Why Civility Failed
The Real Problem With American Politics
The Real Difference Between Left And Right
Not only do people disagree on the issues, they disagree on what the issues are. In declaring themselves to be either “liberal” or “conservative,” and labeling their opponents as the opposite, they rarely agree on what those words even mean. This is one of the contributing factors to why understanding (and civility) failed.
Communists to The Left, Fascists to The Right?
One thing I have noticed is that when speaking of where people fall on the left-right political spectrum, we often speak in totally different languages. To Democrats, Nazis and Fascists are examples of extreme right-wingers, whereas Communists are examples of extreme left-wingers. This terminology is extended to cover a wide array of world leaders, local politicians, and historical figures with very different philosophies. In the meantime, Republicans consider Nazism, Fascism, and Communism to all be subtle variations on extreme left-wing thought. Does anybody who uses these labels actually know what any of these parties really stood for? Why are Marxism, Leninism, and Black Liberation Theology all called by the name of Communism when they all differ from each other so much compared to the differences between Corporatism and Socialism?
Listen to any Republican, and they will tell you that it is Democrats who increase the scope of government, erode freedoms, and take us on a slow path to tyranny. It should then be no wonder that Democrats are considered a form of watered-down Fascists. Listen to any Democrat, and they will tell you that while they do share some minor similarities with Communists in valuing equality, it is Republicans that think in hierarchical, social-role-based terms, and therefore it is Republicans that share more in common with Fascists.
Stop thinking in spectra! Political variation is not one-dimensional and implying associations between your fellow citizens and totalitarian regimes is not helping. Criticize officials on the policies they actually endorse, not on the policies of vaguely similar parties from world history.
Who Is More Violent?
I have often heard the claim that the right is consistently more violent in word and deed than the left. This claim is often coupled with the claim that the right often gets a free pass in the media while the left gets called out for every little outburst.
Oddly enough, those on the right say exactly the opposite – that it is those on the left that have committed more violence, and that the media underreports this.
Who should I believe? Clearly both sides have said and done some things they should not have, but measuring which is worse suffers from a classification problem. For example, what is Joseph Andrew Stack, the man who flew his plane into an IRS office? The left paints him as a right-winger and the right paints him as a left-winger. Well, I have actually read his manifesto/suicide note (1) and find it clear that his main beef was with the IRS code, big government, and corporate bailouts, the same stuff that the right complains about. If he was a left-winger, he would be complaining that the government was too small and wasn't doing enough, but he was clearly bitter that there was too much regulation and too much taxation instead.
What about Jeremy Christian, who harassed a couple of Muslim women on a train and stabbed three people who tried to help? The press went on and on about how President Trump’s election had emboldened racists and religious bigots and that this was just the beginning. Then it came out that the guy was a Bernie Sanders supporter who could not go through with voting for Trump (2).
Does it even matter? We should be able to agree that fringe groups, however one might classify them, sometimes do bad things. To paint an entire movement or party as violent by the actions of a few members (that might not even belong in the group anyways) isn't helpful to discourse and should be refrained from. It makes dialogue impossible.
Who Is More Racist?
Americans of African descent (not to mention other minorities) vote for Democrats by wide margins (3). I'm still in the process of learning why this is, but it seems to have something to do with an impression that many Republicans are borderline racist. In my lifetime I have heard many Democrats state, both implicitly and explicitly, that Republicans have racist tendencies. Democrats, on the other hand, have always stood up for the downtrodden. At least, so the narrative goes.
I even once worked with a (white) guy who claimed that George W. Bush was racist because he was slow to get help into New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, but the government was quick to get help to those affected by hurricane Andrew, completely forgetting that Andrew occurred under Clinton's watch and so cannot be compared. Perhaps Bush was simply less competent than Clinton. Perhaps the state government of Louisiana was more difficult to work with. Perhaps Bush was actually sexist, and so feminine-name hurricanes got less attention than masculine-name hurricanes. Who knows? It's silly to blame this on racism.
The Republicans, on the other hand, tell a very different historical narrative: Lincoln (a Republican) freed the slaves. Eisenhower (a Republican) integrated the armed forces. It was George Wallace (a former Democrat) that ran on a segregationist platform. It was Robert Byrd (a Democrat) that was once a member of the KKK. Jim Crow laws were enacted by Democrats. The Republican party has always been the party of equal rights. At least, so the narrative goes.
There are two very different stories being told here. Both sides impose a simplifying narrative on history and cherry-pick examples. They are both wrong.
However, in recent decades it seems that only Democrats feel the need to make stuff up, interpreting rhetoric as racist even when race was never mentioned. Democrats are worse.
Who Is More Obsessed with Sex?
Liberals claim conservatives want to regulate sexuality. Conservatives claim liberals promote promiscuity. Both claim the other side is simply obsessed with sex.
Liberals promote sex-ed classes that teach about alternative lifestyles. They hand out condoms to teenagers and imply that abstinence is not a viable option. They downplay the seriousness of sexual sins, such as adultery, divorce, pedophilia, or homosexuality. Through the National Endowment of the Arts, they support obscene glorifications of sex. Through the entertainment industry and commercials, they make sure that sex is always on our minds.
Conservatives (at least those of the religious right) preach judgment (or even outright hatred) against those with alternative sexual lifestyles. Their watchdogs scan movies and television for sexual content and sound the alarm bells every time they find anything that could be mistaken for a sexual innuendo. Through church-sponsored classes, they teach their youth the importance of adherence to their strict code of sexual conduct.
