Politically Polarizing Polemics

The rhetoric of the major party campaigns this year (both national and local) has been getting to me.  So when I saw this article on the NPR website today, I figured that I had waited to write this post long enough.  Other people are seeing things the same way as I have for a while, and are writing about them, so... why hold off?

Party politics (at least of the two major parties) has devolved into little more than showing your team allegiances (like wearing the colors of your school or the jersey of a pro player) at best, and at worst the total scandalous vilification of an opponent to gain a temporary positional advantage, using completely fabricated "facts".  In this kind of an environment, where defeating your opponent is the most important thing (regardless of the validity of their viewpoint or the consequences of your opposition), party loyalty has become the most important currency you can trade in, so that you can have the weight of the party machinery opening the way for you, like an offensive line does for a running back.  And when the chosen method of defeating your opponent is personal, ad hominem attacks, the political dialogue gets ugly fast.

What makes it all the more emotion-laden is the sharp ideological divide that seems to be driving the partisanship.  It's typically framed as left vs right or liberal vs conservative, but I think that's really inadequate, a convenient media-packaged distortion of the core conflict: Individualism vs Collectivism. One views the world through the lens of "the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many", and the other sees it as "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few... or the one".  It's Star Trek 2 all over again.   You could also call it the difference between Populists and Progressives, but that gets confusing because there are liberal populists as well as conservative populists, and progressive statists as well as progressive anarchists, so...  let's stick to framing the divide the way it makes the most sense.  The Republicrats (both presidential slates and their backers) have said that this election is about what kind of country we want to be, what kind of people we are.  The major parties each put forth their worldview as the one that should resonate with the voters.  But what they really resonate with is the hard-core ideologues at the far ends of the worldview spectrum.  So what gets forced on us as voters is a false choice between two extremes.

Must we choose, this election season, between

Individualism or Collectivism, 

private sector solutions or public sector ones, 

freely accumulating wealth or equitably sharing it, 

flawed private excesses or flawed social structures,
spending on defense or spending on healthcare,

legislating private morality or legislating public morality,
advancing personal liberty or advancing the common good?

Is there really only black or white (red or blue) to be had?

The thing about Collectivism that makes me most uneasy is that possessing a sincere and compassionate humanitarianism doesn't exempt one from wanting to force that same compassion on the rest of society, via the power structures embedded in that society, as this article from 1943 points out.  Tax policy often determines just who gets helped by society... and just who is required to do the helping.  Unfortunately taxation is always, ALWAYS, backed by the threat of force (force sanctioned by society, of course, but force nonetheless).  Help others, in the way we tell you to help them... or go to jail as a tax protester.  Charity, on the other hand, is never mandated; there may be peer pressure to give, sure (like your boss checking to see if you gave your fair share to United Way), but there's never IRS agents in a black SUV with bulletproof vests slapping on the handcuffs hauling you off.  I don't fear peer pressure anywhere near as much as I fear legislation of public morality via tax policy.  And don't even get me started on privacy concerns... as security and traffic cameras proliferate, and drones start to flood the sky, living in the basement is looking more and more attractive.

The thing about Individualism that makes me most uneasy is the depths of depravity of which the human heart is capable.  As Saint Paul wrote: "...if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for nothing! They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer."  There is a legitimate purpose for government regulation: the restraint of wrongdoing.  Now, of course, what the definition is of wrongdoing matters here a great deal, and we could (and should) wrangle over that. But that aside, one only has to look at the Enron scandal or the Madoff fraud to see what unchecked greed can do.  Even Adam Smith's "invisible hand" occasionally needs a slap on its wrist, when it decides use fraud as a means to gain.  Human trafficking, child abuse, robbery, violent crime of all sorts, make it clear what unchecked appetites can do.  For every southern plantation owner who voluntarily chose to free his slaves, there were many more who could have freely chosen to do the right thing... but did not.  It took massive force and bloodshed to make them change their practices (at least... change within a short span of years, rather than waiting decades or generations for it to happen naturally).

Is this really the choice I face?  Isn't there an alternative to this schema?  Some other way of organizing the discussion?  I don't want one or the other.  I want some of each!  Who will offer me a reasoned and passionate blend of these two?  What I'd love to see is candidates who can somehow synthesize Libertarianism and Catholic Social Teaching.  Then you'd really have something: protections of individual freedom and structures of collective caring.

On another NPR program earlier this week I heard the author of this book interviewed about how we can recover from the Politically Polarizing Polemics to which we have become subject whenever we listen to the proceedings of Congress.  I've thought for some time that we really need a Parliamentary style of government, so that multiple parties with varying viewpoints can negotiate for common ground (and thereby gain more influence as a bloc than separately).  Yes, it's more tribal than what we have now - but what we have now is what we had 150 years ago: a country sharply divided by ideology ready to take up arms against each other.  We're nearly there again.