Drew Westen and his wife suffered the loss of an unborn child. So when he says that the Democratic party in the US needs to communicate better on the issue of abortion, he speaks from the position of a person who understands personally how emotionally conflicted we are in how we view the unborn.But Drew Westen is also a neurologist, so he also speaks from the position of a person who understands where emotional conflicts like this come from, how they work, and how significantly they effect our most important political decisions.The basic premise of The Political Brain is that you cannot sell political ideas on reason alone, or even on reason first. Our brains are not wired to exclude emotion from our decision-making. Far from it. The vast majority of our decision-making can be attributed to emotion first and foremost.I had my own emotional conflict absorbing that premise. On the one hand, the fact that appeals to rational decision-making are fundamentally ineffective is unnerving. It rattles my sense of my own rationality, and of my ability to use reason to convince others. It makes me question whether my own views are correct, and whether or not I can promote them.On the other hand, there is almost a sense of relief. Maybe we are all deluded in how we think our own decisions are made, but at least if we know the nature of the delusion, we can utilize its features to be more effective communicators of political ideas. It also, frankly, makes it easier to understand what seems at times like the mass stupidity of politics.I also found it difficult to digest his advice, sometimes. For instance, he suggests that an absolute ban on abortion should be characterized as a rapist's bill of rights. That narrative has the same flaw he sees in the dominant conservative narrative - an absence of motivation for the antagonists. People who would ban abortion no more love rapists than people who would support gay marriage hate families.The problem is that if you fail to take people on in an emotional way, you cede the entire playing field to the enemy. And the neurological effect of silence is equivalent to the effect of agreeing. So you have to disagree, and in an emotionally evocative way.Westen's advice to the left seems to be that they need to draw a distinction between having moderate policies and having moderate (or as he calls it, dispassionate) politics. If you want to unite and convince people it's all about big emotion.Yes, it's not how we have told people for hundreds of years that we should aspire to make decisions. It's just the way we actually do, and always have. The more I understand the game of politics, the less I like it. But hopefully the more I understand it, the better I can get at it. Because it never seems less important.