Politics

The Occupy Tea Party Platform, Part II: Obamacare

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Health care reform and universal health insurance is one of those issues that has popped up time and again in American politics for decades, dating back to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid, if not further. Both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton tried and failed to enact their own reforms. In that context, love him or hate him (or his plan), the fact that Barack Obama was able to pass anything, in the most polarized political climate since at least the Civil War, is nothing short of astounding.

The spiraling costs of health care pose such a threat to the long-term viability of the federal government, especially as the baby boomers retire, that this should be an issue that both sides of the aisle can agree on. In practice, a lot of people, especially on the right, seem to be unclear as to what the issue actually is, seeing the health care debate as being less about health care and more about the role of government in our lives, and there’s a lot of disagreement over where to fix the problem. (It doesn’t help that “Obamacare” has become a bogeyman that has arguably overshadowed the actual contents of the bill.) A lot of Democrats made insurance companies into the scapegoat, calling for the government to institute a public option to force insurance companies to keep premiums down and stop discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions (the people who most need it) in the name of profit, if not take over the health insurance system entirely and adopt a single-payer system.

While I’m sympathetic to the Democrats’ stance, I’m still not convinced that repealing the health insurance industry’s anti-trust exemption wouldn’t have done a lot to solve those problems even on its own, without further government intervention in the marketplace. Ultimately, Obama wasn’t able to pass any form of public option, and the bill’s ultimate solution to the problem of the insurance industry could be seen as an adoption of my viewpoint. Perhaps the centerpiece of the bill is the establishment of an “exchange” with which individuals and businesses could compare and contrast various health plans. But this was coupled with numerous requirements for qualifying health plans and a universal coverage mandate. During the debate on the bill, while watching C-SPAN I saw Republican lawmakers denounce the “exchange” as sufficient to constitute a “government takeover” of health care, raising the specter of the government deciding which insurance plans you’ll have a “choice” from. The “exchange” comes across to me as more of a shadow free market than an actual one, one the Democrats didn’t have enough confidence in not to include instructions to insurance companies on what to do and what not to do on top of it.

I can see why the individual mandate, probably the most controversial specific provision, was included. Most young, healthy people consider themselves invulnerable and don’t think they’ll need health insurance for anything. Requiring them to get health insurance means they’re covered if they turn out to be wrong, while their healthiness makes them the insurance companies’ ideal customer and makes it easier for them to cover more marginal customers for less, possibly having the result of lowering insurance costs overall. Republicans have been most vocal in decrying the mandate, but even Keith Olbermann, then still with MSNBC, called for the mandate to be stripped after the public option died, claiming that with the mandate but no public option the bill amounted to a massive gift to the insurance companies. I suspect that betrays his lack of faith in capitalism and the free market more than anything else, but in any case I can definitely see a scenario where requiring everyone to get health insurance causes high and inelastic demand, theoretically allowing insurance companies to drive prices to the moon.

At any rate, all the emphasis on insurance may be at least slightly misguided anyway. A larger problem may involve the quality of care itself and how it’s delivered to patients. There’s little research on what treatments offer the best bang for the buck; doctors are presently paid based on how often they’re used, not with a constant salary, encouraging overtreatment; and there needs to be effort to encourage healthier lifestyles so people aren’t so reliant on the health care system in the first place. (This last may come up in later entries in this series.) Republicans would rather focus on tort reform, claiming that fear of malpractice suits is what drives up costs; I’m not convinced by Wikipedia’s analysis which focuses on the effect of the actual rather than perceived risk of malpractice. And we’re running the risk of shortages in doctors and nurses in the future. The health care legislation does confront many of these problems, though they’re clearly in the background compared to insurance reform.