My take is that sex is a small part of life and has no need to be discussed as extensively as it is. Sex is largely private and so there is very little about it I am willing to say or listen to. Sexual sins are serious, but are largely a private family matter that need not concern the whole country. I dislike how sexualized the entertainment industry has become, but I also dislike how often I am reminded of this by those who rail against it, and those people “cry wolf” a lot. So, what does that make me? Conservative or liberal?
The left-right spectrum is a rather poor way to classify people, and many don't fit. Also, for one side to say the other is more sexualized is like the pot calling the kettle black. Drop the labels and the name calling, stick to the issues, and you may learn from each other.
The Republicrat Monopoly:
Both Republicans and Democrats claim to represent the average voter. Both claim to protect “the little guy” from the powerful, whether big business or big government. Do they?
Democrats want to raise the minimum wage, eliminating many low-skill jobs from the market. They also support OSHA regulations and higher payroll taxes that make it prohibitively expensive in time and effort to hire transients on a short-term basis. They also tend to support licensing requirements that protect established business interests from competitors. Republicans conclude that Democrats hate the poor.
Republicans want to reduce welfare and unemployment benefits. They often treat the problem of the poor as one of laziness or moral failings. They tell the homeless to “get a job!” They say that the best way to help people out of poverty is to make them feel uncomfortable there. Democrats conclude that Republicans hate the poor. Maybe they both hate the poor.
Democrats support unions but greatly fear monopolies, fretting over every merger. Republicans care little about monopolies, but despise unions, pointing out every flaw they can find. Both unions and monopolies are centralizations of power formed from the act of collusion. Is there really much of a difference?
Big government works hand in hand with big business. Republicans are perfectly happy to support big business when a military hardware contract is involved. Republicans joined with Democrats in the bank bailouts of 2008. For years Democrats railed against insurance companies and then passed a law requiring that people purchase health insurance. For years Democrats complained of the rich being able to drown out the voices of the poor and supported campaign finance reform because of it, yet they do nothing to stop censorship done by YouTube, Twitter, Google, and FaceBook. No party has a monopoly on hypocrisy. In some ways, Republicans and Democrats are the same people!
The Biggest Lie in Politics:
The media elites in America are always trying to divide us. They divide us by age, sex, religion, and race. They divide us into extroverts and introverts. They divide us into aspies and nuerotypicals. Most of all, they divide us by political party affiliation. They use misleading labels such as “conservative” and “liberal” to make us believe there are two distinct groups of us with a large gulf in between. The reality is that no two people agree on everything and there are often more differences within groups than between them. Independent individuals exist across the political spectrum as one large, sprawling ideascape.
How people are classified depends much on the questions asked and on how such things are framed. It is entirely possible to believe the death penalty is sometimes justified, but to still believe it to be bad policy. It is entirely possible to believe the wars in Iraq and Libya were justified, but to still believe them mistakes. It is entirely possible to believe that drug use and extramarital sex are unhealthy without considering them immoral, and possible to consider them immoral without believing they should be made illegal. It is entirely possible to be deeply suspicious of big corporations and yet even more suspicious of big-government attempts to reign them in. The same person taking two different surveys may seem very liberal on one and very conservative on the other. Depending on which points candidates emphasize, the same person could vote either Republican or Democrat.
Sometimes people will support the same policies for very different reasons. One can support anti-capitalist economic protectionism not to protect the jobs of American workers, but to protect national security and self-determination. Some people may oppose affirmative action not because it divides us and perpetuates unequal treatment based on race, but because they are secret segregationists.
Whether one supports particular policies often depends how the policies are applied. One might be perfectly happy to let the state decide to legalize or criminalize abortion or drug use, but not believe it is the role of the federal government to tell the states how to rule. One might believe it perfectly permissible for government to fund with taxpayer money things such as health care and education, but not the federal government. One might believe that the congress should pass a law to define marriage to include homosexual unions, but still call foul when unelected judges impose their own will on the people to do the same.
Sometimes what policy someone supports depends on what the given alternatives are. The same individual might support a flat tax when the alternative is a complex income tax with multiple brackets, exemptions, credits, deductions, and different rates for different types of income, yet support a sales tax over a flat tax, and a tax on the states over a national sales tax, allowing the citizens of each state to decide how they will be taxed. This is what gets politicians into trouble more than anything else. They will support one policy one year and another policy another year because the given alternatives have changed, not their principles. The media will still cast the change as a flip-flop.
Sometimes the problem is one of pragmatism. On one hand, one might support pure democracy over anarchy because of the political reality that without government there is no protection from criminals or foreign governments, though in an ideal world without such threats they would support anarchy. On the other hand, one might support separation of powers, a bill of rights, and term limits that thwart the will of the voters over pure democracy because of the political reality that most voters are easily manipulated and too willing to impose their will on each other, though in an ideal world without such things they would support a pure democracy. On yet another hand (How many hands do people have again?), one might not support term limits or separation of powers because of the political reality that such things are not politically viable, and will be misunderstood and misapplied.
Over and over, I see people that actually agree or have very similar positions argue with each other. Sometimes two people who are both moderates on abortion and can see merit in both the pro-choice and pro-life arguments will misinterpret where the other is coming from. One person might react to recent pro-choice extremism in the news by repeating a pro-life argument and the person next to them person might assume the first to be a pro-life extremist and respond with a pro-choice argument, in turn causing the first to think they are a pro-choice extremist. They can go back and forth for hours and never realize that they agree. We aren’t necessarily as far apart as the media would have us believe. I encourage everyone to be patient and tolerant and really listen to each other. Then we can know for sure.
