Nothing Personal
Reading this tweet finally crystallized an essay I've been meaning to write after a couple of recent conversations.
Namely: why, to so many liberal Americans, is politics such an intensely personal matter?
I'm going to be painting with a fairly broad brush, here, so let's get some disclaimers out of the way right off the bat:
1) It is neither true that all liberal Americans view politics as a very personal matter, nor that all conservatives do not, nor that all those who do/do not have the exact same strength of conviction (or lack thereof) on the matter. In particular, I suspect that those for whom politics is their livelihood take an understandably personal view; to Rush Limbaugh, I imagine the upcoming election is exceedingly personal. I'm not primarily addressing these folks, though they do factor in to some degree. Likewise, I'm not speaking to the extreme fringes of any party - the Birthers for conservatives, for instance. What I'm arguing for, instead, is that there is a higher incidence of personal investment in politics among liberal Americans in general than in non-liberal Americans.
I'm beginning with that claim as something of an assumption, and perhaps it needs a bit of a defense. There are a number of cases that could be cited as evidence, but probably the easiest to see is in the relative treatment by liberal and non-liberal speakers of opposing news agencies.
In particular, I'm talking about the socially-acceptable liberal hatred of Fox News - which is pervasive to the degree that I'm more likely to hear snide remarks about how awful the channel is than neutral comments about watching it, despite the majority of my close social contacts being more likely to do the former than the latter. That Fox is biased - that they are, in fact, heavily conservatively biased - isn't really in dispute, I think. What should be just as plain is that a number of other media outlets (PBS and MSNBC perhaps most prominently) are comparably as strongly biased in the other direction. While one does hear criticism of these networks, there does not seem to have developed the same culture of hatred for them that has developed for Fox.
This is the two-part thing I'm pointing to, then: not only that there are vehement and vocal expressions towards a pro-conservative station, but there is not a comparable outpouring towards pro-liberal stations. Again, other examples exist, but this is the easiest to see.
2) The various non-liberal "parties" - whether one considers Republicans, Libertarians, Tea Partiers, or what-have-you - are no more composed of saints than are any other organizations. That they have their fair share of liars, scoundrels, and crackpots is undeniable, and to take note of this fact is not an act of personal aggression. Again, though, I'm not looking here to charges of moral bankruptcy ("X Republican shot a lady and sold her organs on ebay!") nor of policy disagreement ("X Republican voted for a thing I think is a bad idea!"). What I'm talking about are essentially personal attacks: criticisms of a person as a person, reasons to despise a man rather than his platform.
As an example: I have pretty strenuous disagreement with some of George W. Bush's policies, particularly in his latter years. I am sympathetic to arguments that X or Y was a bad idea, that there were bad consequences of his actions, etc. Whether I ultimately agree with them or not, these are reasonable critiques to make! But the charges against Bush most often presented in public dialogue seem to be, first, and resting on essentially no evidence, that he is an imbecile; and second, and with arguably little better cause, that virtually everything he says is a lie.
(One sees this same phenomenon repeated with the Tea Party: They have a stupid name! They're a bunch of religious hick wackos! They're paid patsies of the Republican party too dumb to realize it! Similar examples could be made re: Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, etc.)
I'm not defending the policies of these individuals - minimally in this space, and in some cases not at all. But these are not policy critiques; they are not legal charges, or reasoned arguments, or suggestions of logical flaws and superior alternatives. They are, instead, attempts to dismiss a person or group out of hand, to find them not only wrong but repugnant, worthy not of opposing argument but simply of derision.
And, whatever the source, that's worthless talk. It is ad hominem in its purest form, utterly unhelpful for actually evaluating policies; worse, it strives to close its audience off to even considering alternatives.. It certainly is practiced by conservatives and liberals alike, and if my argument here has been that it is more common among liberals, that is in no way tacit approval of the same talk when practiced by conservatives. But while one finds some such personal dislike leveled against, say, President Obama, Vice President Biden, etc., it more rarely rises to the same level.
The question, then, is: "Why?"
It seems to me that the foundation of liberal American thought is this: it is possible, by means of government action over time, to perfect society - or, if "perfect" is too strong a term, to improve it to some arbitrary level. We can stop the planet from warming, without meaningfully sacrificing our quality of life! We can give everyone full-quality healthcare, without a heavy widespread financial burden! We can give everyone a job that makes them comfortably well off! We can manage the economy so as to prevent depression - or to cure it, if it does occur! And so there emerges a theory: a theory that may be, perhaps, imperfect, but whose inevitable end is the raising of mankind to a state of nigh-universal plenty and harmony. Moved by this goal, the adherents of the theory deeply desire to put it into practice, for the sake of all mankind. Periodically, they get a chance to do so.
And, inevitably, when they do, something doesn't quite work out. The New Deal kills a hesitant recovery. Public education and college scholarships don't raise academic performance; if anything, scores drop. California micromanages its power output and is left with rolling blackouts. Home ownership is extended to all, and a housing bubble forms and then collapses. The President carries out his plan for economic recovery, backed by an allied Congress, and unemployment numbers rise above his worst projections for the consequences of inaction. Throughout, debt goes up and up and up and...