This is too complex an issue for me to figure out what the best approach is, so I may revisit it later. My impression is that the health care bill is superior to the status quo ante, and any better reform would need to build off at least some of its provisions, and if the Republicans repeal it without providing some sort of replacement there may be some people who feel a bit betrayed. But I can’t help but wonder what might have happened if we had instituted a true free market, rather than one imposed by the government. As it stands, it may well turn out that the health care legislation will give more power to both government and business, and while I’d like to see how it plays out before making any rash decisions, if it does end up repealed we should insist that it be replaced with a bill that empowers patients first and foremost by encouraging, rather than stifling, innovation in all areas of health care. Perhaps it includes an individual mandate, perhaps not, but if it includes it it does so only if it’s been established that, combined with other reforms, it will improve health care costs and quality of health for all Americans, rather than serving as a giveaway to insurance companies.

The Occupy Tea Party Platform, Part I: Reforming the Financial System

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Yesterday I suggested that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street arose from a common impetus of the people fighting back against The Man holding them down, be The Man government or big business. I proposed that this common impetus could be seized to become the birth of a new political movement looking out for the best interests of the people rather than government or business.

Of course, if it were that simple, our political system wouldn’t be so gridlocked in the first place. So let’s start with OWS’ concern about the depredations of Wall Street, because it most clearly illustrates both the problem and the opportunity. Both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have at least some of their roots in outrage over the huge bailouts given to big banks, but at the same time, who’s going to rein in Wall Street if not the government?

The question is really one of saving Wall Street from itself. It’s as much in Wall Street’s best interest as anyone for the economy to be humming along smoothly. Ask Lehman Brothers or the hordes of other banks that went down as a result of the financial crisis whether they enriched themselves at the expense of everyone else. Individuals who made money from the constructions that precipitated the financial crisis may have gotten off relatively scot-free, but that’s a different problem from “Occupy Wall Street”.

Wall Street’s problem is that, in their zeal to make money, they sometimes throw common sense to the wind and bamboozle themselves into the equivalent of a pyramid scheme. They delude themselves with a bunch of fuzzy math that says that, in aggregate, these investments are an awesome, can’t-miss proposition, even if there are enough not-so-can’t-miss investments hidden in there that the fuzzy math obscures that can still send the entire construct crashing into a heap. Wall Street may have swindled each other and the public, but first and foremost, they swindled themselves. The biggest problem with untangling the financial crisis is that Wall Street failed to do what one would think it would do regardless of what anyone tells it to.

Painting “Wall Street” as the monolithic villain of the story is probably unfair unless you’re arguing against capitalism itself. At least in theory, big investment banks are the engine that drives the system of capitalism, lending the money that allows people to do everything from starting a business to buying a home. If you’ve ever taken student loan money or saved for retirement, your money has probably been tied up in what Wall Street does, and you’re counting on them to make sure you get it back in one piece. Ideally, Wall Street does this precisely by working for its own benefit, because that benefit should be passed down to the people whose money has passed through there, through lower or higher interest rates. It could be said, if you wanted to oversimplify, that a bank’s role is to temporarily redistribute money from those who have it to those who need it, in the hopes that the same money will eventually flow back in the other direction.

Of course, part of the reason why that’s an oversimplification is that banks have what might be considered a weird definition of “need”. Banks are obviously not in the business of simply handing out money to the poor; arguably, getting into that business is what precipitated the housing crisis. Rather, banks lend out their money to people who will (hopefully) use that money to make more money, both powering the economy and allowing them to pay back that money with interest.

The problem is not that Wall Street is too powerful in and of itself. The reason why Wall Street was able to bamboozle itself was because certain specific banks became so big they could effectively act with impunity. Even that isn’t really a bad thing in and of itself, because lost in all the talk of all the risky loans banks handed out is that without risk, there’s no reward. The problem comes when banks become completely isolated from any negative consequences of their actions at the peak of their power, with nothing stopping them from bringing down the entire economy once they’re big enough to potentially do so, because the government will bail them out if they do. The alliance between government and business isn’t even all that great for business.

