Politics as Religion

I came across a good quote from Bryan Caplan while reading the blog post Bad Incentives That Work Quite Well: The Opportunity Cost of Political Partisanship by Stephen J. Dubner.

Dubner thinks back to how Caplan put it in a podcast:

People have often said that politics has been the religion of the 20th century, and I think there’s a lot to that. In the same way that people get attached to a religion, they get attached to a political party. And once you’re part of it, you don’t want to hear someone talking about the horrible things that your religion or your party did in the past. You don’t want to go and say the people who now run it might be morally questionable, or hypocritical, or just wrong. Instead, you want to find a sense of community with a bunch of like-minded people. You all tell each other how wonderful you are and try to defeat your Satanic enemies who for some strange reason continue to dispute the truth that you have obtained.

Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University and author of The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.

I would say that politics is today's "new religion." As we become a more diverse and secularized community/state/nation, our passions and calls for dogmatic purity have moved into the political arena.