Maybe I’m just going to make all of my blogposts have deliberately provocative titles. (…it’s not like a million people have already had this idea or anything…)
It’s kind of become an article of faith among the political class (or at least the mainstream ones I read, as with this op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times by Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute) that the USA is too polarized politically: Democrats and Republicans can’t work together; they don’t respect each other; this is why no major legislation gets passed these days; political operatives are cynically scaring voters into believing that their political opponents are the scum of the earth; this is Bad For the Country.
It’s true that with a Democratic president and a GOP Congress, there is very little major legislation being passed. But this level of polarization and acrimony isn’t unprecedented – think of the Adams/Jefferson election, or hey, the Civil War. And let’s be honest with ourselves: there’s not going to be another civil war. The country will survive.
I’m not against recognizing that Republicans are people. Far from it! In the ideal world, we’d be magnanimous and open-minded towards everyone, and respect everyone’s basic humanity.
My issue is with the assumption that it’s important for everyone in the USA, specifically, to have this feeling of common purpose and unity with other citizens of the USA. Look, I think I’d get along better (and, in fact, have) with a cosmopolitan-liberal-leftist from France or South Africa or Poland than with a hard-core conservative from Texas – and I’m not ashamed of that. In fact I find the suggestion that I should be ashamed of that pretty repulsive. Why should sharing my nationality bump someone up several places in the line for my esteem and loyalty, ahead of sharing my worldview? It’s usually an accident of birth that makes two people Americans, but to a significantly larger (if not total) extent, ideology is something people choose.
I’d like to be as understanding and compassionate towards conservatives as possible. But the tragedy here is that it’s fundamentally human to operate under the principle that the friend of my enemy is my enemy. If Akshay and Benicia are friends, and Akshay has been let’s say punched in the face by Chaim, Akshay’s probably going to expect Benicia to take his side against Chaim, and if Benicia starts making excuses for Chaim and talking about how he was only doing what he thought was right, Akshay might get angry. Making peace with one’s rivals is easy when you’re the only one whose rivals they are. If you’re not, you run the risk of offending a lot of people who are even angrier at those rivals than you are.
It’s easy to dismiss such anger as irrational, or hyped up out of proportion by fearmongering, but if there’s one truth about the business of government, it’s that it involves real-life consequences. “Losing” in politics doesn’t just mean being disappointed in your country: it can mean being immiserated, jailed, killed. I was going to make a bigger deal of the issues of privilege and marginalization here – it’s relatively easy for me as a man to say that Republicans are fundamentally good people, for instance, given that they aren’t trying to take away my right to choose whether or not to give birth; and it would be even easier for a straight man to overlook Republicans’ belief that my sexual orientation is disgusting. But even if some people are more vulnerable than others, anyone can perceive themselves as being at the mercy of political change. My point is that people have very rational, or at least very human, reasons for distrust and rage towards others, and it’s forgivable that they should demand that their allies share that rage.
If this still shocks you, consider if someone decried the “polarization” between the USA and ISIS, and suggested that we should stop “vilifying” ISIS. You’d probably be pretty offended, right? I know I would: ISIS is doing objectively horrible things, and suggesting that they can be reasoned with as though they hadn’t committed atrocities attacks the conscience. I’m not trying to get into the question of how much worse is ISIS than Republicans: all I’m saying is that even you, dear moderate, centrist, open-minded reader, have enemies – people with whom the idea of reconciliation is offensive, people who, if a politician described them as “basically good people trying to get by, just like us”, you’d be outraged.
And since domestic politics have real, even fatal, consequences, is it so hard to believe that some people’s enemies might share their citizenship? The idea that it’s natural for a nation to “all get along” is the great centrist hubris of our era. I don’t see the point of working to ensure that everyone who happens to live in the same country should feel a sense of shared destiny. What is so special about nationhood? It’s just another division of the human race. If we are going to go all out for the principle that Americans should all get along, we should equally go all out for the principle that humans should all get along. And most centrists, even the most high-minded and noble, aren’t willing to go that far.
If humans really are in a tragic state of being unable to see everyone as Us – if there has to be a Them – I would argue that an ideological Them is actually the best Them to have. It beats the pants off having an ethnic, regional or national Them, because people can in principle change their minds, adopt a different ideology, or just hide their true convictions. They can’t so easily pass as a different race, lose their accent, emigrate. If it’s even true that I “hate Republicans”, that hatred is dependent on their holding Republican viewpoints; if they abandon them, so would I my alleged hatred.
(Religion is a special case – wars based on religion have been some of the bloodiest in history, and religion is at least to some extent an ideology, but the ideologies of the modern US political spectrum, unlike religions, have an empirical test in whether they work in this life: you can stay pretty aggressively loyal to the emperor if it takes you until after you die to realize he has no clothes. You can’t vote God out of office if He sends you to Hell.)
Ideology isn’t a zero-sum game: the reason I keep voting for Democrats is because I sincerely believe that everyone ends up better off on average if Democratic policies get implemented. I also believe that if Democratic policies get implemented and work and make people better off, more people will support them (the policies at least, if not necessarily the party). These are both testable claims that don’t require any group of people to surrender power forever, unlike dividing the world by nations or races.
A lot of Americans, though they wouldn’t own up to it, probably think there isn’t enough polarization in Washington. We want to vote for politicians who share our views and values, which means sharing our outrage, which means from time to time lobbing intemperate insults at powerful people who we believe are doing great harm. If all the politicians seemed to like each other, would we be happy about that? I doubt it.
This partisanship, contra Arthur Brooks, won’t break the country. He quotes Thomas Jefferson warning of “a political intolerance as despotic [as religious intolerance], as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.” In 1801, that might have panned out – politicide is a real phenomenon. But it’s almost unheard of in the USA now for Democrats or Republicans to be physically attacked or persecuted based on their party preferences. Having secret ballots helps. By contrast, our country’s most salient ‘bitter and and bloody persecutions’ – in which Jefferson himself was neck-deep! – are rooted in ethnicity, particularly white supremacy, anti-Black and anti-Native racism. I’m not as concerned about political polarization as I am about racism, maybe because the partisan divide in the USA isn’t killing anyone. So I feel pretty okay with, say, calling a conservative politician a monster for supporting policies I feel are egregiously anti-Black.
There’s a larger discussion to be had about how these days so much discussion and opinion-sharing is public: how should we accommodate our human need to be as polite as possible to whoever’s face we’re in front of right now, when more than ever everyone can access everything we say? But it’s just the truth that by ingratiating ourselves with some people we inevitably alienate some others. In a utopia, we would be understanding and benevolent towards even the most evil humans, but as long as we remain the tribal creatures we’re evolved to be, I think choosing our tribes based on shared moral values is the best option.
Notes From Punderground 