The answer isn’t to burn down Wall Street entirely, or even for the government to put up barriers to confine it, reducing the incentive for success. What’s needed is some way to keep Wall Street from bringing down the economy without restricting their ability to grow it. That means transparency, not control; rather than tell Wall Street what to do, let’s make sure we know what it is doing. We need independent watchdogs who can keep an eye on what Wall Street is up to and determine whether or not it’s working, watchdogs who can be trusted not to be in Wall Street’s pocket, but can speak up whenever it starts undermining itself – and who will be listened to when they do. And rather than bailing out banks that are “too big to fail”, the government should instead mitigate the damage by protecting such banks’ assets, getting everyone off the bus before it crashes, possibly by liquidating those assets on other banks or even taking them on itself. If the government does need to resort to bailouts, we need to make sure our taxpayer dollars are being spent wisely.

Wall Street needs a check on its power the American people can trust, not one that can’t keep up with it, only seeks to build its own power at Wall Street’s expense, or worst of all, actually makes it easier for Wall Street to abuse its power.

The Tea Party Occupies Wall Street

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The funny thing about the “people’s movements” that have energized both sides of the aisle and challenged their respective parties over the course of the past three years is that they’re not inherently incompatible.

In fact, they largely stem from the same source. The Tea Party was a reaction to the perceived encroaching dominance and enriching of government; Occupy Wall Street was a reaction to the perceived encroaching dominance and enriching of big corporations. Both at least portrayed themselves as movements of the people against those with a lust for power and money, and even to the extent they were single-issue movements – the Tea Party excessive taxation, OWS Wall Street’s role in the economic crisis – it was still possible for someone to sympathize theoretically with both positions. Indeed, part of OWS’ message is precisely that big business has taken over the government.

Although both movements are largely associated with a particular political persuasion, the Tea Party positioned itself as a libertarian movement independent of the two major parties, while even some conservatives felt Occupy Wall Street had a point, even if they disagreed with their methods. It was possible to be a Democratic Tea Partier and a Republican occupier of Wall Street. To be sure, the diehards of each political persuasion could probably never be convinced of that, claiming the former to be fakes or the latter to not be “real conservatives”.

Still, I see in the compatibility of the two movements hope for moving beyond our tense ideological divide. A lot of people across the country saw outrage in their particular economic situation, and a lot of people across the country saw outrage in the general economic situation, enough so that they felt the need to demonstrate their outrage. It’s a shame that OWS seems to have lost a lot of its momentum, unable to seize the momentum of the initial protests into a long-term political movement like the Tea Party, and it’s also a shame that the Tea Party itself may be sputtering out as the Republican Party has settled on its most moderate plausible candidate for President, but in that may be opportunity. Had both movements remained strong they might have become irreconcilably opposed. Now, though, if we can take these two different currents of populist outrage and find a way to articulate a coherent, populist message and platform from the both of them, we can effectively give voice to the broader position of the people, and in so doing, create a better chance to “take back the country” than either movement could have done alone or in opposition.

This unified, populist platform, with the potential to strike fear in the heart of both parties, might have among its guiding principles:

  • The liberty of the people shall not be infringed.
  • The people will fight for their freedom and their livelihood against all who would take it.
  • Government should not take our hard-earned money so they can intrude into every aspect of our lives.
  • Wall Street should not be able to make themselves rich at the expense of everyone else.

If I had to distill the message sent by the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street into a single sentence, it might be: We won’t let anyone else screw with us. Whether the enemy is government or Big Business, the people are willing to fight back against the both of them. And considering how huge the people are compared to government or business, that’s a force that will prove impossible to ignore.

Over the next several days and weeks I’m going to look at how this position might play itself out in practice. I’m going to look at various issues and consider what a policy based on the best interests of the people would decide. At no point will I give more power or money to government or big business unless there is no way for that to come at the expense of the people and there is no alternative. As such, I won’t always advocate things either political party is backing right now. In so doing, I hope to give structure to this new populist movement, to recommend concrete strategies for people to advocate and follow and guiding principles for voting and activism.

