This morning I have three examples for us to explore, in each case we want to know if people are stupid or simply partisan. Another way of looking at this is to ask to what degree partisanship makes people stupid, or perhaps warps their morals.

The first example involves Medicare and Medicaid which are celebrating their 56th birthday on July 30th. Before we get started, here’s a 1961 video of Ronald Reagan explaining why a government-run health program for old folks would be socialist and very, very bad.

Reagan and the American Medical Association lost that battle, but the campaign helped conservatives take over the Republican Party and put Reagan in the White House in 1981. In the meantime, Medicare became very popular. When conservatives took over the House of Representatives in 1995 and Speaker Newt Gingrich said he had a plan to let Medicare “wither on the vine,” that turned out to be very unpopular.

Gingrich argued in a speech at the Blue Cross/Blue Shield conference on Oct. 24, 1995, that Medicare is a “government monopoly plan” with a “centralized command” bureaucracy. He said it was the kind of program that we were then advising Russian president Boris Yeltsin to move away from in favor of free market solutions. In other words, Medicare wasn’t just socialist but akin to Soviet-style socialism.

This was consistent with Reagan’s original argument for opposing a program like Medicare, but the Clinton administration knew that people would not like Gingrich’s comments and they used it as a cudgel against the Speaker and as a key part of their successful reelection campaign.

Perhaps for this reason, it was the effort to privatize Medicare that withered on the vine, and today we see a different message coming from House Republicans.

It’s interesting to see Republican Rep. Elsie Stefanik celebrating the “critical role” a Soviet-style socialist centralized command bureaucracy has played in safeguarding people’s health and future. But it’s very odd that she then contrasts it to socialist health care schemes. This kind of thing can make your head explode. Is Stefanik a moron who doesn’t know how stupid she sounds? Or does she know that her argument is absurd and doesn’t care because it’s a political argument that works for her party?

Our second example involves Donald Trump’s persistent popularity with Republicans.

This one is self-explanatory. There’s little question that Trump attempted to remain in power despite losing the 2020 presidential election, and this ought to be very unpopular even with the people who voted for him. For some reason it is not. Do the Americans who still support Trump not care about representative government or are they truly under the spell of lies that suggest that Trump was the true winner?

Finally, let’s turn to Joe Biden and the Democrats. Biden appears to have made a breakthrough, as he convinced 17 Republican senators to sign off on having a debate on a very large bipartisan infrastructure package. It’s far from a done deal yet, in part because progressive Democrats in the House are unhappy about the concessions that were made to the Republicans.

In fact, Democratic voters are split on this issue and others that involve a choice between pursuing purely partisan solutions and seeking deals with the other side of the political aisle.

A new Associated Press-NORC poll finds 6 in 10 Democrats say they’re optimistic about their party’s future, and Democrats nearly universally — 92% — approve of the way President Biden is handling his job.

“But the party is divided over the best strategy for accomplishing its agenda. About half say Democrats should compromise with Republicans, even if it means giving up things they want. The other half say Democrats should stick to their positions no matter what, even if it means they would have to find a way to pass laws without Republican support.”

You can be sure that Republicans are universally opposed to the Democrats passing laws that have no Republican support, so if half the Democrats agree that gets us close to three-quarters of the American electorate. It’s easy to see what is popular, at least in the abstract, but that doesn’t prevent a lot of Democrats from criticizing Biden’s approach.

On the other hand, even if many Democrats are unhappy, 92 percent of them tell pollsters that they approve of the president’s job performance.  Are they being honest with the pollsters? If they’re unhappy, why don’t they say so? Could it be the case that they are less interested in giving a truthful answer than in avoiding saying anything that could lend aid and comfort to the Republicans?

Politics is treated as a team sport. But it’s a little more complicated than that. Most people, including many politicians, aren’t in on the game. They’re not fully self-aware about the distinction between what they say and how they really feel. In truth, people will easily begin to believe things that aren’t true if they sense it’s in their political interest, and they’ll even change how they feel, especially over time.

There’s no question, for example, that rank-and-file Republicans are less committed to free and fair elections than they used to be. Many Democrats who want no part of compromising with Republicans will nonetheless begin to feel differently when the see that defending Biden also involves defending his approach.  They may not realize it it happening, but before long they’ll actually see bipartisan solutions as preferable and take Biden’s side.

This is why leadership is so important. What leaders say changes how people think and eventually how they feel about the issues. One example from the Obama administration involves the black community’s opinion of gay rights. As President Obama moved to the left on LGBT issues, so did the black community.

Similarly, Trump’s attacks on the free press and our election system have moved his strongest supporters.

One measure of the health of a political movement is to look at whether or not their arguments make logical sense. Celebrating America’s greatest socialist program by saying it’s far better than socialism doesn’t meet that test. You may not agree with Biden’s approach, but at least it’s not absurd.