Foreign Affairs is decent as well, as is International Security. Personally my favorite is the IISS journal Survival, which is very balanced in its discussion, but individual membership is exceeding difficult to obtain.

SOME WASHINGTON NOTE READERS DON'T "GET" SOCIAL SCIENCE AND DATA ANALYSIS

Perhaps it is in the nature of blogs that the readership is more interested in what they "feel" than about empirical evidence.

Valdis applied social networking analysis to real data about real books bought from a real store. It produced an interesting result that has validity within the framework of the data.

He could have selected a list of books that he "felt" were interesting and surveyed the purchases made by a range of readers he "felt" were worthy.

This would have produced bloggable material, but it would not be social science.

There is a sub-group amongst WashingtonNote readers who don't seem to get the distinction.

JohnStuart

Richard, your categorical dismissal of the list suggests profound parochialsm ( you write "I agree with you none of the books on that list could be considered "serious reading").

The leading-lights on foreign policy at think tanks and universities would wince at your suggestion, for example, that John Lewis Gaddis [Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale and author of The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (1972); Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security (1982); The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (1987); We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997); The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (2002); and Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (2004)]is not "serious reading".

Your unfamiliarity with Gaddis is a sure signal that you don't actually read Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, et al.

Many readers of this and other blogs would do well to devote an hour a day to reading the "serious" literature before they go on-line. This might reduce the "vapidity qotient" of the on-line commentary.

JohnStuart

I think Professor Cole hits the nail on the head. Most Americans don't know enough details about other countries to make informed decisions. The pundits may not know much more than the people.

"The United States is a peculiarly insular society. Most people here haven't traveled very much and our mass media, all television news of any significance, is controlled by about five corporations. We have a tradition in the State Department and our press corps of preferring generalists and being suspicious of deep expertise as a form of bias. So a journalist covering Iraq, who knows the Middle East well and knows Arabic, might well be seen as someone too entangled with the region to be objective. The American way of ensuring objectivity is to parachute generalists into a situation and have them depend on local informants. The whole theory of it is wrong. The BBC, for example, wouldn't dream of having most of its Middle Eastern coverage done by people who don't know Arabic.

Basically, the public is informed about things like the Middle East by generalist journalists who were in Southeast Asia or Russia last year, and by politicians and bureaucrats who were dealing with some other region last week. And then there's official Washington spin, and the punditocracy, the professional commentators, mainly in New York and Washington, who comment about the Middle East without necessarily knowing anything serious about it. Anybody who's lived in parts of the world under the microscope in Washington is usually astonished at how we represent them. You end up with an extremely persistent set of images that almost no actual information is able to make a dent in."

I think Prof Cole has accurately described the state of our policy making and information structure. Given this state of affairs, is it any wonder that people have very different ideas, many of them not reality based?

Look John, I only briefly looked over the list, and I passed over your post. What struck me was the mass amount of what I call psuedo-intellectual crud. I'll admit it though... I made a generalization, and yes there are some good books on there, many of which I've read. So I'm sorry about that. But I'd also like to point out that calling someone poorly read because he missed five or six exceptions on a list of a hundred titles could be construed as being as a bit harsh and even hypocritical. I have read Gladdis, (I think it was required reading in first year of university), and he reminds me at times of one of my favorite authors, Lawrence Freedman.

I am going to disagree with Richard over two facts he states in his post. The first is that the Neo-cons are winning the policy battle. In case you haven't noticed about 3 in 5 disapprove of Bush/Neocon Iraq policy. Barely 2 in 5 support Bush/Neocon policy. After an attack, it is easy to motivate the American people to seek revenge and hit back. Retaliation is common to Neocon, liberal interventionist or isolationist policies. Mr Bush has justified his policy, not as Neoconism but as retaliation for 911. Mr Bush is still talking about Iraq and 911 in the same sentence.

Second, there is nothing about military inteventionism that is "moral". While overthrowing a brutal dictator in some sense may be moral, the reasons for the US being in Iraq are far broader and range from moral to very immoral reasons. Much of the Neocon policy seems to be intervention in the ME in support of Israeli colonization of the West Bank. Where is the moral imperative from the Neocons for Darfor? Neocon policy is hardly moral, unless one equates moral with God giving land to people. Even JR Ewing of the TV show Dallas did acts that had some good consequences, but his acts in no way would be described as "moral".

I think that moral (good v evil) is a bad way to define a foreign policy. Foreign policy is mostly NOT about morality or good and evil. Foreign policy is mostly about competing interests and finding solutions that are just. Justice and fairness define foreign policy, not morality. In this light, Neocons can claim "morality" all they want, but they cannot equate military intervention with justice.

JohnStuart, I think what several people above have been saying is that the conclusions are only as good as the data. Any conclusions drawn from the chart posted here are based on assumptions underlying the chart. These assumptions include: 1. Bestselling books are the right measurement; 2. Amazon's list is the appropriate list; 3. The 'political' list is the right list to use from Amazon.