And so the adherents are forced to ask what went wrong. The problem cannot be the theory - in small details, perhaps, but not in the overall claim that society is basically perfectible. In many cases, laws were passed to do precisely what the theory demanded, yet results fail to materialize. What, then, has gone wrong?
There is, given these restrictions, essentially one answer: sabotage. Someone has deliberately taken steps to keep the theory from working. Who? The opposition, obviously - who else? Why? Why would they oppose something that's for the good of all? It must be because in doing so, they gain more for themselves at the expense of everyone else.
And so each new failure of the theory demands the creation of a villain - the war-profiteers, the greedy bankers, the corporate overlords, the lying moguls, the idiotic and pathological presidents - who is so self-centered that he'd oppose what any thinking person sees as the path to nirvana. So, for instance, in the tweet that's inspired this long-winded ramble, comedian John Fugelsang says:
"GOP blaming Obama for the slow recovery is like John Wilkes Booth blaming Lincoln for missing the 2nd act of the play."
Get that? The GOP here are the assassins, who murdered America's chance at recovery. How have they done this, when Obama had two essentially unopposed years in which to enact his policies? Who knows? Who cares? Things aren't any better, so they must have done something.
Thus we get the description of Conservatives as what amounts to mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash villain parodies: Captain Planet villains, who decide to combine their seafood restaurant and toxic-waste-dumping properties in one building because how else are they going to get people to eat toxic waste? And thus do we get out-of-hand dismissal of conservative rationale, of refusal even to understand arguments that (for instance) minimum wages take jobs from the poor, or that taxes on the wealthy employers translate to burdens on employees, or any of a dozen other things.
These tendencies are by no means universal among liberals, nor absent among conservatives. But it seems to me that the theory of governmental salvation predisposes liberalism towards this intellectual blind alley. Conservativism has its own flaws and blind spots, but properly understood, it doesn't imply that government is going to ever fix things. (Indeed, it doesn't imply that things are going to be fixed, period; the government may be able to sit on its hands and stay out of the way, and the poorest Americans may be better for it - but poverty is not likely to be cured.) And so, when something bad happens - an environmental disaster, an economic collapse - the conservative search for answers is at least tempered by the belief that sometimes, bad things happen with not a blessed thing to be done about them.
There is, I think, a peculiar comfort in that knowledge.
Edit: engelhardtlm1 supplies some excellent corroborating evidence.
Namely: why, to so many liberal Americans, is politics such an intensely personal matter?
I'm going to be painting with a fairly broad brush, here, so let's get some disclaimers out of the way right off the bat:
1) It is neither true that all liberal Americans view politics as a very personal matter, nor that all conservatives do not, nor that all those who do/do not have the exact same strength of conviction (or lack thereof) on the matter. In particular, I suspect that those for whom politics is their livelihood take an understandably personal view; to Rush Limbaugh, I imagine the upcoming election is exceedingly personal. I'm not primarily addressing these folks, though they do factor in to some degree. Likewise, I'm not speaking to the extreme fringes of any party - the Birthers for conservatives, for instance. What I'm arguing for, instead, is that there is a higher incidence of personal investment in politics among liberal Americans in general than in non-liberal Americans.
I'm beginning with that claim as something of an assumption, and perhaps it needs a bit of a defense. There are a number of cases that could be cited as evidence, but probably the easiest to see is in the relative treatment by liberal and non-liberal speakers of opposing news agencies.
In particular, I'm talking about the socially-acceptable liberal hatred of Fox News - which is pervasive to the degree that I'm more likely to hear snide remarks about how awful the channel is than neutral comments about watching it, despite the majority of my close social contacts being more likely to do the former than the latter. That Fox is biased - that they are, in fact, heavily conservatively biased - isn't really in dispute, I think. What should be just as plain is that a number of other media outlets (PBS and MSNBC perhaps most prominently) are comparably as strongly biased in the other direction. While one does hear criticism of these networks, there does not seem to have developed the same culture of hatred for them that has developed for Fox.
This is the two-part thing I'm pointing to, then: not only that there are vehement and vocal expressions towards a pro-conservative station, but there is not a comparable outpouring towards pro-liberal stations. Again, other examples exist, but this is the easiest to see.
2) The various non-liberal "parties" - whether one considers Republicans, Libertarians, Tea Partiers, or what-have-you - are no more composed of saints than are any other organizations. That they have their fair share of liars, scoundrels, and crackpots is undeniable, and to take note of this fact is not an act of personal aggression. Again, though, I'm not looking here to charges of moral bankruptcy ("X Republican shot a lady and sold her organs on ebay!") nor of policy disagreement ("X Republican voted for a thing I think is a bad idea!"). What I'm talking about are essentially personal attacks: criticisms of a person as a person, reasons to despise a man rather than his platform.