It’s time to move beyond pointless division and allow all of us to move forward as Americans, truly and passionately, as more than a buzzword for politicians who are about to realize just how much they didn’t actually want it to happen, and if nothing else, set an example for a Congress seemingly unable to do so.

State of the Occupy Movement

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Admittedly I looked after midnight Eastern time on Wednesday/Thursday, but I didn’t find much national coverage of Tuesday’s May Day protests and even less of the protests in Seattle. Nonetheless, I presume there was enough for Michelle Malkin to use the #seamayday hashtag.

Judging by that tweet and the local coverage, the headline, at least in Seattle, would appear to be the outbreak of violence and vandalism of downtown storefronts, which jibes with some of the reasons Occupy has lost some popularity and momentum since the heady early days. Now, the Occupy movement can say things like how the violent protestors don’t represent them, or how the corporate media is overemphasizing the violence (the Seattle Times is locally-owned but tends to be further to the right than its former competitor the P-I), but there is still one thing that is undeniable.

At least when Martin Luther King was running it, the civil rights movement never (or almost never) turned violent.

One of Occupy’s greatest strengths at this point has been its lack of an overarching leader, its status as a spontaneous movement of the people. Right now, however, if it sees itself as a movement on par with the civil rights movement, perhaps it could use one to keep the movement disciplined and its message clear. Perhaps outbreaks of violence show how desperate people are, perhaps Occupy’s concerns are more frivolous than those of the civil rights movement, but whatever the case the movement seems to be stalled in more ways than one. It’s an election season; maybe it’s time for some of the same tactics as the Tea Party.

More on this (hopefully) next week, in a series I’ve been trying to get off the ground for over a month.

Reading between the lines: Keith Olbermann’s departure from Current

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While Keith Olbermann was at MSNBC, I was, as a liberal myself, rather fond of his show, especially his willingness to put up an actual fight against the right with little guilt, but I felt that it was entertainment more than anything else and not exactly the most reliable place to get “news” despite Olbermann’s tendency to refer to it as a “news hour”. It was basically a place for Olbermann to bring on his liberal friends to talk about how much those conservatives stink; the real reason I watched the show when I did was for Olbermann’s segments where he could bring his own brand of snark and sarcasm to the stories he talked about, segments like the infamous “Worst Person in the World”. I always felt Olbermann’s real counterpart was more the blustering Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh than the more straight-laced, putting-on-a-front-of-balance Bill O’Reilly (whose own counterpart might be Rachael Maddow).

Last week, Olbermann’s relationship with Current – a network he almost singlehandedly built into a fulfillment of Al Gore’s original vision of a “progressive” news network – abruptly ended as he was replaced in the 8 PM ET hour by Eliot Spitzer, on Friday no less. Much like his departure from MSNBC a year prior, which appeared to have been motivated more by longstanding issues with the brass than by the aftermath of the Giffords shooting, this appears to be one in a long line of departures resulting at least in part from Olbermann’s ego running unchecked (though I hasten to add that I get this only from a line in the show’s Wikipedia article that had a [citation needed] tag on it when I looked on Friday).

And that ego was on full display in his snarky statement on the break-up:

I’d like to apologize to my viewers and my staff for the failure of Current TV.

Overdramatic much? I read that and thought that Current itself was shutting down.

It goes almost without saying that the claims against me implied in Current’s statement are untrue and will be proved so in the legal actions I will be filing against them presently. To understand Mr. Hyatt’s “values of respect, openness, collegiality and loyalty,” I encourage you to read of a previous occasion Mr. Hyatt found himself in court for having unjustly fired an employee. That employee’s name was Clarence B. Cain. http://nyti.ms/HueZsa

Really? It sounds to me like all Current needs to do is point to this statement for an example of your lack of “respect” and “collegiality”. Just look at the last paragraph:

In due course, the truth of the ethics of Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt will come out. For now, it is important only to again acknowledge that joining them was a sincere and well-intentioned gesture on my part, but in retrospect a foolish one. That lack of judgment is mine and mine alone, and I apologize again for it.

