My suspicion, my awful awful newfound theory, is that there are people with a sincere and even kind of innocent belief that we are all just picking winners, in everything: that ideology, advocacy, analysis, criticism, affinity, even taste and style and association are essentially predictions. That what a person tries to do, the essential task of a person, is to identify who and what is going to come out on top, and align with it. The rest—what you say, what you do—is just enacting your pick and working in service to it.