The larger conclusions do not necessarily follow from the data, for several reasons. First, policy debates are conducted among a much smaller subset of people, thus bestsellers are not a very good measuring tool. Second, publishers are known to game the bestseller lists for commercial advantage; this diminshes their accuracy as an actual measurement of what people are reading. Third, the entire analysis rests on how good a job Amazon is doing in coding books as political. If the conclusions' definition of politics is not congruent with the category choosers' definition, then even the best analysis will not tell a reader much. (To take four examples cited by cb above, Ferguson's Empire is categorized as history; Boot's Savage Wars has one categorization as law, two as history, three as politics and one as professional & technical/law; Lewis' What Went Wrong has two as history and one as politics; and Keegan's Intelligence in War is in four different history categories and no political categories.)

Of course good social science requires dispassionate analysis of the data. Equally, it requires judicious selection of the data to analyze. Without that, you're left with that old aphorism from computer science.

JohnStuart, I think what several people above have been saying is that the conclusions are only as good as the data. Any conclusions drawn from the chart posted here are based on assumptions underlying the chart. These assumptions include: 1. Bestselling books are the right measurement; 2. Amazon's list is the appropriate list; 3. The 'political' list is the right list to use from Amazon.

The larger conclusions do not necessarily follow from the data, for several reasons. First, policy debates are conducted among a much smaller subset of people, thus bestsellers are not a very good measuring tool. Second, publishers are known to game the bestseller lists for commercial advantage; this diminshes their accuracy as an actual measurement of what people are reading. Third, the entire analysis rests on how good a job Amazon is doing in coding books as political. If the conclusions' definition of politics is not congruent with the category choosers' definition, then even the best analysis will not tell a reader much. (To take four examples cited by cb above, Ferguson's Empire is categorized as history; Boot's Savage Wars has one categorization as law, two as history, three as politics and one as professional & technical/law; Lewis' What Went Wrong has two as history and one as politics; and Keegan's Intelligence in War is in four different history categories and no political categories.)

Of course good social science requires dispassionate analysis of the data. Equally, it requires judicious selection of the data to analyze. Without that, you're left with that old aphorism from computer science.

Sorry about the double post above. (And how about that comment spam above me? Anyone able to get rid of it?)

What the chart does tell us is that people who buy The French Betrayal of America doe not also buy The Bubble of American Supremacy, or that people who buy The Lies of George W. Bush do not also buy The Official Hanbook: VRWC. This confirms what intuition intuits.

Valdis writes, "I made NO choice on which books to include/exclude... I followed Amazon's numbers which reflect WHAT their customers are buying." Precisely the point. All of the judgement has been subbed out to Amazon, which is why I'd give this chart an "isn't that interesting" remark but would not base anything stronger on it.

Doug,

you are asking things of the research that it does not purport to answer.

The question being examined by this rather simple and straightforward piece of social science is "are American readers of political books polarized?"

So the universe is "American book readers".

The reasarcher's proxy for book readers is book buyers.

And his sample is book buyers from America's largest book seller (Amazon) at a specific poi nt in time in 2004.
These are the kinds of sample simplifications that are common in applied research & are not dangerous as long as they are transparent and understood by the research consumer.

All this business about "publishers gaming the system" is effectively overridden by the fact that the data is books sold to actual buyers.

Yes, Amazon's hand is in the pie in terms of their categorization of books as "political", but I don't see much about this list that suggests that their categorization has obvious flaws. Do you imagine that there were high volume purchases of political books at Amazon in the sample period in 2004 that were excluded? If the excluded book was something sophisticated, ambiguous and abstruse, it probably didn't sell enought to make the data set anyway.

Had the universe been book buyers at the Harvard Coop, there would have been some differences in both the book list and the buyer universe. But finding out what American book buyers at America's largest bookseller actually buy and what are the linkages amongst their purchases is quite a good way of answering the basic reasearch question that Valdis set out to examine:

"are American readers of political books polarized?"

I remain persuaded that there is a fundamental weakness in the critical facilities of the majority of the blog-reading community.

Blog readers tend to be:
****partisan
****polarized
****readers of more rumor than fact
****generally (although not always) inadequately educated in both the scientific method and critical logical analysis

For all of these reasons, the blog reading world,as a collectivity, has a hard time dealing with simple, straightforward social science. Straight social science lacks the innuendo, pizazz, multiple agendas, and tendency to scream to which blog-readers have become accustomed.

Blogging will probably prove to be a relatively minor and passing phase in the longer sweep of modern intellectual discourse.

Unfortunately, however, the longstanding tradition of fuzzy thinking, rejection of empiricism, and attraction to conspiracy theories will continue to thrive. It will simply find new modes of expression when blogging fades away.

JohnStuar