This piece on mobbing (via Glenn Reynolds) has not done much to renew my faith in the human brain:

When a mobbing occurs, that spirit of openness gets strangled by groupthink, bent on someone's elimination.

The Law of Group Polarization, formulated by Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, says that a bunch of people who agree with each other on some point will, given the chance to get together and talk, come away agreeing more strenuously on a more extreme point. If this tendency has a curdling effect on intellectual debates, it can have a downright menacing effect when the point of agreement is that a particular colleague is a repugnant nutjob.

Calling some departmental mess a mobbing does not imply that the victim is wholly innocent, Mr. Westhues says. But it does imply that the campaign against the target has probably been based on fuzzy and unspecific charges, that it has proceeded with a degree of secrecy, that its timing has been hasty, that its rhetoric has been overheated and overwrought, and that it has been backed by an eerie unanimity.

"One of the most painful experiences in my life," Mr. Westhues says, "has been to go to dismissal hearings where everybody is sitting around a table as if they were embodiments of pure reason." What's really going on in many of those settings, he thinks, is just brutish behavior ratified by procedure.

"What we've got to do is cultivate an academic culture that is aware of the tendencies in us, of the herd instincts inside of us," he says. "We have a tendency, especially us pompous academics, to think we're above all that."

With his mobbing research, Mr. Westhues joins a tradition of thinkers who present an account of some deep-seated impulse as a plea for pluralism and restraint. And while he says it is possible to take mobbing seriously without believing we all have those herd instincts, that belief helps.

"I have a friend who says that there's only two kinds of people in the world," Mr. Westhues says, "those who believe that there's original sin and those who don't."

"I think probably mobbing research as a whole is more on the side of the original-sin folks," he says.

When mobbing occurs in politics, the process is usually initiated by activists who hurl ad hominem attacks which would be called bullying in a workplace setting, but which are considered part and parcel of the normal political arena.

If the target is a real bastard, this sort of mobbing can work, and the voters will ratify the attacks by voting against the vilified target. But what can also happen is that the activists forget that voters aren't activists, but normal Americans with a wholesome love of the underdog -- and a hatred for bullying. So instead of creating a monster or a demon, the mobbing can create victim status.

And in politics, victim equals backlash.

While it is too early to tell how it will go over with Pennsylvania voters in November, the vilification of Senator Rick Santorum has already reached such a fever pitch that it's made the front page of today's (Sunday) Inquirer:

To fans, Santorum is a moral champion. To many on the left, however, he epitomizes intolerance and inspires contempt. For example, there are tens of thousands of references to "santorum and anal" on Google, including the lewd definition - which is the first thing that pops up when you search "santorum." And blogs are filled with brutal language about the senator. "He's garbage wrapped in skin," someone named Dethspud posted on the Drudge Retort this week, one of the few insults suitable for newspaper publication.

"The mythology is starting to build so that at a certain point Santorum isn't Santorum anymore - he's a token, or a type," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and a scholar of political communication.

"Santorum lives in a world that doesn't have grays in it," Jamieson said. "It brings out a kind of hostility on one end and a loyalty on the other."

The interplay of those emotions is likely to influence Santorum's reelection fight this fall, already targeted by both parties as the top Senate race.

Only a few political figures outside the White House have generated such strong feelings in modern times, analysts say. Among them: former Sen. Jesse Helms (R., N.C.) and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D., Mass.). In another league, but the same vein: Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who led a hunt for Communist infiltrators in the 1950s, giving his name to the hysteria of an age.

In addition to the effort to use Santorum's name to define certain sex acts, there's a group called Philadelphians Against Santorum which is sponsoring a Rick Santorum lookalike contest. And recently, a local gym was targeted for a boycott because its owner supported Santorum.

In activist circles, the name "Santorum" seems to have become a synonym for eeevil and dirty:

Polls, so far, show Santorum trailing his likely Democratic opponent, state Treasurer Bob Casey Jr., and give the incumbent low job-approval ratings.

But poll numbers don't adequately convey the vehemence of some Santorum opponents.

"When I actually hear his name, I think of 'sanctimonious,' " said Hannah Miller, 30, a Democratic activist in Philadelphia. "It's one thing to hate all these [conservative] bastards in Texas, but Santorum's in Pennsylvania! He's like this dirty thing that should have stayed in the South, but he floated up here and invaded. This is personal."

Pollster Berwood Yost said Santorum appeared to face an uphill fight now, but the race would "have a life of its own" because of the high stakes and the millions both sides will spend.

"Liberals and Democrats in general are so strongly against the current administration that they are much more likely to be energized," said Yost, director of the Keystone Poll at Franklin and Marshall College. "The key to the election this year is going to be whether conservatives come out to vote." (Emphasis added.)

I can't think of a better way to increase conservative turnout. And if the attacks get so loud as to be out of all proportion to the reality of Rick Santorum (who voiced sentiments shared by a sizeable minority of voters), ordinary non-activist voters might be shocked to be reminded -- notwithstanding their short memories -- that Santorum is surprisingly soft-spoken.

Worst of all, Rick Santorum refused last summer to fire a gay aide. (The original Knight-Ridder story survives at Free Republic.) A picture of the gay aide (who is also black) appears here. Even more ominously, the gay Advocate.com reported that "Santorum's praise for his gay aide didn't dim the ardor of the senator's conservative supporters." (More here.)

Fortunately for Santorum's aide, he wasn't outed in the heat of the election, although it might have fascinated voters to see a gay black man (or should that be "black gay" man?) "mobbed" in the name of gay rights.

Political mobbers are probably too smart to do such a thing this summer.

(As for me, I've never been a fan of Rick Santorum, but I'm a bleeding heart where it comes to victims of any mob.)