Yes, because they wouldn’t do every little thing you said? Where are you going to take your schtick now, “KOTV“?

Should I say it? Keith Olbermann, today’s Worst! Person! In the Woooorrrrrrrlllllllldddddddd!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

From an example of congressional bipartisanship (SOPA) to an example of ideological bipartisanship.

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Our school’s library gets a lot of magazines, and occasionally I take a peek at them. Over the past few months, the National Review – the United States’ conservative magazine of record – has published stories with, essentially, the following messages:

  • “Hey, you know, maybe those Occupy Wall Street guys have a point, maybe these big banks might just have a little too much power?”
  • “Hey, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s harder to move from relative rags to relative riches in America these days.” (This was the cover story of the same issue as the above.)
  • “Hey, maybe we should get all this Wall Street money out of the Republican party?” (Another cover story; I didn’t read this one, but this was the gist I got from the table of contents.)

I don’t know if this says more about the National Review, the state of the country, or the state of the Republican Party, but I do know I will have much more to say about this sort of thing next week, and especially in March…

Programming Note

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(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized blackout.)

I had heard of SOPA before today’s protests thereof, but I generally don’t like jumping to conclusions and following whatever people tell me I should think. Nonetheless, in light of current events, next week will see a special four-part series on the future of content. Some of this will likely be things that would have made my book on the Internet had I ever written it, and not all of it will be related to SOPA; there will also be things specific to this site’s main two topics, sports and webcomics.

Also, MorganWick.com will go down today sometime between 9 AM and noon PT, but not because of SOPA. I’m finally upgrading to WordPress 3.x series; seems someone finally got around to taking over the plugin that powers the Sports and Webcomics subsites.

Also, as I write this, it is 1:35 AM on the West Coast, and many webcomics have not updated yet, and I still feel confident saying that no other webcomic will protest SOPA as well as Homestuck, even if no one will get it later. (Although now that I’ve seen xkcd, I like its alt text too.)

The Day of Reckoning Revisited

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Due to space constraints, I barely scratched the surface of how far into the gutters the political discourse remains in my first Understanding the News post last week. Here are the titles of a few recent sample threads on the Democratic Underground site: “Teabaggers: Tools of Bin Laden?” “FUCK YOU CONDI RICE.” “An Open Letter to Delusional Rightwing Folks.” Not to be outdone, here are a few excerpts from posters on the right-wing forum Free Republic: “These presstitutes make me sick!” “‘I had no hesitation about taking a human life’… Neither did Stalin. You can’t have a moral dilemma when you have no sense of morality.” “We all know his pappy is a commie, his momnie [sic] is a comie [sic] and that he aint a po azz black boy down fo de struggle. He was raised a privileged white communist punk by his rich ass grandparents.”

I edited these out of my original post fairly early on (and in fact I’m missing even more such comments as a result of my quick hatcheting) because anyone like me can cherrypick the worst comments from public forums where anyone can post like DU and Free Republic, but as I hinted at in my original post when I talked about how partisan views can be self-reinforcing, extreme viewpoints have a tendency to go unchallenged, and hence increasingly legitimized, on partisan forums. For one thing, extreme viewpoints tend to be more vocal about it. This isn’t just a tendency inherent in the positions themselves (the status quo is more of an outrage the further your own position is from it). Consider a hypothetical Democratic message board, with posts from various parts of the spectrum represented. Some posts may be very moderate, others may be all-out Marxist, but they all share one thing in common: assuming there are no trolls, they are probably all in disagreement with the Republicans. Indeed, to feel strongly enough to sign up for an explicitly Democratic message board, one is probably not terribly moderate.