What is the difference between liberals and conservatives anyways? I find that what I am told by pundits, politicians, and even social scientists does not make sense to me. We are told that liberals support big government while conservatives support small government. Is this true? There are many different ways to measure the size of government. It can be measured in the number of agencies, the number of employees of those agencies, the fiscal costs of running the agencies, the number of individual laws and regulations, the expansion of the ability to enforce the laws (e.g. greater punishments, greater surveillance), the tediousness and intrusiveness of those laws into realms that many consider private (e.g. how many ounces of soda one can order), and the expansion into realms not directly related to governance (e.g. spending money on welfare or corporate subsidies rather than on law enforcement). It is very difficult to find data on these things except for spending, and spending has been increasing under both Republicans and Democrats since the forties.
I am sometimes told that conservatives value tradition while liberals are for change for the sake of change. Is this true? There are different ways to measure change. Liberals keep proposing new policies all the time, but from my perspective they seem like only tiny tweaks to the same top-down, authoritarian, one-size-fits-all, all-in, big-government model that they have been using since The New Deal and The Great Society. In contrast, conservatives propose many creative new ways to order public life, such as partial Social Security privatization and school vouchers.
I am sometimes told that liberals are idealists and conservatives are pragmatic. Is this true? While it makes sense to say that the free market is a practical alternative to failed liberal welfare-state policies that only create dependency and it makes sense to say that training and equipping good citizens in gun use is a practical alternative to failed liberal gun-control policies that the criminals don’t follow anyways, conservatives are idealistic in that they cannot see that neither the free market nor repealing the gun laws are politically viable. When the majority supports an impractical ideal, the practical thing is not to fight it. Those that do are often called idealists – by other conservatives.
Some students of political science classify people in two dimensions – one pertaining to the degree of economic freedom they support, and the other pertaining to the degree of personal/social freedom they support. The famous Nolan chart is of this type (4). Others use three dimensions – one for economic issues, one for personal/social issues, and one for foreign policy issues. I have even seen models using four and five dimensions. With all of these models, there is the problem of classifying which issue fits in which dimension. Are school vouchers a personal issue or an economic one? Is participation in NAFTA an economic issue or a foreign policy one?
Often, very different ideologies and interest groups are lumped together in ways that make no sense. “Neoconservatives” support free trade and military interventionism, “nationalists” support neither, and “libertarians” support trade across borders but not the constant warmongering. Yet, all three are lumped together as “conservative.” The religious right – which differs from libertarians on many issues – is also called “conservative.” The word means nothing.
Transactivists support the ability to sexually self-identify, undermining the ability of feminists to measure the wage gap and undermining the very existence of homosexuals, who are by definition those attracted to the same sex, not the sex one identifies as. Sharia Law Islamists oppose transactivists, feminists, homosexuals, and New York Jewish liberals. Cultural relativists somehow support all these contradictory ideas simultaneously while still managing to put down Western civilization. Environmentalists are often opposed to the economic interests of labor union members working in industry – and vice versa. Yet, all of these groups are lumped together and called “liberal.” The word means nothing.
Just to make things even more confusing, the way pundits and politicians arrange possible positions on a given issue into a political spectrum often defies logic. It is highly misleading. There is a school of thought popular among neoconservatives that we must meet every potential threat to our national interest with overwhelming force before they become big problems. There is another school of thought popular among libertarians that the best way to avoid wars is by not being so quick to escalate. The best policy is probably somewhere in the middle. Where do the Democrats fit on this spectrum? Listening to the politicians, they would have you believe that they are libertarian when running against Republicans, but as soon as they get into office, they get us into wars everywhere even when there is no compelling national interest, instead citing “humanitarian reasons” – but humanitarian reasons exist in every conflict!
Spectra can be divided up differently depending on how an issue is conceptualized. Purely pro-choice people obviously go at one end and purely pro-life people obviously go on the other end, but who goes in the middle? Those otherwise pro-life who make an exception for rape and incest, or those otherwise pro-life that make an exception during the first trimester? How should those people be arranged on a political spectrum?
There exist those that dislike verbal obscenities but have no problem seeing them in print. There exist those that dislike written obscenities but have no problem hearing and using them verbally. How should those people be arranged on a political spectrum?
Some people prefer an income tax, some prefer a sales tax, and some prefer a property tax. What fair way is there to arrange those people onto a political spectrum?
Among those who are called moderates there can be larger differences than between the most radical liberals and the most radical conservatives. Some are called moderates because they are radically liberal on social issues and radically conservative on economic issues. Others are called moderates because they are radically conservative on social issues and radically liberal on economic issues. Some are called moderates because they are right in the middle on nearly every issue. Still others are called moderates because they don’t care much what happens on many issues of little importance to them. Many people only care about one or two issues.
Even on a given issue there are at least three different ways to be called a moderate. Moderate is a relative term. One can hold a position that is an equal distance from the extremes in potential positions one can have, one can hold a position that is identical to that of the average voter (whether the average is the mean, median, or mode), or one can hold a position that is an equal distance between the official positions of the two parties in Washington at the moment.
For example, one extreme school of thought is to grant the federal government complete power to overrule the state governments. This is called a unitary government. The opposite extreme school of thought is to give each state the complete power to rule without interference from other states. This is called confederacy. To some, the perfect compromise between the two is to grant the federal government only those powers explicitly granted to it in the constitution, leaving everything else to the states, and prohibiting from the states only those powers explicitly prohibited from any government (i.e. the bill of rights). As far as they are concerned, they are moderates, but because this puts them out of step with the majority of voters who clamor for more federal intervention and centralization, it makes them extremists. Still, the average citizen does not want to grant as much power to Washington as politicians in both parties seem to want to take recently, yet the media will often treat those that lie between the two parties as the true moderates and paint average citizens as extremists.
