Why Civility Failed
The Real Problem With American Politics
All Politics Is Personal
This isn’t really a political book. Books on politics are written by researched experts and office-holders who experienced events first-hand. This is a memoir. This is the story of broken human relationships of all kinds. This is the story of reaching out with the offer of friendship and what I learned about human nature as a result.
FOX News is rejected by Democrats and the New York Times is rejected by Republicans. Who should I believe? I can’t be everywhere at once, so I am as dependent on the news as everyone else. Since the various news outlets contradict each other (and themselves), and have been caught in lies before, none of us can be sure of everything. There is a chance I have many details wrong, but my problem is less with the alleged wrongdoers in the news and more with those average people I meet who knowingly endorse wrongdoing. That’s what the book is really about. This is my story:
Since a very young age, I always considered it to be my job as a citizen to vote and to educate myself so that I could vote intelligently. I didn’t want to screw things up for everyone else. I read all I could on every issue and encouraged my peers to do the same. I corrected the record when I heard lies being repeated and I was always willing to debate.
I am a very easy person to get along with. I’m generally easygoing. I’m not picky. I do not always fight to have things my way. Even in politics, when the stakes are high, I am comfortable with a wide range of options. I really don’t have a preference whether gay marriage or civil unions are recognized by the state or not. If such things are important enough to you that you feel the need to advocate, I won’t get in your way. I want to be friends with everybody.
Sometimes, we may disagree on politics. This can actually be a good thing. I can’t be everywhere at once and it would help to compare notes with someone who listens to different news sources than I. You may know some things about the candidates that I do not, and I may know some things that you do not. I want to make the best possible choice based on the best possible evidence. I welcome debate because bringing up points for analysis and rebuttal is a great way to get to the truth. If we are both honest, we should be able to reach an agreement.
It may also be that on certain types of issues we cannot reach a resolution. For example, I studied a great deal about climatology and came to the conclusion in 2004 that global warming was basically made up. I remember finding much evidence for this. Unfortunately, this was so many years ago that I can no longer remember every bit of evidence, every counterargument, and how large sets of facts fit together. I might not be able to convince anybody today. In this case, the best thing is for both of us to keep an open mind and remain uncommitted to any position. If it is truly important, I can always go back and learn everything over again. This will take years. We should not be quick to jump to conclusions based on the first paper we read.
There are also certain issues that cannot by their very nature be decided by one person. No one person can know all the ways that new immigrants both harm and help us. It takes the cumulative experience of everyone in the country that has to deal with them in order to know how high to set the number of admissions per year. You are free to have a different opinion because I understand that you have had different experiences.
It is also okay not to be interested in politics or science. Not everybody can do everything. We can divide up the work. You can be an engineer and I can be an artist. You can run a restaurant and I can do the voting and activism. There is nothing wrong with a lack of opinion if you are uninformed. In fact, keeping an open mind is the wise thing to do when lacking data.
I love debate. Debate is good. It helps us to find the truth. I appreciate that others have different opinions of how to distribute power (Should the congress or the senate or the president declare war? Should judges be elected or appointed?), how to count the votes (Multi-seat districts? Ranked choice?), which candidate is more qualified for the job, how best to raise revenue, or what color the flag should be. I have no problem with this type of debate.
There are only a few things that bother me: Jumping to conclusions and holding them tightly in spite of evidence to the contrary is one. Believing in contradictions is another. Refusing to even listen to my side of the story is another. Getting confused by language and thinking the symbols we use to represent things are the things themselves is another. Constantly moving the goalposts and changing the meaning of words mid-sentence is another. Being evil and showing no respect for other people really pisses me off.
Because in politics we play with the lives of other people – whether or not we should go to war, what behaviors should be illegal, what should be done with those that continue to engage in such behaviors, and what should be done with those who resist – it is not a light, pleasant conversation that we can have over tea. Politics is simply war by other means. Government is by definition the use of force. If you commit yourself to supporting evil candidates in order to perpetuate injustice, I cannot guarantee your safety. I must allow people the chance to defend themselves, and if they are unable, I must do it for them.
