David McElroy

It seems as though I’m seeing stronger and stronger expressions of political anger lately. If you read that and thought, “Well, of course we’re angry. The other side is so unreasonable,” this is for you.

The people you’re angry with are just as convinced they’re right as you’re convinced that you’re right. “But they’re dishonest,” you say. “They must know that they’re wrong. They have other motives.”

I’m here to disagree with you about that. There are a very few people who get into politics purely as charlatans, but very few. Mostly, they got into it because they were attracted to the political process (and the power involved in it) and they believed that the political position they took was obviously the right one.

The vast majority of liberal progressive Democrats sincerely believe that conservative Republicans are selfish, greedy racists. The vast majority of socially conservative Republicans honestly believe that liberal Democrats are immoral, evil idiots. Various other groups have similarly distorted views about people they oppose. The truth is that almost everybody honestly believes he’s right. The problem is that we have a system that allows only one group to get its way.

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Every animal I’ve ever been around has had some kind of personal quirk, but I’ve never seen one like Anne. She seems to want to spend her life inside of a stinky shoe.

You might remember a story from a few weeks ago about Molly, the homeless young cat who I placed into a home — only to have her returned to me by the new family, who deemed her unsuitable. She was also pregnant when she returned from that experience. Anne was one of the kittens born to Molly two years ago.

Molly had four kittens, but only three of them survived. Anne is solid black, and she’s the runt of the litter. She’s the smallest cat I’ve ever been around, weighing in at only 5 pounds.

Her biggest oddity is that she loves shoes. I’ve had cats who love specific types of shoes — such as leather for trying to scratch on — but I’ve never seen one who so consistently wants to crawl inside my shoes. Given the smell of the human foot, you understand why this seems an unfathomable mystery to me.

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Why do some ideas limp along for years and then suddenly jump to public acceptance seemingly overnight? Why can the tiny minority opposed to a government languish for decades and then suddenly succeed? Scientists say they have an answer. The magic is in winning 10 percent of the population.

I never seem to be part of majorities. In fact, I typically find myself in a very small minority — sometimes a minority of one. The people I’m attracted to have never been like everybody else, either. Most of all, though, the iconoclastic ideas that I fall in love with are rarely popular with most people. And when you’re in those sorts of minorities, you get accustomed to staying there.

Social scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are now offering hope for the crazy people like me — and maybe you — who believe in ideas that others reject. Their research suggests that you don’t have to win a majority to change a population. You merely have to find 10 percent of the population to agree with you:

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