The truth is that the words liberal, conservative, moderate, centrist, radical, statist, fascist, and libertarian have no constant meaning. The labels are misleading at best and divisive at worst. Don’t let words get in the way of understanding. We are all Americans. Those of the “other” party are not the enemy any more than those we think of as our allies. That is the greatest illusion. Start talking to each other again. More importantly, start listening again. The nation and the world depend on it.
A Failure of Science:
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt at MoralFoundations.org has created a system of mapping one’s moral philosophy in five dimensions. They are called care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. In his view, liberals rank high in the first two only while conservatives feel all five.
There are many problems with his model. First of all, each dimension is not independent. Often, the reason conservatives respect an established authority or remain loyal to an institution is to keep things fair. Unfairness piles up quickly in an anarchy. The reason some actions are degrading is that they cause harm, including spiritual harm. Also, there are several types of fairness. Equality of opportunity and equality of outcome cannot coexist. They should be separate dimensions. The model has deep conceptual problems that makes ranking completely arbitrary and myself unable to know how to answer his survey questions.
Second, Haidt assumes that while we might have differing instincts, we have a common culture such that those with the same instincts apply them in the same ways. This could not be further from the truth. Both socialists and capitalists claim to be motivated by care for the poor, but they apply this care differently because of their different beliefs derived from their education (or indoctrination). We do not live in a unified culture.
Third, what Haidt means by “liberal” and “conservative” do not resemble any country I have ever lived in. In America, it is Democrats who believe in loyalty and authority, so long as it is loyalty to the party and they are the authorities. Republicans tend to favor more decentralized power (or they pretend to).
Haidt has shown the ability to learn, however. Early on, he realized that not only conservatives felt moral disgust. While conservatives often see deviant sexuality as immoral and against nature, some liberals make a big deal out of what people eat and how they treat the environment. Also, in his original model, valuing liberty was seen not as morality, but as selfishness. Somehow, he missed the obvious idea that those who fight for smaller government do so not only to secure liberty for themselves, but for their fellow citizens. This oversight has since been fixed by adding the sixth dimension liberty/oppression, but I find it inexplicable that someone who actually studies this stuff professionally could miss something like that. All one has to do is listen to Rush Limbaugh or any other self-described conservative for three days to realize that they primarily make liberty-centered arguments. Personally, I have thought of morality primarily in terms of liberty since I was old enough to think, not learning until later in life that it was even possible to think differently. Haidt and I must have grown up on very different planets – or he is being dishonest.
Carl Milstead, former Libertarian activist and creator of HolisticPolitics.org, has suggested his own system of four political values, including liberty, equality, nature, and morality. If I were to suggest a rival system to take into account everything people look for in government policy, not just morality, I would want it to have liberty, equality, prosperity, security, and sanity.
What all these dimensional paradigms fail to do is take into account trump cards. Instead, each value is weighed against the others. A very high level of fairness and loyalty in one proposal can cause one to support it even if it moderately raises disgust. However, for some types of actions, the perceived immorality is effectively infinite. Take stem cell research for example. If the value of human life was just one value among many, the number of people saved from horrible diseases would matter to whether it is justified to destroy an embryo. Perhaps one hundred people is not enough, but one thousand is – but this is not the way people think. Those who value the sanctity of life see it as wrong to kill even one embryo no matter what benefit may be derived from it. The issue is a trump card.
Another trump card we should all be familiar with is the idea that while insulting someone verbally opens one up to being insulted in return, it does not justify physical violence. As the saying goes, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” Free speech is considered a trump card that protects even the vilest bullies from physical retaliation for their mere verbal attacks.
When even the intellectuals can’t get the classification right, what chance do the rest of us have? Assuming all members of an ideological group to think the same way is one of the reasons we misunderstand each other. Assuming one’s motives based on the positions they hold is one of the reasons we can’t get along. We are all individuals. Drop the classification schemes.
Why Labeling Matters:
People complain that our leaders in Washington can’t seem to get along well enough to get much done, but the real problem is what their rhetoric does to the rest of us.
I remember seeing on the news a school meeting, where they were discussing whether the school should aid in deporting children who had been brought into the country illegally. One teacher was put on the spot and accused of promoting a liberal agenda. In the contentious atmosphere, the teacher shot back that the local tea party leader was a Nazi.
Rather than discuss and debate the merits of deporting illegal immigrants, which is an issue with legitimate concerns on all sides, a label was thrown out that the teacher was being “liberal.” If it wasn’t for those in Washington and on television constantly framing one side of the debate as the “liberal” one, the teacher could only have been accused of being “wrong.” In fact, I still don't truly know what this teacher's concerns were. His position may not be that different from that of Republicans Rick Perry or Mike Huckabee, both of which have expressed concern for punishing the children of illegals for the crimes of their parents. (6) (7) Chances are, the teacher didn’t view his beliefs as either conservative or liberal, but merely “right.” That the left is often engaged in classroom propaganda didn’t help the teacher’s case any, making the others in the room quick to believe the worst and imply that this is what the teacher was doing.
Firing back, the teacher equated his opposition as Nazis, something ridiculously untrue, but still repeated so often that many have come to believe it. This is what rhetoric does: it gives us biases and cheap labels so we are quick to assume the worst of our opponents instead of giving them time to better explain their true leanings. This distracts us from the pressing issues at hand.
Instead of seeing this as a local dispute between just a few people that most of us have never met, people with an axe to grind take this as yet one more example of the ongoing dispute between the national (or even global) forces of liberalism and conservatism. This type of mindset needlessly divides us when we see our neighbors as smaller parts of a greater evil, rather than as individuals that just happen to be wrong about one issue. This is one of the reasons civility failed.