If we are going to get along, you must use logic and common sense. If you repeat nonsense political slogans, I will have a very hard time trusting your judgment and sanity. This means I will be nervous doing business with you or giving you a ride home. I will feel I always have to watch my back. It will be hard to stay friends. Basically, don’t be evil and don’t be stupid and we should get along fine.
In 2010, I started the understanding project in response to the increasing political strife I was hearing about in the news and observing between my friends and coworkers. I aimed to promote civility, compromise, pragmatism, unity, tolerance, education, and understanding. To understand and be understood are basic emotional needs that I hoped to meet. I believed at the time that most people were basically good, but misinformed. I thought that by being nice and by listening, we might have the chance to learn from each other and find solutions to our problems that would work for everybody. My plan was to interview people to find out how they had arrived at their positions, as well as discover who they were getting their news from and how they had determined them to be reliable. I had expected to learn as much as I taught.
I believed that people sometimes remained uninformed because they wouldn’t listen, but that they wouldn’t listen only because those who might teach them had started off by insulting them. I believed that so long as I avoided stepping on anyone’s ego, I would be able to reach people in a way that the screaming TV personalities could not.
I started a blog (TheUnderstandingProject.com) to explain some of my thoughts. I wrote a book (The Nutcase Across The Street) on political polarization and mailed copies to pundits whose addresses I could find (not many). I reached out to everyone I knew who had espoused political opinions and offered to buy them a coffee and listen to them so I could learn why they thought the way they did. I wanted to know where they got their news and why and what caused people to think differently. I joined Facebook groups. I even joined the “Coffee Party” early on, which claimed to be for all the same things I was. I went to their meetups and posted links on their Facebook wall.
I discovered that people sometimes used the same word to mean different things and different words to mean the same things. I discovered that I would often end up arguing over the definitions of words while actually agreeing on the basic concepts. This happened often enough that I began to think all our disagreements were ones of semantics. I thought that by “learning the language” of others, we could understand each other and see that we are all on the same side.
I experienced some initial success, giving me hope I was on the right track. I got one Democrat woman to agree that repealing the seventeenth amendment was in the country’s interests when I didn’t tell her where the idea had come from. I listened long enough to a self-described socialist and anarchist to understand that what he meant by those terms was nothing scary or contradictory. Unfortunately, these examples soon dried up and I was as frustrated as ever. In the meantime, the blog got very few comments, most of them from spambots, and I repeatedly found myself too busy to keep up on it. I couldn’t even keep up on the news as I had in the past and when I did have free time my other interests dominated. At the same time, my usual news sources were becoming ever more suspect and I knew of nothing to replace them with. I could no longer be sure I knew what I was talking about.
Soon nobody wanted to talk to me. One woman somehow assumed I had only asked to meet her for one-time-only for ten minutes so I could ask some survey questions. When I told her I had hoped to talk for hours and meet every week, she lost all interest. Nobody had any time to spare. The Coffee Party stopped meeting in person and the leadership changed the settings on their Facebook page so that only they could post. As their promoted posts gradually became ever more anti-heterosexual, anti-white, and anti-Republican, all the independents, Libertarians, Greens, and Republicans left, leaving behind only hyperpartisan Democrats.
On the national stage, political rhetoric continued to become more venomous and people I did manage to engage with online refused to accept the most basic axioms of logic, math, or morality. If I didn’t agree with them already one hundred percent, they weren’t interested in educating me. I would be written off even if I agreed with ninety percent of what they said. People I knew no longer directed their hate exclusively at politicians but went after regular people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. With the increased use of social media, people who never showed any interest in politics before rapidly became committed partisans. People who used to be my friends began taking stances against decency and reason. They never believed anything I told them, but would turn their whole worldview inside out after seeing a single meme of unknown origin.