That means there are certain micro-level issues that all of the board’s members are in agreement on. Whenever there is a thread on one of these micro-level issues, the extreme Marxists and the relative moderates will have scarcely any difference between them, in theory. But on issues that might produce more controversy, the moderates are less likely to speak up, because they might be construed as agreeing with the enemy. (In my experience, individual posters tend to have less individual identity on the most popular political message boards.) On the other hand, those that hold relatively extreme positions just on the fringes of what is considered acceptable are allowed to speak freely. Their positions are legitimized, allowing new frontiers to be opened and eventually closing off more moderate positions as the social controls against dissent take effect.

Despite the seeming demise of any principles with which to define and control society – from the naked greed of large corporations to the demands for rights coming from any corner large and loud enough to be heard – the tendency to make such rules, and form societal associations organized around these rules, is endemic. We find it anywhere you look in society, wherever cliques or subcultures are found, and one ignores or underestimates this basic tendency of human nature at their peril. Right now such tendencies have put us on the brink of the abyss, and while I’m still not certain what needs to happen, something definitely needs to happen. Congress will only find the middle ground when America as a whole will, so let’s put together each side’s solutions and the problems with each, and find a way to solve those problems, reason out why one solution is ultimately better than the other, find a solution that incorporates the best of both sides, or at least come to an understanding of each position.

In addition to everything I suggested in my original post, this will require a voice for moderate voices that can recognize the merits of each side and point out their flaws, and hopefully suggest synthesized solutions. The aim is not so much to convince either side so much as to provide a voice for the silent majority in the middle. But for the same reasons mentioned before, moderates tend not to care as much about politics, at least if they’re prone to seek compromise, because they tend not to have very solid views (given their propensity to waver between them) and tend to be okay with whatever comes out, if they even pay attention to politics given how little they care about them. And once again, they’re not likely to escape charges of bias, and may even show some real bias if they become increasingly convinced one side is superior to the other. The entrenchment of our political positions works to keep them from leaving the trenches, and I don’t know how to break the cycle.

I will say that our present system of electing our government on a geographical basis, though it appears reasonable at first glance, does not encourage healing the divide or giving a voice to moderates. Political positions have always been partly geographically determined, whether it was the north being against slavery and the south being for it before the Civil War, or urban areas being more Democratic and rural areas more Republican now. The result is that, even without much gerrymandering, districts have a tendency to become “safe” for one party or the other, which does not encourage and, with our increasing partisan divide, may even discourage the election of moderates. This makes it easier for Congress to reflect the partisan divide in the rest of the country; moderates do get elected, but they do not tend to have much of a voice, especially since their districts may be more vulnerable, and they risk being demonized on the national level among their nominal peers, as Joe Lieberman and Arlen Specter know well; better to give the leadership positions to those more likely to stay in Congress longer. (I don’t believe changing this necessarily requires amending the Constitution, which to my knowledge only governs the division of representation among the states, not that those representatives need to be elected by geographic sub-divisions.)

The geographical system of electing our Congressmen is not the only aspect of our electoral system that furthers the divide. Our “first-past-the-post” plurality system of voting discourages the formation of more than two parties, as should be obvious to anyone who sat through the effect of Ralph Nader on the 2000 presidential election; any viable third party needs to be able to attract exactly as many people from each side. With only two parties, polarization is all too easy; with at least three, one party can synthesize the best ideas of the other two and come up with some ideas of their own that might be better than that suggested by either side. There are ways to address both problems, but I’ll save them for future posts because they’ll take quite a bit of explaining.

Understanding the News: Ignoring the Day of Reckoning

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Note: As this was heavily edited down from a post three times the size, I’ll issue another post greatly expanding on this one.

On January 8, 2011, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner shot US Representative Gabrielle Giffords in the head during a meeting she was holding with constituents near Tucson, Arizona. Although Loughner was a mentally disturbed man who held extreme views on all sides of the political spectrum and paid more attention to conspiracy theories than anything that could be called “news”, the shooting came as a shock to a country deeply divided between left and right. Attention turned to a map made by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin in the lead-up to the 2010 midterm elections showing candidates in vulnerable districts targeted by crosshairs.