Communists to The Left, Fascists to The Right?
One thing I have noticed is that when speaking of where people fall on the left-right political spectrum, we often speak in totally different languages. To Democrats, Nazis and Fascists are examples of extreme right-wingers, whereas Communists are examples of extreme left-wingers. This terminology is extended to cover a wide array of world leaders, local politicians, and historical figures with very different philosophies. In the meantime, Republicans consider Nazism, Fascism, and Communism to all be subtle variations on extreme left-wing thought. Does anybody who uses these labels actually know what any of these parties really stood for? Why are Marxism, Leninism, and Black Liberation Theology all called by the name of Communism when they all differ from each other so much compared to the differences between Corporatism and Socialism?
Listen to any Republican, and they will tell you that it is Democrats who increase the scope of government, erode freedoms, and take us on a slow path to tyranny. It should then be no wonder that Democrats are considered a form of watered-down Fascists. Listen to any Democrat, and they will tell you that while they do share some minor similarities with Communists in valuing equality, it is Republicans that think in hierarchical, social-role-based terms, and therefore it is Republicans that share more in common with Fascists.
Stop thinking in spectra! Political variation is not one-dimensional and implying associations between your fellow citizens and totalitarian regimes is not helping. Criticize officials on the policies they actually endorse, not on the policies of vaguely similar parties from world history.
Who Is More Violent?
I have often heard the claim that the right is consistently more violent in word and deed than the left. This claim is often coupled with the claim that the right often gets a free pass in the media while the left gets called out for every little outburst.
Oddly enough, those on the right say exactly the opposite – that it is those on the left that have committed more violence, and that the media underreports this.
Who should I believe? Clearly both sides have said and done some things they should not have, but measuring which is worse suffers from a classification problem. For example, what is Joseph Andrew Stack, the man who flew his plane into an IRS office? The left paints him as a right-winger and the right paints him as a left-winger. Well, I have actually read his manifesto/suicide note (1) and find it clear that his main beef was with the IRS code, big government, and corporate bailouts, the same stuff that the right complains about. If he was a left-winger, he would be complaining that the government was too small and wasn't doing enough, but he was clearly bitter that there was too much regulation and too much taxation instead.
What about Jeremy Christian, who harassed a couple of Muslim women on a train and stabbed three people who tried to help? The press went on and on about how President Trump’s election had emboldened racists and religious bigots and that this was just the beginning. Then it came out that the guy was a Bernie Sanders supporter who could not go through with voting for Trump (2).
Does it even matter? We should be able to agree that fringe groups, however one might classify them, sometimes do bad things. To paint an entire movement or party as violent by the actions of a few members (that might not even belong in the group anyways) isn't helpful to discourse and should be refrained from. It makes dialogue impossible.
Who Is More Racist?
Americans of African descent (not to mention other minorities) vote for Democrats by wide margins (3). I'm still in the process of learning why this is, but it seems to have something to do with an impression that many Republicans are borderline racist. In my lifetime I have heard many Democrats state, both implicitly and explicitly, that Republicans have racist tendencies. Democrats, on the other hand, have always stood up for the downtrodden. At least, so the narrative goes.
I even once worked with a (white) guy who claimed that George W. Bush was racist because he was slow to get help into New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, but the government was quick to get help to those affected by hurricane Andrew, completely forgetting that Andrew occurred under Clinton's watch and so cannot be compared. Perhaps Bush was simply less competent than Clinton. Perhaps the state government of Louisiana was more difficult to work with. Perhaps Bush was actually sexist, and so feminine-name hurricanes got less attention than masculine-name hurricanes. Who knows? It's silly to blame this on racism.
The Republicans, on the other hand, tell a very different historical narrative: Lincoln (a Republican) freed the slaves. Eisenhower (a Republican) integrated the armed forces. It was George Wallace (a former Democrat) that ran on a segregationist platform. It was Robert Byrd (a Democrat) that was once a member of the KKK. Jim Crow laws were enacted by Democrats. The Republican party has always been the party of equal rights. At least, so the narrative goes.
There are two very different stories being told here. Both sides impose a simplifying narrative on history and cherry-pick examples. They are both wrong.
However, in recent decades it seems that only Democrats feel the need to make stuff up, interpreting rhetoric as racist even when race was never mentioned. Democrats are worse.
Who Is More Obsessed with Sex?
Liberals claim conservatives want to regulate sexuality. Conservatives claim liberals promote promiscuity. Both claim the other side is simply obsessed with sex.
Liberals promote sex-ed classes that teach about alternative lifestyles. They hand out condoms to teenagers and imply that abstinence is not a viable option. They downplay the seriousness of sexual sins, such as adultery, divorce, pedophilia, or homosexuality. Through the National Endowment of the Arts, they support obscene glorifications of sex. Through the entertainment industry and commercials, they make sure that sex is always on our minds.
Conservatives (at least those of the religious right) preach judgment (or even outright hatred) against those with alternative sexual lifestyles. Their watchdogs scan movies and television for sexual content and sound the alarm bells every time they find anything that could be mistaken for a sexual innuendo. Through church-sponsored classes, they teach their youth the importance of adherence to their strict code of sexual conduct.
My take is that sex is a small part of life and has no need to be discussed as extensively as it is. Sex is largely private and so there is very little about it I am willing to say or listen to. Sexual sins are serious, but are largely a private family matter that need not concern the whole country. I dislike how sexualized the entertainment industry has become, but I also dislike how often I am reminded of this by those who rail against it, and those people “cry wolf” a lot. So, what does that make me? Conservative or liberal?
