Explaining Portman

[novalis]

sandmantv and thekinginyellow have posted about Rob Portman, but I don't think either of them has it quite right.

sandmantv says "I think there’s too much emphasis on the personal dimension of this." Then he follows up with "Yes this is their personal journey and lots of people have their eyes widened regarding tolerance because of how it touched them or someone close to them.

Comments

[thekinginyellow]

More than that. We actively reward people for doing the "compassionate family thing," and we actively punish people for "figuring things out on their own." It's part of the American cultural makeup. Which is the really terrifying part.

[novalis]

Yeah, I think that's what I was saying.

[thekinginyellow]

I do think you're underselling sandmantv's point here, but he can speak for himself.

Regarding my own point: my stance here is not an abstract "it's important to be right for the right reasons" (although it is). My stance is that we as a culture have idolized a specific reason for taking any position on any issue, a reason that pretty much has to be the wrong reason in any circumstance, and that this actively encourages people to continue being wrong until the issue comes to affect them personally.

(There can be more than one takeaway point in a given situation!)

Those things said...I'm really, really, really not a fan of the "cookie" formulation in general. And I'm frankly surprised to hear that you are.

Portman didn't "do a bad thing." I mean, in actual fact he did, but that's not a useful way of framing the issue in any case where genuine controversy exists [regardless of the underlying truth]. He disagreed with us, and now he doesn't. Failing to reward that shift-towards-correctness, and instead demanding a Show of

[novalis]

I mean, in actual fact he did, but that's not a useful way of framing the issue in any case where genuine controversy exists [regardless of the underlying truth].

I think "genuine controversy" is a problematic standard. It has the effect of holding fringe views to a higher standard than mainstream views. And it says that it's more important to protect the feelings of abusers than to talk about actual harm to abused people.

He disagreed with us, and now he doesn't. Failing to reward that shift-towards-correctness, and instead demanding a Show of Contrition and Sincerity, is harmful on at least two fronts. It discourages others from becoming correct, because it places additional costs on them for shifting their stance rather than offsetting the already-substantial ones. And it pollutes the discourse, because it uses cultural capital as a club rather than responding to the underlying claims. This is what I was getting at with the comment about the cynical political strategy (admittedly, I was too brief). Define the cynical

[novalis]

As for religion..."controlling other people's lives" has nothing to do with it, does it? Bad religious argument is bad religious argument, and that's true regardless of the content.

I don't think that's quite right. If someone says, "I've prayed about whether or not to run for Congress" (or go to college, or whatever), that's generally unobjectionable, in that they're not trying to privilege their internal experience to influence others. Maybe if R's neighbor prayed about whether R should run for congress, they would get a different answer, but so what? Sure, I believe that they are all mistaken to believe that they have had any communication with God. But it doesn't affect me that much. And there's a strong argument that R's neighbor is far more likely to be mistaken (since they're praying about something that doesn't directly affect them).

[sandmantv]

I don’t think it’s a contradiction to say “Portman did this for broader political reasons than this story lets on” and “left wing commentators are annoyingly cynical about the personal story.” They may get to fairly dissimilar points, and it’s an artifact of bad writing in my post if you think I was trying to make the same point at the time. I only brought that up then because well, I was only going to devote one post to this news story

[novalis]

I have a lot of responses to this, but they're all connected. So I'll start with a random note, and then move into the meat of the issue:

Hacker School
I don't think Hacker School is a particularly good example here, since (a) it is a business whose services I am endorsing rather than a cause and (b) it has almost nothing to do with my political outlook. I say almost nothing, because of course my views on the effectiveness of traditional vs non-traditional schooling affect my views on schooling policy. But also I mostly had those views before Hacker School started up.

Why do I consider this annoyingly cynical? Well on an abstract level, I think feelings and intuitions have a lot more to do with morality than abstract rationality. I count on compassion to make people do the right thing (or not do the wrong thing) first, empirical data about results second, and pure logic third. That however, is a very large topic for another time.

It's not very helpful for you to discard the term "liberal" for describing yourself as separate

[novalis]

But I don't feel that it's weird to describe myself as non-liberal. If I take the "World's Smallest Political Quiz", I find myself exactly on the line between liberal and libertarian, depending on how I interpret the questions (hilariously, the quiz's space for "Centrist" as so large that that's where they put me). Granted, that quiz is designed to make most people look like a libertarian (although it would be interesting to take the questions where GSS data is available and see what the score distribution actually looks like). And the quiz is about object-level debates rather than principles. But on a number of issues that are non-controversial among liberals (gun control, for instance), my views are very far from the common liberal position. Am I to the "left" of the median person? Maybe on many issues, if politics is one-dimensional. Congressional politics is (if DW-NOMINATE is to be believed), but I generally disagree with my congresspeople on a wide variety of issues (sometimes even agreeing with the theoretically-more-

[novalis]

Perhaps if I saw either of you, or the author I linked, criticizing people on the left for doing this, I'd be less bothered.

I rarely pay attention to what politicians say; the major reason I commented here was that you and thekinginyellow were interested. But to provide some balance: Obama is wrong about drones, privacy, national security, non-prosecution of torturers, and a dozen other thing as well. On same-sex marriage, Obama is only slightly better than Portman -- he didn't apologize, but he has consistently taken actions to support marriage equality (even before his official conversion). His statement was also somewhat better than Portman's; he gave anecdotes as causal explanations, but in the end he said, "it’s also the golden rule -- you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated." And that's more-or-less what a politician ought to be advocating: Liberalism in the sense of JS Mill.

[kleenestar]

What matters to me is what underlying principles his current actions are being driven by. "I changed my mind because of my son" is entirely consistent with "I now have compassion for others" or "I do what's best for me and mine" or "I want to get votes now, please," among other things. I think it's our responsibility not to take his story at face value, but rather to ask whether it's consistent with what he chooses to do - and to try to figure out, based on what he says and does, which set of underlying principles he's used to make this change. That allows us to make meaningful predictions about his behavior going forward.