As an example: I have pretty strenuous disagreement with some of George W. Bush's policies, particularly in his latter years. I am sympathetic to arguments that X or Y was a bad idea, that there were bad consequences of his actions, etc. Whether I ultimately agree with them or not, these are reasonable critiques to make! But the charges against Bush most often presented in public dialogue seem to be, first, and resting on essentially no evidence, that he is an imbecile; and second, and with arguably little better cause, that virtually everything he says is a lie.
(One sees this same phenomenon repeated with the Tea Party: They have a stupid name! They're a bunch of religious hick wackos! They're paid patsies of the Republican party too dumb to realize it! Similar examples could be made re: Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, etc.)
I'm not defending the policies of these individuals - minimally in this space, and in some cases not at all. But these are not policy critiques; they are not legal charges, or reasoned arguments, or suggestions of logical flaws and superior alternatives. They are, instead, attempts to dismiss a person or group out of hand, to find them not only wrong but repugnant, worthy not of opposing argument but simply of derision.
And, whatever the source, that's worthless talk. It is ad hominem in its purest form, utterly unhelpful for actually evaluating policies; worse, it strives to close its audience off to even considering alternatives.. It certainly is practiced by conservatives and liberals alike, and if my argument here has been that it is more common among liberals, that is in no way tacit approval of the same talk when practiced by conservatives. But while one finds some such personal dislike leveled against, say, President Obama, Vice President Biden, etc., it more rarely rises to the same level.
The question, then, is: "Why?"
It seems to me that the foundation of liberal American thought is this: it is possible, by means of government action over time, to perfect society - or, if "perfect" is too strong a term, to improve it to some arbitrary level. We can stop the planet from warming, without meaningfully sacrificing our quality of life! We can give everyone full-quality healthcare, without a heavy widespread financial burden! We can give everyone a job that makes them comfortably well off! We can manage the economy so as to prevent depression - or to cure it, if it does occur! And so there emerges a theory: a theory that may be, perhaps, imperfect, but whose inevitable end is the raising of mankind to a state of nigh-universal plenty and harmony. Moved by this goal, the adherents of the theory deeply desire to put it into practice, for the sake of all mankind. Periodically, they get a chance to do so.
And, inevitably, when they do, something doesn't quite work out. The New Deal kills a hesitant recovery. Public education and college scholarships don't raise academic performance; if anything, scores drop. California micromanages its power output and is left with rolling blackouts. Home ownership is extended to all, and a housing bubble forms and then collapses. The President carries out his plan for economic recovery, backed by an allied Congress, and unemployment numbers rise above his worst projections for the consequences of inaction. Throughout, debt goes up and up and up and...
And so the adherents are forced to ask what went wrong. The problem cannot be the theory - in small details, perhaps, but not in the overall claim that society is basically perfectible. In many cases, laws were passed to do precisely what the theory demanded, yet results fail to materialize. What, then, has gone wrong?
There is, given these restrictions, essentially one answer: sabotage. Someone has deliberately taken steps to keep the theory from working. Who? The opposition, obviously - who else? Why? Why would they oppose something that's for the good of all? It must be because in doing so, they gain more for themselves at the expense of everyone else.
And so each new failure of the theory demands the creation of a villain - the war-profiteers, the greedy bankers, the corporate overlords, the lying moguls, the idiotic and pathological presidents - who is so self-centered that he'd oppose what any thinking person sees as the path to nirvana. So, for instance, in the tweet that's inspired this long-winded ramble, comedian John Fugelsang says:
"GOP blaming Obama for the slow recovery is like John Wilkes Booth blaming Lincoln for missing the 2nd act of the play."
Get that? The GOP here are the assassins, who murdered America's chance at recovery. How have they done this, when Obama had two essentially unopposed years in which to enact his policies? Who knows? Who cares? Things aren't any better, so they must have done something.
Thus we get the description of Conservatives as what amounts to mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash villain parodies: Captain Planet villains, who decide to combine their seafood restaurant and toxic-waste-dumping properties in one building because how else are they going to get people to eat toxic waste? And thus do we get out-of-hand dismissal of conservative rationale, of refusal even to understand arguments that (for instance) minimum wages take jobs from the poor, or that taxes on the wealthy employers translate to burdens on employees, or any of a dozen other things.
These tendencies are by no means universal among liberals, nor absent among conservatives. But it seems to me that the theory of governmental salvation predisposes liberalism towards this intellectual blind alley. Conservativism has its own flaws and blind spots, but properly understood, it doesn't imply that government is going to ever fix things. (Indeed, it doesn't imply that things are going to be fixed, period; the government may be able to sit on its hands and stay out of the way, and the poorest Americans may be better for it - but poverty is not likely to be cured.) And so, when something bad happens - an environmental disaster, an economic collapse - the conservative search for answers is at least tempered by the belief that sometimes, bad things happen with not a blessed thing to be done about them.
There is, I think, a peculiar comfort in that knowledge.
Edit: engelhardtlm1 supplies some excellent corroborating evidence.