Ryan Michaelson

English 101
Rhetorical Analysis
7 Nov 2014
Is Partyism the New Racism?

David Brooks takes the issue of discrimination by political affiliation head on in the
article he authored for the New York Times titled Why is Partyism Wrong? In this article
Brooks tries to argue that there is a greater amount of political discrimination in todays society
and racial discrimination. He begins the article by describing an encounter he had with a young
college student, the college student asks Brooks if he should leave certain job experiences off of
his resume because the job he was performing was for a conservative think tank and the
companies he was applying for had liberal views. Brooks advises the student not to leave the
experience off of his resume, but later admits that that advice may have been wrong.
After Brooks starts to question whether or not he gave the young college student sound
advice he delves deeper into the issue stated in his articles title. Brooks begins by referencing a
study conducted by two political scientists, Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood. These scientist
conducted an experiment by handing out one thousand student resumes to random people and
asking them which students deserved a scholarship. Each resume had certain political cues and
certain racial cues, the scientist found that even though race influenced the decisions on which
students received scholarships, political affiliation influenced the decisions even more.

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Brooks then references the same to political scientists in separate study conducted at
Harvard College. In this study the scientists measured whether people associate different
qualities with positive or negative emotions. They had the students play a trust game which
measures the trustworthiness of different kinds of people, they found that political biases were
stronger than racial biases. It seems to me that Harvard might not be the best suited college to
conduct this study, if they wanted to enforce their findings they should have chosen a place
that had more of a diverse group of people.
Another issue I have with the two studies that Brooks references is that they are from
the same set of scientists. The scientists could have their own agenda in setting up these
experiments. If Brooks intends to persuade the reader into his way of thinking I believe he
would have had a stronger argument if the data was from more varied sources.
After presenting the only two scientific studies in this article Brooks goes on to say that
in todays society politics is being hyper moralized. He argues that people are building their
entire social identities on around political labels. These statements and the rest of the article
seem to be Brooks opinion more than fact. It seems that after he presented the two studies
conducted by the same scientists he is content with those being the only scientific sources he
needs to back up his arguments.
I think Brooks starts the article off well with his story about the young college student,
he then backs up his initial point by transitioning to the political studies that were conducted.
Unfortunately I dont think these two studies are strong enough to sway the reader into the

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same line of thinking that Brooks has presented. Overall I dont think Brooks article was strong
enough to present the case that political discrimination is more prevalent that racial
discrimination.