It used to be that genuine misunderstandings (whether mine or theirs) were cleared up quickly by more talk. Sometime between 2006 and 2012, this stopped. Additional words only gave additional points of misunderstanding. These misunderstandings were often so preposterous that they could not possibly be genuine. People would ignore the context of the conversation, the context of what they knew about me as a person, and even forget that they had just used the problem word the same way. They repeatedly took my words in the worst possible way they could be taken. Furthermore, the same issues would pop up again and again even after I thought they had been resolved. Memory had no hold on them. Most importantly, the constant squabbling over semantics that had always existed in politics and legal matters began to leak into everyday non-political conversation. At the same time, more and more issues that were never political before became political. It became harder and harder to communicate and I soon felt I had no friends. There was nobody I could trust.
It has now become clear that misinformation and language barriers are not the problem. My opponents have no legitimate grievances or concerns. They only want to play mind games with me by constantly changing the definitions of words as they go. They yell and accuse me of crimes when I thought we were on the same side.
It is out of times of loneliness that we get mass shootings. It is out of times of tribal strife that we get civil wars. I hear people warn about both of these things – and then go right on to keep the fires burning. I can only conclude that this is what they want.
How big government drives incivility:
Politics isn’t merely a popularity contest. The candidates who win enact policies that can mean the difference between liberty and tyranny. Laws are more than mere slogans. They are meaningless unless they are enforced and governments are not above threatening violence to ensure compliance. Even when the punishments are non-violent, such as fines or imprisonment, this is only so when the accused cooperate in their own oppression. Should one resist, the inherent violence of government will show. This subtle threat exists behind every law.
When people feel their rights are being trampled on, they fight back. If the government were not involved in marriage, we wouldn’t be fighting over whether gays and lesbians can get married. If the government were not involved in education, we wouldn’t be fighting over how to teach sex ed or whether to teach evolution, the Bible, or the Koran. If the government were not involved in health care, we wouldn’t be fighting over abortion subsidies. The more government controls, the more there is to fight over. The less it controls, the more that each can live, work, and play his or her own way and we can all be happy.
This is why it is so important that we start listening to each other. This is why it is so important that we start understanding each other. I’m not writing for the politicians. I’m writing for those that vote for them. Give peace a chance.
Respecting the wishes of opinion minorities isn’t just the nice thing to do, it’s also in our best self-interest. There are so many issues to have positions on that it is actually rare for anyone to be with the majority on all of them. Someone who stands with the majority on health care, gay rights, climate change, and voter ID laws might later find themselves to be in the minority on school vouchers or the death penalty.
In a dictatorship, the one overrules the many. In an oligarchy, the few overrule the many. In a democracy, the many overrule the few. In all three cases, somebody is being trampled on. By respecting individual rights and restricting our decisions to only those things directly affecting the whole country, the majority will keep its trampling to a minimum. By respecting those in the minority, we ourselves will be respected when it is our turn to be in the minority.
There are several ways this principle might be applied. One idea is for all bills to have to pass a significantly larger portion of the legislature than fifty percent, such as sixty or seventy-five. Unanimity is impractical, but any problem of great importance with an obvious solution should have no problem being approved by seventy-five percent. Problems of lesser importance with less clear solutions probably shouldn’t be imposed by government anyways.
Another idea is for all bills to pass a majority of multiple houses, each elected differently and representing different interests. We already do this to a degree by requiring bills to pass the congress, senate, and be signed by the president. We could do more, adding a house to represent moneyed interests or by putting certain issues before the public to vote on directly.
Another way to make sure all points of view are included is to have multi-seat districts filled by single-transferable voting, range voting, or some other method that eliminates the spoiler effect so the true preferences of the people can be counted.
In addition to preserving civility and peace by preventing small and feeble majorities from imposing on each other, these measures have the added bonus of reducing the number of new laws to pass, the number of new programs and departments created, and the amount of money spent. What is good for civility is often good for liberty and what is good for liberty is often good for civility. Centrists and libertarians have a lot in common. It’s a win-win.
Who is to blame?
The one who actually does the deed bears the bulk of the guilt, but the one who gives the order is guilty too. Ordering a raid on someone’s house is only one step away from taking part in it. In the same way, voting into office those who would give such orders is only one step away from actually giving the orders. In a democracy, it is the voters that perpetuate oppression. The problem isn’t politicians or the media, the problem is you.