The left-right spectrum is a rather poor way to classify people, and many don't fit. Also, for one side to say the other is more sexualized is like the pot calling the kettle black. Drop the labels and the name calling, stick to the issues, and you may learn from each other.
The Republicrat Monopoly:
Both Republicans and Democrats claim to represent the average voter. Both claim to protect “the little guy” from the powerful, whether big business or big government. Do they?
Democrats want to raise the minimum wage, eliminating many low-skill jobs from the market. They also support OSHA regulations and higher payroll taxes that make it prohibitively expensive in time and effort to hire transients on a short-term basis. They also tend to support licensing requirements that protect established business interests from competitors. Republicans conclude that Democrats hate the poor.
Republicans want to reduce welfare and unemployment benefits. They often treat the problem of the poor as one of laziness or moral failings. They tell the homeless to “get a job!” They say that the best way to help people out of poverty is to make them feel uncomfortable there. Democrats conclude that Republicans hate the poor. Maybe they both hate the poor.
Democrats support unions but greatly fear monopolies, fretting over every merger. Republicans care little about monopolies, but despise unions, pointing out every flaw they can find. Both unions and monopolies are centralizations of power formed from the act of collusion. Is there really much of a difference?
Big government works hand in hand with big business. Republicans are perfectly happy to support big business when a military hardware contract is involved. Republicans joined with Democrats in the bank bailouts of 2008. For years Democrats railed against insurance companies and then passed a law requiring that people purchase health insurance. For years Democrats complained of the rich being able to drown out the voices of the poor and supported campaign finance reform because of it, yet they do nothing to stop censorship done by YouTube, Twitter, Google, and FaceBook. No party has a monopoly on hypocrisy. In some ways, Republicans and Democrats are the same people!
The Biggest Lie in Politics:
The media elites in America are always trying to divide us. They divide us by age, sex, religion, and race. They divide us into extroverts and introverts. They divide us into aspies and nuerotypicals. Most of all, they divide us by political party affiliation. They use misleading labels such as “conservative” and “liberal” to make us believe there are two distinct groups of us with a large gulf in between. The reality is that no two people agree on everything and there are often more differences within groups than between them. Independent individuals exist across the political spectrum as one large, sprawling ideascape.
How people are classified depends much on the questions asked and on how such things are framed. It is entirely possible to believe the death penalty is sometimes justified, but to still believe it to be bad policy. It is entirely possible to believe the wars in Iraq and Libya were justified, but to still believe them mistakes. It is entirely possible to believe that drug use and extramarital sex are unhealthy without considering them immoral, and possible to consider them immoral without believing they should be made illegal. It is entirely possible to be deeply suspicious of big corporations and yet even more suspicious of big-government attempts to reign them in. The same person taking two different surveys may seem very liberal on one and very conservative on the other. Depending on which points candidates emphasize, the same person could vote either Republican or Democrat.
Sometimes people will support the same policies for very different reasons. One can support anti-capitalist economic protectionism not to protect the jobs of American workers, but to protect national security and self-determination. Some people may oppose affirmative action not because it divides us and perpetuates unequal treatment based on race, but because they are secret segregationists.
Whether one supports particular policies often depends how the policies are applied. One might be perfectly happy to let the state decide to legalize or criminalize abortion or drug use, but not believe it is the role of the federal government to tell the states how to rule. One might believe it perfectly permissible for government to fund with taxpayer money things such as health care and education, but not the federal government. One might believe that the congress should pass a law to define marriage to include homosexual unions, but still call foul when unelected judges impose their own will on the people to do the same.
Sometimes what policy someone supports depends on what the given alternatives are. The same individual might support a flat tax when the alternative is a complex income tax with multiple brackets, exemptions, credits, deductions, and different rates for different types of income, yet support a sales tax over a flat tax, and a tax on the states over a national sales tax, allowing the citizens of each state to decide how they will be taxed. This is what gets politicians into trouble more than anything else. They will support one policy one year and another policy another year because the given alternatives have changed, not their principles. The media will still cast the change as a flip-flop.
Sometimes the problem is one of pragmatism. On one hand, one might support pure democracy over anarchy because of the political reality that without government there is no protection from criminals or foreign governments, though in an ideal world without such threats they would support anarchy. On the other hand, one might support separation of powers, a bill of rights, and term limits that thwart the will of the voters over pure democracy because of the political reality that most voters are easily manipulated and too willing to impose their will on each other, though in an ideal world without such things they would support a pure democracy. On yet another hand (How many hands do people have again?), one might not support term limits or separation of powers because of the political reality that such things are not politically viable, and will be misunderstood and misapplied.
Over and over, I see people that actually agree or have very similar positions argue with each other. Sometimes two people who are both moderates on abortion and can see merit in both the pro-choice and pro-life arguments will misinterpret where the other is coming from. One person might react to recent pro-choice extremism in the news by repeating a pro-life argument and the person next to them person might assume the first to be a pro-life extremist and respond with a pro-choice argument, in turn causing the first to think they are a pro-choice extremist. They can go back and forth for hours and never realize that they agree. We aren’t necessarily as far apart as the media would have us believe. I encourage everyone to be patient and tolerant and really listen to each other. Then we can know for sure.
