What Does the Party Want?

What the Party Wants is What Matters, Even If It Shifts From Day to Day

Orwell’s 1984 is devastating about the immense power of one thing: What the Party Wants.

That’s what matters, much more than people’s views about policies — and much more, even, than people’s memories.

Is Ukraine our friend? Was Ukraine our friend yesterday? Was Ukraine our friend a few years back?

Or is Russia our friend? Was Russia our friend the day before yesterday? Was it our friend a few years back? Was Russia always our friend?

Do we love tariffs? Did we always love tariffs?

What about Canada? China? Europe? USAID? Did we like one or more of these in 2024? What do we think now?

Here’s Orwell:

“Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.”

Orwell gets the psychology right, but he didn’t have data. A good nominee for The Most Relevant Paper of 2025 comes from 2003, and it is by Geoffrey Cohen. It’s called Party Over Policy: The Dominating Impact of Group Influence Over Political Beliefs. (You can find it here: https://ed.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/party_over_policy.pdf)

The central finding, from way back in 2003, is that in deciding whether to favor some policy, people set their own views to one side and ask instead: What does my party think?

That’s pretty interesting, but here’s something equally interesting: People denied being influenced by what their party thought, even though they clearly were, and even though they said that other people would certainly be influenced by what their party thought.

You might think that people would be affected by their party only on exotic issues, where their own convictions are not firm. It’s a good thought, but it’s wrong.

One of the tested issue areas involved welfare programs. Should they be generous or not so much? Not surprisingly, Republicans tended to prefer the less generous programs. But after Republicans learned that most of their party’s members of Congress favored the more generous programs, and that most Democratic leaders opposed them, they flipped: They preferred the more generous programs!