How to be an ideological border collie

Reading an excerpt from "The Wisdom of Crowds" for class. A couple passages struck me:

Why does polarization occur? One reason is because of people's reliance on "social comparison".... It means that people are constantly comparing themselves to everyone else with an eye towards maintaining their relative position within the group. In other words, if you start out in the middle of the group and you believe the group has moved, as it were, to the right, you're inclined to shift your position to the right as well, so that relative to everyone else you're standing still... By moving to the right you're moving the group to the right, making social comparison something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. What's assumed to be real eventually becomes real.

And later....

...In small groups ideas do not succeed simply on their own merits... when advocates are chosen, as it were, on the basis of status or talkativeness, rather than perceptiveness or keenness of insight, then the group's chance of making a smart decision shrinks. Talkativeness may seem like a curious thing to worry about, but in fact talkativeness has a major impact on the kinds of decisions small groups reach. If you talk a lot in a group, people will tend to think of you as influential almost by default..."

In combination, it makes me re-evaluate what's going on in the US culture wars. The forces approving the war, shouting that it's all fine, or those raising a ruckus to root religion into schools, courts and science text books are applying these two principles. Volume of response is interpreted by the masses as proportion of agreement, and the masses, wanting to maintain their centrist stance, migrate to the right. When those with dissenting views allow themselves to be shouted down by those who substitute volume of response for quality of response, the best ideas lose.

This is the flaw of equal time: "We just heard 2 minutes from someone who thinks all races should be equal under the law, and now, to maintain a balanced view, we'll give 2 minutes to the Grand Wizard of the Tupelo, MS chapter of the KKK." The sheep aren't clever enough to realize that just because the KKK guy gets half the time, he doesn't represent the ideas of half the people.

The author is very clear that these insights apply to small groups, but I'd argue they seem to apply to discourse taking place at a national level.