This is what most people forget when they call for new legislation: They are endorsing violence against their fellow citizens. They threaten their neighbors in order to get them to obey. Sometimes this is both justified and necessary when our neighbors are destructive, but most people never stop to ask themselves if the tradeoff is worth it. Which is worse? That some people ride without seatbelts or that we make people buckle up at gunpoint? That some people drink too much soda or that officers threaten to shut down businesses that sell it in cups larger than sixteen ounces? That someone might ignite a piece of cloth to make a point or that the state kidnaps and imprisons them for burning the flag? That someone might take a nap in a park or that the police wake them up and chase them away? That someone might give a haircut, shovel snow, or sell lemonade without first applying for a business license or that low-skill people are unable to support themselves? That a few stupid people injure themselves or that the rest of us never have fun anymore? Does it really cost society so much to allow fireworks that we are justified in outlawing them? There are always tradeoffs. Remember this.
This is the greatest reason why we don’t get along. How can I be friends with someone that wants to control me and is willing to use state-sponsored violence to get their way? It’s impossible. If you vote, you have made yourself my enemy. It isn’t political; it’s personal.
To be clear, the biggest problem facing our nation today is not that corrupt politicians pursue evil ends against the will of the people once in office; it is that the voters insist on evil again and again. The current positions and past actions of politicians are well-known. The ways in which members of one party rally to defend one of their own is common knowledge. Anyone who runs as a member of a particular party endorses that party. With everything that is public about our political parties, what kind of monster would support them? They are without excuse.
Government is never content to handle only the big issues of the day; it gets itself involved in the minutiae of our everyday lives. It is the most important thing there is because it makes itself that way. In his 2018 book Them, Senator Ben Sasse suggests that the way to heal our partisan divides is to get to know people as more than their party, finding common goals in other realms of life, remembering that political beliefs are not the most defining characteristic they have. This is the way it should work, but so long as oppression continues and is backed by the voters, political beliefs are the most defining characteristic. They show the nature of the heart more clearly than the sports team one backs. Friendship is impossible with control freaks. There is only war.
FOX News is rejected by Democrats and the New York Times is rejected by Republicans. Who should I believe? I can’t be everywhere at once, so I am as dependent on the news as everyone else. Since the various news outlets contradict each other (and themselves), and have been caught in lies before, none of us can be sure of everything. There is a chance I have many details wrong, but my problem is less with the alleged wrongdoers in the news and more with those average people I meet who knowingly endorse wrongdoing. That’s what the book is really about. This is my story:
Since a very young age, I always considered it to be my job as a citizen to vote and to educate myself so that I could vote intelligently. I didn’t want to screw things up for everyone else. I read all I could on every issue and encouraged my peers to do the same. I corrected the record when I heard lies being repeated and I was always willing to debate.
I am a very easy person to get along with. I’m generally easygoing. I’m not picky. I do not always fight to have things my way. Even in politics, when the stakes are high, I am comfortable with a wide range of options. I really don’t have a preference whether gay marriage or civil unions are recognized by the state or not. If such things are important enough to you that you feel the need to advocate, I won’t get in your way. I want to be friends with everybody.
Sometimes, we may disagree on politics. This can actually be a good thing. I can’t be everywhere at once and it would help to compare notes with someone who listens to different news sources than I. You may know some things about the candidates that I do not, and I may know some things that you do not. I want to make the best possible choice based on the best possible evidence. I welcome debate because bringing up points for analysis and rebuttal is a great way to get to the truth. If we are both honest, we should be able to reach an agreement.
It may also be that on certain types of issues we cannot reach a resolution. For example, I studied a great deal about climatology and came to the conclusion in 2004 that global warming was basically made up. I remember finding much evidence for this. Unfortunately, this was so many years ago that I can no longer remember every bit of evidence, every counterargument, and how large sets of facts fit together. I might not be able to convince anybody today. In this case, the best thing is for both of us to keep an open mind and remain uncommitted to any position. If it is truly important, I can always go back and learn everything over again. This will take years. We should not be quick to jump to conclusions based on the first paper we read.
