Cognitive biases and the Milibands

I fear that the Labour leadership election, and reactions thereto, are heavily influenced by some cognitive biases.
Some say that David lost despite being the more experienced of the two brothers. It might be truer to say that he lost because of his experience. Far from this giving him attractive skills, it merely gave him guilt by association.
The association here wasn’t just with New Labour, but with power structures. Some people hold it against David that he covered up allegations of torture. What they fail to ask, though, is whether this reflects on his character or rather upon the corrupting influence of power itself. My strong suspicion - having known David quite well at university - is the latter. Given the pressures from the US and the security services, I suspect that lots of decent people would have done what David did. His critics seem to me to be committing both guilt by association and the fundamental attribution error.
By contrast, Ed’s lesser experience was a positive advantage. It allowed him to distance himself from New Labour - in a way that Balls or David couldn’t - and to present himself as a blank canvas, onto which people could project their own hopes; I suspect this was also a factor in David Cameron’s winning the Tory leadership. People are seeing what they want to see (pdf) in Ed.
The fundamental attribution error, though, appears in a second context -it is raising hopes for what Ed might achieve. Polly Toynbee says:

Now he is free to write whatever he wants on the clean page he has created.

This is gibber. As the man said, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.” And the problem is that any Labour leader’s freedom is highly circumscribed: by the waning power of the media; by voters’ own cognitive biases as filtered by the Westminster village; and, of course, by what everyone’s favourite Miliband called “the logic of capital.”
Surely, the fate of the Labour party in the next few years owes more to circumstances - most notably whether the government’s deficit reduction strategy will work or not - than to Ed’s particular character.

Comments

[Paolo Siciliani]

David experience is a disadvantage because he didn't have the gut to topple Brown and run for the elections - it is a big IF but with hindsight he might be serving now as PM in a la-lib coalition.
Hw is also too charmant, too telegenic and an easy communicator, which I guess people is growing increasingly suspicious of this kind of politicians. . .

[RobG]

"Given the pressures from the US and the security services, I suspect that lots of decent people would have done what David did"

But lots of decent people didn't aspire to power like David did. It's the desire for power in the first place, with the full knowledge of what that will involve, which is the objectionable trait.

[pablopatito]

Its not unreasonable to want, and indeed expect, your leaders to be above merely "decent". If David proved to be just normal in caving to the US, then I don't want him as Prime Minister. Ed may turn out to be same, but he may not - I'd rather wait and find out than assume he's also weak-willed but decent.

But I don't understand this idea that Ed will "be his own man", and won't be pressured by the unions. I always thought the Labour leader merely reflected the will and wishes of the party, and wasn't some kind of a dictator. Indeed, if Ed Balls ends up as Chancellor then he'll be almost as powerful and influential as Miliband, and in some regards even more powerful. Am I just naive?

[Alex]

This is wet. It's precisely because it's easy to slide into doing unspeakable things in power that it's necessary to maintain norms against them. One way of doing this is exemplary punishment, which is just what Torture Dave just got.