Julian Sanchez has written an outstanding post on “symbolic belief.”

As my colleague at Democracy in America notes, comparable numbers of Democrats during the Bush Administration told pollsters that they thought Bush had foreknowledge of 9/11—or at any rate were uncertain about whether he did.

Despite that, as he goes on to explain, there was no serious and sustained effort to overthrow the president.

It’s obviously too stringent to make it a condition of ascribing belief that people act on all the logical and practical implications of holding it, but when the disconnect is too profound, I think we’re justified in characterizing some of these as pseudobeliefs, one subset of which is what I want to call “symbolic beliefs.”

Consider the large number of Muslims in the Middle East and South Asia who both denied that Al Qaeda was responsible for the 9/11 attacks yet who also wore Bin Laden T-shirts to celebrate his fight against the West. What we’re dealing with is what Sanchez calls a pseudobelief.

Pseudobeliefs may serve any number of functions; I’m using the phrase “symbolic belief” for the ones that either work as a public expression of some associated attitude, or play some role in defining the holder’s self-conception.

To question whether Obama was really born on American soil is to associate oneself with the view that Obama is somehow un-American. I recall a spate of articles raising questions about the fact that John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone — could his eligibility for the White House thus be questioned? The argument never gained traction, perhaps because it didn’t resonate with an existing narrative about McCain’s foreignness. McCain’s harshest critics saw him as a warmonger, but they never questioned his American credentials; rather, they felt that his politics reflected the worst excesses of the American character. Obama’s critics, in contrast, really do see him as alien to America’s political traditions, though he in fact embodies a strain of American left-liberalism that’s been around for a long time.

While Birtherism is clearly disturbing, not unlike the 9/11 Trutherism that for various reasons never attracted the same level of sustained media attention, it is important to understand the limits of the phenomenon. Julian Sanchez concludes his post with the following.

We’re accustomed to hyperbolic claims in political rhetoric when they’re manifestly at least partly normative—”Bush is a fascist!” or “Obama is a Stalinist!”—but still tend to take comparable assertions that seem more strictly factual at face value. Things don’t look quite as worrying if, at least when they’re coming from ordinary folks answering pollsters queries, we treat them as one more species of exaggeration in political rhetoric.

That sounds right to me.