There are also certain issues that cannot by their very nature be decided by one person. No one person can know all the ways that new immigrants both harm and help us. It takes the cumulative experience of everyone in the country that has to deal with them in order to know how high to set the number of admissions per year. You are free to have a different opinion because I understand that you have had different experiences.
It is also okay not to be interested in politics or science. Not everybody can do everything. We can divide up the work. You can be an engineer and I can be an artist. You can run a restaurant and I can do the voting and activism. There is nothing wrong with a lack of opinion if you are uninformed. In fact, keeping an open mind is the wise thing to do when lacking data.
I love debate. Debate is good. It helps us to find the truth. I appreciate that others have different opinions of how to distribute power (Should the congress or the senate or the president declare war? Should judges be elected or appointed?), how to count the votes (Multi-seat districts? Ranked choice?), which candidate is more qualified for the job, how best to raise revenue, or what color the flag should be. I have no problem with this type of debate.
There are only a few things that bother me: Jumping to conclusions and holding them tightly in spite of evidence to the contrary is one. Believing in contradictions is another. Refusing to even listen to my side of the story is another. Getting confused by language and thinking the symbols we use to represent things are the things themselves is another. Constantly moving the goalposts and changing the meaning of words mid-sentence is another. Being evil and showing no respect for other people really pisses me off.
Because in politics we play with the lives of other people – whether or not we should go to war, what behaviors should be illegal, what should be done with those that continue to engage in such behaviors, and what should be done with those who resist – it is not a light, pleasant conversation that we can have over tea. Politics is simply war by other means. Government is by definition the use of force. If you commit yourself to supporting evil candidates in order to perpetuate injustice, I cannot guarantee your safety. I must allow people the chance to defend themselves, and if they are unable, I must do it for them.
If we are going to get along, you must use logic and common sense. If you repeat nonsense political slogans, I will have a very hard time trusting your judgment and sanity. This means I will be nervous doing business with you or giving you a ride home. I will feel I always have to watch my back. It will be hard to stay friends. Basically, don’t be evil and don’t be stupid and we should get along fine.
In 2010, I started the understanding project in response to the increasing political strife I was hearing about in the news and observing between my friends and coworkers. I aimed to promote civility, compromise, pragmatism, unity, tolerance, education, and understanding. To understand and be understood are basic emotional needs that I hoped to meet. I believed at the time that most people were basically good, but misinformed. I thought that by being nice and by listening, we might have the chance to learn from each other and find solutions to our problems that would work for everybody. My plan was to interview people to find out how they had arrived at their positions, as well as discover who they were getting their news from and how they had determined them to be reliable. I had expected to learn as much as I taught.
I believed that people sometimes remained uninformed because they wouldn’t listen, but that they wouldn’t listen only because those who might teach them had started off by insulting them. I believed that so long as I avoided stepping on anyone’s ego, I would be able to reach people in a way that the screaming TV personalities could not.
I started a blog (TheUnderstandingProject.com) to explain some of my thoughts. I wrote a book (The Nutcase Across The Street) on political polarization and mailed copies to pundits whose addresses I could find (not many). I reached out to everyone I knew who had espoused political opinions and offered to buy them a coffee and listen to them so I could learn why they thought the way they did. I wanted to know where they got their news and why and what caused people to think differently. I joined Facebook groups. I even joined the “Coffee Party” early on, which claimed to be for all the same things I was. I went to their meetups and posted links on their Facebook wall.
I discovered that people sometimes used the same word to mean different things and different words to mean the same things. I discovered that I would often end up arguing over the definitions of words while actually agreeing on the basic concepts. This happened often enough that I began to think all our disagreements were ones of semantics. I thought that by “learning the language” of others, we could understand each other and see that we are all on the same side.