What is the difference between liberals and conservatives anyways? I find that what I am told by pundits, politicians, and even social scientists does not make sense to me. We are told that liberals support big government while conservatives support small government. Is this true? There are many different ways to measure the size of government. It can be measured in the number of agencies, the number of employees of those agencies, the fiscal costs of running the agencies, the number of individual laws and regulations, the expansion of the ability to enforce the laws (e.g. greater punishments, greater surveillance), the tediousness and intrusiveness of those laws into realms that many consider private (e.g. how many ounces of soda one can order), and the expansion into realms not directly related to governance (e.g. spending money on welfare or corporate subsidies rather than on law enforcement). It is very difficult to find data on these things except for spending, and spending has been increasing under both Republicans and Democrats since the forties.
I am sometimes told that conservatives value tradition while liberals are for change for the sake of change. Is this true? There are different ways to measure change. Liberals keep proposing new policies all the time, but from my perspective they seem like only tiny tweaks to the same top-down, authoritarian, one-size-fits-all, all-in, big-government model that they have been using since The New Deal and The Great Society. In contrast, conservatives propose many creative new ways to order public life, such as partial Social Security privatization and school vouchers.
I am sometimes told that liberals are idealists and conservatives are pragmatic. Is this true? While it makes sense to say that the free market is a practical alternative to failed liberal welfare-state policies that only create dependency and it makes sense to say that training and equipping good citizens in gun use is a practical alternative to failed liberal gun-control policies that the criminals don’t follow anyways, conservatives are idealistic in that they cannot see that neither the free market nor repealing the gun laws are politically viable. When the majority supports an impractical ideal, the practical thing is not to fight it. Those that do are often called idealists – by other conservatives.
Some students of political science classify people in two dimensions – one pertaining to the degree of economic freedom they support, and the other pertaining to the degree of personal/social freedom they support. The famous Nolan chart is of this type (4). Others use three dimensions – one for economic issues, one for personal/social issues, and one for foreign policy issues. I have even seen models using four and five dimensions. With all of these models, there is the problem of classifying which issue fits in which dimension. Are school vouchers a personal issue or an economic one? Is participation in NAFTA an economic issue or a foreign policy one?
Often, very different ideologies and interest groups are lumped together in ways that make no sense. “Neoconservatives” support free trade and military interventionism, “nationalists” support neither, and “libertarians” support trade across borders but not the constant warmongering. Yet, all three are lumped together as “conservative.” The religious right – which differs from libertarians on many issues – is also called “conservative.” The word means nothing.
Transactivists support the ability to sexually self-identify, undermining the ability of feminists to measure the wage gap and undermining the very existence of homosexuals, who are by definition those attracted to the same sex, not the sex one identifies as. Sharia Law Islamists oppose transactivists, feminists, homosexuals, and New York Jewish liberals. Cultural relativists somehow support all these contradictory ideas simultaneously while still managing to put down Western civilization. Environmentalists are often opposed to the economic interests of labor union members working in industry – and vice versa. Yet, all of these groups are lumped together and called “liberal.” The word means nothing.
Just to make things even more confusing, the way pundits and politicians arrange possible positions on a given issue into a political spectrum often defies logic. It is highly misleading. There is a school of thought popular among neoconservatives that we must meet every potential threat to our national interest with overwhelming force before they become big problems. There is another school of thought popular among libertarians that the best way to avoid wars is by not being so quick to escalate. The best policy is probably somewhere in the middle. Where do the Democrats fit on this spectrum? Listening to the politicians, they would have you believe that they are libertarian when running against Republicans, but as soon as they get into office, they get us into wars everywhere even when there is no compelling national interest, instead citing “humanitarian reasons” – but humanitarian reasons exist in every conflict!
Spectra can be divided up differently depending on how an issue is conceptualized. Purely pro-choice people obviously go at one end and purely pro-life people obviously go on the other end, but who goes in the middle? Those otherwise pro-life who make an exception for rape and incest, or those otherwise pro-life that make an exception during the first trimester? How should those people be arranged on a political spectrum?
There exist those that dislike verbal obscenities but have no problem seeing them in print. There exist those that dislike written obscenities but have no problem hearing and using them verbally. How should those people be arranged on a political spectrum?
Some people prefer an income tax, some prefer a sales tax, and some prefer a property tax. What fair way is there to arrange those people onto a political spectrum?
Among those who are called moderates there can be larger differences than between the most radical liberals and the most radical conservatives. Some are called moderates because they are radically liberal on social issues and radically conservative on economic issues. Others are called moderates because they are radically conservative on social issues and radically liberal on economic issues. Some are called moderates because they are right in the middle on nearly every issue. Still others are called moderates because they don’t care much what happens on many issues of little importance to them. Many people only care about one or two issues.
Even on a given issue there are at least three different ways to be called a moderate. Moderate is a relative term. One can hold a position that is an equal distance from the extremes in potential positions one can have, one can hold a position that is identical to that of the average voter (whether the average is the mean, median, or mode), or one can hold a position that is an equal distance between the official positions of the two parties in Washington at the moment.
For example, one extreme school of thought is to grant the federal government complete power to overrule the state governments. This is called a unitary government. The opposite extreme school of thought is to give each state the complete power to rule without interference from other states. This is called confederacy. To some, the perfect compromise between the two is to grant the federal government only those powers explicitly granted to it in the constitution, leaving everything else to the states, and prohibiting from the states only those powers explicitly prohibited from any government (i.e. the bill of rights). As far as they are concerned, they are moderates, but because this puts them out of step with the majority of voters who clamor for more federal intervention and centralization, it makes them extremists. Still, the average citizen does not want to grant as much power to Washington as politicians in both parties seem to want to take recently, yet the media will often treat those that lie between the two parties as the true moderates and paint average citizens as extremists.
