You may be familiar with the "fundamental attribution error," which is our tendency to characterize our own behavior as a reasonable response to circumstance, but other people's behavior as a reflection of their inherent nature. When I cut you off in traffic, it was an honest mistake, because you were in my blind spot; when you cut me off in traffic, it was because you're a jerk who doesn't care who you run off the road. There's a related kind of ideological attribution error, which is the belief that my positions are reasonable judgments about what's good and what works, while your positions are the product of evil intentions. I give you George Will, America's most widely syndicated opinion columnist:
Forever seeking Archimedean levers for prying the world in directions they prefer, progressives say they embrace high-speed rail for many reasons—to improve the climate, increase competitiveness, enhance national security, reduce congestion, and rationalize land use. The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives' passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans' individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.
To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make.
He found us out! If we can just get that high-speed line between Los Angeles and San Francisco going, the way will at last be smoothed for the forced relocation of all Americans to collective farms! This differs from the most unhinged Glenn Beck rant only in that it lacks a reference to Bill Ayers.
As Matt Yglesias points out, high-speed rail isn't so much an alternative to cars as it is an alternative to air travel, and furthermore, America is awash in heavy-handed government regulation and taxation at the national, state, and local level in the service of subsidizing the automobile. So when conservatives support those government policies, they're just maintaining human freedom, but when progressives support a slightly different set of policies, they're "Forever seeking Archimedean levers for prying the world in directions they prefer."
Does George Will actually believe that progressives like high-speed rail because they think it will turn Americans into mindless drones who are "more amenable to collectivism"? I really don't know. Either he doesn't, in which case he's a just a partisan hack, or he does, in which case his powers of analysis have been so twisted by distaste for his ideological opponents that, well, he's a partisan hack. Will does aver, however, that "generations hence, when the river of time has worn this presidency's importance to a small, smooth pebble in the stream of history, people will still marvel that its defining trait was a mania for high-speed rail projects." No question about that -- in a hundred years, when historians are looking at the Obama administration, they won't be talking about health-care reform or economics or Afghanistan or anything else: "Its defining trait" will definitely be its "mania" (you'll notice that a policy a friendly administration pursues is just a policy it pursues; a policy an unfriendly administration pursues is a "mania") for high-speed rail.