I experienced some initial success, giving me hope I was on the right track. I got one Democrat woman to agree that repealing the seventeenth amendment was in the country’s interests when I didn’t tell her where the idea had come from. I listened long enough to a self-described socialist and anarchist to understand that what he meant by those terms was nothing scary or contradictory. Unfortunately, these examples soon dried up and I was as frustrated as ever. In the meantime, the blog got very few comments, most of them from spambots, and I repeatedly found myself too busy to keep up on it. I couldn’t even keep up on the news as I had in the past and when I did have free time my other interests dominated. At the same time, my usual news sources were becoming ever more suspect and I knew of nothing to replace them with. I could no longer be sure I knew what I was talking about.
Soon nobody wanted to talk to me. One woman somehow assumed I had only asked to meet her for one-time-only for ten minutes so I could ask some survey questions. When I told her I had hoped to talk for hours and meet every week, she lost all interest. Nobody had any time to spare. The Coffee Party stopped meeting in person and the leadership changed the settings on their Facebook page so that only they could post. As their promoted posts gradually became ever more anti-heterosexual, anti-white, and anti-Republican, all the independents, Libertarians, Greens, and Republicans left, leaving behind only hyperpartisan Democrats.
On the national stage, political rhetoric continued to become more venomous and people I did manage to engage with online refused to accept the most basic axioms of logic, math, or morality. If I didn’t agree with them already one hundred percent, they weren’t interested in educating me. I would be written off even if I agreed with ninety percent of what they said. People I knew no longer directed their hate exclusively at politicians but went after regular people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. With the increased use of social media, people who never showed any interest in politics before rapidly became committed partisans. People who used to be my friends began taking stances against decency and reason. They never believed anything I told them, but would turn their whole worldview inside out after seeing a single meme of unknown origin.
It used to be that genuine misunderstandings (whether mine or theirs) were cleared up quickly by more talk. Sometime between 2006 and 2012, this stopped. Additional words only gave additional points of misunderstanding. These misunderstandings were often so preposterous that they could not possibly be genuine. People would ignore the context of the conversation, the context of what they knew about me as a person, and even forget that they had just used the problem word the same way. They repeatedly took my words in the worst possible way they could be taken. Furthermore, the same issues would pop up again and again even after I thought they had been resolved. Memory had no hold on them. Most importantly, the constant squabbling over semantics that had always existed in politics and legal matters began to leak into everyday non-political conversation. At the same time, more and more issues that were never political before became political. It became harder and harder to communicate and I soon felt I had no friends. There was nobody I could trust.
It has now become clear that misinformation and language barriers are not the problem. My opponents have no legitimate grievances or concerns. They only want to play mind games with me by constantly changing the definitions of words as they go. They yell and accuse me of crimes when I thought we were on the same side.
It is out of times of loneliness that we get mass shootings. It is out of times of tribal strife that we get civil wars. I hear people warn about both of these things – and then go right on to keep the fires burning. I can only conclude that this is what they want.
How big government drives incivility:
Politics isn’t merely a popularity contest. The candidates who win enact policies that can mean the difference between liberty and tyranny. Laws are more than mere slogans. They are meaningless unless they are enforced and governments are not above threatening violence to ensure compliance. Even when the punishments are non-violent, such as fines or imprisonment, this is only so when the accused cooperate in their own oppression. Should one resist, the inherent violence of government will show. This subtle threat exists behind every law.
When people feel their rights are being trampled on, they fight back. If the government were not involved in marriage, we wouldn’t be fighting over whether gays and lesbians can get married. If the government were not involved in education, we wouldn’t be fighting over how to teach sex ed or whether to teach evolution, the Bible, or the Koran. If the government were not involved in health care, we wouldn’t be fighting over abortion subsidies. The more government controls, the more there is to fight over. The less it controls, the more that each can live, work, and play his or her own way and we can all be happy.
This is why it is so important that we start listening to each other. This is why it is so important that we start understanding each other. I’m not writing for the politicians. I’m writing for those that vote for them. Give peace a chance.