The truth is that the words liberal, conservative, moderate, centrist, radical, statist, fascist, and libertarian have no constant meaning. The labels are misleading at best and divisive at worst. Don’t let words get in the way of understanding. We are all Americans. Those of the “other” party are not the enemy any more than those we think of as our allies. That is the greatest illusion. Start talking to each other again. More importantly, start listening again. The nation and the world depend on it.
A Failure of Science:
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt at MoralFoundations.org has created a system of mapping one’s moral philosophy in five dimensions. They are called care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. In his view, liberals rank high in the first two only while conservatives feel all five.
There are many problems with his model. First of all, each dimension is not independent. Often, the reason conservatives respect an established authority or remain loyal to an institution is to keep things fair. Unfairness piles up quickly in an anarchy. The reason some actions are degrading is that they cause harm, including spiritual harm. Also, there are several types of fairness. Equality of opportunity and equality of outcome cannot coexist. They should be separate dimensions. The model has deep conceptual problems that makes ranking completely arbitrary and myself unable to know how to answer his survey questions.
Second, Haidt assumes that while we might have differing instincts, we have a common culture such that those with the same instincts apply them in the same ways. This could not be further from the truth. Both socialists and capitalists claim to be motivated by care for the poor, but they apply this care differently because of their different beliefs derived from their education (or indoctrination). We do not live in a unified culture.
Third, what Haidt means by “liberal” and “conservative” do not resemble any country I have ever lived in. In America, it is Democrats who believe in loyalty and authority, so long as it is loyalty to the party and they are the authorities. Republicans tend to favor more decentralized power (or they pretend to).
Haidt has shown the ability to learn, however. Early on, he realized that not only conservatives felt moral disgust. While conservatives often see deviant sexuality as immoral and against nature, some liberals make a big deal out of what people eat and how they treat the environment. Also, in his original model, valuing liberty was seen not as morality, but as selfishness. Somehow, he missed the obvious idea that those who fight for smaller government do so not only to secure liberty for themselves, but for their fellow citizens. This oversight has since been fixed by adding the sixth dimension liberty/oppression, but I find it inexplicable that someone who actually studies this stuff professionally could miss something like that. All one has to do is listen to Rush Limbaugh or any other self-described conservative for three days to realize that they primarily make liberty-centered arguments. Personally, I have thought of morality primarily in terms of liberty since I was old enough to think, not learning until later in life that it was even possible to think differently. Haidt and I must have grown up on very different planets – or he is being dishonest.
Carl Milstead, former Libertarian activist and creator of HolisticPolitics.org, has suggested his own system of four political values, including liberty, equality, nature, and morality. If I were to suggest a rival system to take into account everything people look for in government policy, not just morality, I would want it to have liberty, equality, prosperity, security, and sanity.
What all these dimensional paradigms fail to do is take into account trump cards. Instead, each value is weighed against the others. A very high level of fairness and loyalty in one proposal can cause one to support it even if it moderately raises disgust. However, for some types of actions, the perceived immorality is effectively infinite. Take stem cell research for example. If the value of human life was just one value among many, the number of people saved from horrible diseases would matter to whether it is justified to destroy an embryo. Perhaps one hundred people is not enough, but one thousand is – but this is not the way people think. Those who value the sanctity of life see it as wrong to kill even one embryo no matter what benefit may be derived from it. The issue is a trump card.
Another trump card we should all be familiar with is the idea that while insulting someone verbally opens one up to being insulted in return, it does not justify physical violence. As the saying goes, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” Free speech is considered a trump card that protects even the vilest bullies from physical retaliation for their mere verbal attacks.
When even the intellectuals can’t get the classification right, what chance do the rest of us have? Assuming all members of an ideological group to think the same way is one of the reasons we misunderstand each other. Assuming one’s motives based on the positions they hold is one of the reasons we can’t get along. We are all individuals. Drop the classification schemes.
Why Labeling Matters:
People complain that our leaders in Washington can’t seem to get along well enough to get much done, but the real problem is what their rhetoric does to the rest of us.
I remember seeing on the news a school meeting, where they were discussing whether the school should aid in deporting children who had been brought into the country illegally. One teacher was put on the spot and accused of promoting a liberal agenda. In the contentious atmosphere, the teacher shot back that the local tea party leader was a Nazi.
Rather than discuss and debate the merits of deporting illegal immigrants, which is an issue with legitimate concerns on all sides, a label was thrown out that the teacher was being “liberal.” If it wasn’t for those in Washington and on television constantly framing one side of the debate as the “liberal” one, the teacher could only have been accused of being “wrong.” In fact, I still don't truly know what this teacher's concerns were. His position may not be that different from that of Republicans Rick Perry or Mike Huckabee, both of which have expressed concern for punishing the children of illegals for the crimes of their parents. (6) (7) Chances are, the teacher didn’t view his beliefs as either conservative or liberal, but merely “right.” That the left is often engaged in classroom propaganda didn’t help the teacher’s case any, making the others in the room quick to believe the worst and imply that this is what the teacher was doing.
Firing back, the teacher equated his opposition as Nazis, something ridiculously untrue, but still repeated so often that many have come to believe it. This is what rhetoric does: it gives us biases and cheap labels so we are quick to assume the worst of our opponents instead of giving them time to better explain their true leanings. This distracts us from the pressing issues at hand.
Instead of seeing this as a local dispute between just a few people that most of us have never met, people with an axe to grind take this as yet one more example of the ongoing dispute between the national (or even global) forces of liberalism and conservatism. This type of mindset needlessly divides us when we see our neighbors as smaller parts of a greater evil, rather than as individuals that just happen to be wrong about one issue. This is one of the reasons civility failed.