Respecting the wishes of opinion minorities isn’t just the nice thing to do, it’s also in our best self-interest. There are so many issues to have positions on that it is actually rare for anyone to be with the majority on all of them. Someone who stands with the majority on health care, gay rights, climate change, and voter ID laws might later find themselves to be in the minority on school vouchers or the death penalty.
In a dictatorship, the one overrules the many. In an oligarchy, the few overrule the many. In a democracy, the many overrule the few. In all three cases, somebody is being trampled on. By respecting individual rights and restricting our decisions to only those things directly affecting the whole country, the majority will keep its trampling to a minimum. By respecting those in the minority, we ourselves will be respected when it is our turn to be in the minority.
There are several ways this principle might be applied. One idea is for all bills to have to pass a significantly larger portion of the legislature than fifty percent, such as sixty or seventy-five. Unanimity is impractical, but any problem of great importance with an obvious solution should have no problem being approved by seventy-five percent. Problems of lesser importance with less clear solutions probably shouldn’t be imposed by government anyways.
Another idea is for all bills to pass a majority of multiple houses, each elected differently and representing different interests. We already do this to a degree by requiring bills to pass the congress, senate, and be signed by the president. We could do more, adding a house to represent moneyed interests or by putting certain issues before the public to vote on directly.
Another way to make sure all points of view are included is to have multi-seat districts filled by single-transferable voting, range voting, or some other method that eliminates the spoiler effect so the true preferences of the people can be counted.
In addition to preserving civility and peace by preventing small and feeble majorities from imposing on each other, these measures have the added bonus of reducing the number of new laws to pass, the number of new programs and departments created, and the amount of money spent. What is good for civility is often good for liberty and what is good for liberty is often good for civility. Centrists and libertarians have a lot in common. It’s a win-win.
Who is to blame?
The one who actually does the deed bears the bulk of the guilt, but the one who gives the order is guilty too. Ordering a raid on someone’s house is only one step away from taking part in it. In the same way, voting into office those who would give such orders is only one step away from actually giving the orders. In a democracy, it is the voters that perpetuate oppression. The problem isn’t politicians or the media, the problem is you.
This is what most people forget when they call for new legislation: They are endorsing violence against their fellow citizens. They threaten their neighbors in order to get them to obey. Sometimes this is both justified and necessary when our neighbors are destructive, but most people never stop to ask themselves if the tradeoff is worth it. Which is worse? That some people ride without seatbelts or that we make people buckle up at gunpoint? That some people drink too much soda or that officers threaten to shut down businesses that sell it in cups larger than sixteen ounces? That someone might ignite a piece of cloth to make a point or that the state kidnaps and imprisons them for burning the flag? That someone might take a nap in a park or that the police wake them up and chase them away? That someone might give a haircut, shovel snow, or sell lemonade without first applying for a business license or that low-skill people are unable to support themselves? That a few stupid people injure themselves or that the rest of us never have fun anymore? Does it really cost society so much to allow fireworks that we are justified in outlawing them? There are always tradeoffs. Remember this.
This is the greatest reason why we don’t get along. How can I be friends with someone that wants to control me and is willing to use state-sponsored violence to get their way? It’s impossible. If you vote, you have made yourself my enemy. It isn’t political; it’s personal.
To be clear, the biggest problem facing our nation today is not that corrupt politicians pursue evil ends against the will of the people once in office; it is that the voters insist on evil again and again. The current positions and past actions of politicians are well-known. The ways in which members of one party rally to defend one of their own is common knowledge. Anyone who runs as a member of a particular party endorses that party. With everything that is public about our political parties, what kind of monster would support them? They are without excuse.
Government is never content to handle only the big issues of the day; it gets itself involved in the minutiae of our everyday lives. It is the most important thing there is because it makes itself that way. In his 2018 book Them, Senator Ben Sasse suggests that the way to heal our partisan divides is to get to know people as more than their party, finding common goals in other realms of life, remembering that political beliefs are not the most defining characteristic they have. This is the way it should work, but so long as oppression continues and is backed by the voters, political beliefs are the most defining characteristic. They show the nature of the heart more clearly than the sports team one backs. Friendship is impossible with control freaks. There is only war.