People on both sides called for bipartisanship, civility, and toning down the political discourse, and later that month at the State of the Union Address, congressmen of both houses sat in the chamber regardless of political affiliation, breaking with tradition. Even Keith Olbermann, who arguably was one of the standardbearers of the division of the political discourse on the left, apologized for anything he may have ever said that might have been construed as supporting violence. Later that month, Olbermann’s MSNBC show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, was abruptly cancelled.

Did anything result from all the calls for bipartisanship? Not really. Other than Olbermann, the same figures are the most public representatives of left and right, and I see no evidence any of them have changed their MO. Radio host Laura Ingraham recently expressly rejected another call for unity from President Obama, and another radio host, Mike Malloy, suggested that the Navy SEAL team that took out Osama bin Laden should have taken out George W. Bush instead. And I found these incidents from, respectively, Media Matters for America, which had a column calling Obama’s haters “deranged“, and Newsbusters, which called one recent claim of radio host Randi Rhodes “lunacy“. Even Keith Olbermann will restart Countdown on Current TV next month – and it’s worth noting that the breakup with MSNBC may have been in the works ever since Olbermann was suspended the previous November for donating to Democratic congressional candidates.

In my view, the left seemed more self-aware about their sins than the right. While Olbermann fell on his sword, no comparable conservative figure shared the same fate that I know of (with Glenn Beck’s Fox News program only being cancelled in April). While Olbermann apologized for any perceived sins, Palin – from whom one could have drawn a more direct line to the shootings in Tucson – refused to take any responsibility and instead attacked the media for allegedly jumping to blame the right for the attacks. In the end, the left’s reluctance to play the same game as the right only came out as a win for the right – one side pulls the conversation as far right as they want, but the other side is too reluctant to do likewise. I’d like to think it wouldn’t take a conservative figure being shot to shock the right out of their complacency, but I’m not sure if even that would work. But if an assassination attempt can’t bring “red America” and “blue America” together, what can?

Tribalism is a natural result of the human experience. We like to think that we’ve risen above tribalism, but we merely live in bigger tribes today, and smaller sub-tribes among them. One of the most important aspects of any group of people are the moral precepts and core beliefs holding the tribe together. These core principles are at the heart of the tribe’s identity; they allow its members to identify other members of the tribe, beyond those they personally know, and they serve a more practical purpose in keeping the tribe together by creating social controls against those who undermine the rest of the tribe. These controls, and the principles themselves, can have nasty consequences. Anyone who disagrees with a group’s core principles will not remain a member of that group for long.

So it is that our two great political persuasions have purged themselves of heretics and seek complete purity. The other side is pure evil; it is the enemy; to even consider it for a moment is to introduce an impurity. When these core beliefs are held in unanimity, they can be self-reinforcing, and as such they are often deeply held, thought to be self-evident, so now the enemy becomes stupid too, if not outright liars; after all, aren’t our positions so obviously right? At this point, they have become fundamentally religious beliefs, so deeply held that those who hold them cannot make any decisions, cannot even function, if they find themselves forced to throw them out.

In the case of our two great political persuasions, it is thought that the course of action most in accordance with these core beliefs is always in the best interests of America, in every situation and on every issue, regardless of whether or not it contradicts other beliefs they claim to be just as core; to claim otherwise is an absurdity, a heresy. Regardless of what they may claim their principles to be, both parties will sacrifice their principles to support their true clientele. Republicans will always seek the best result for corporations, while I suspect there is some truth to the Republican cariacture of Democrats as not-so-closet socialists.

To make matters worse, the media – Fox News, MSNBC, and major radio companies such as Clear Channel, but all the media to some extent – have gleefully exploited and furthered the political divide. By providing mass outlets for those who would drive each party further into the fringes, they further legitimize such extreme positions and in fact make the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann instantly mainstream. That it is eminently understandable (outrageous positions attract attention and ratings) does not make it any less shameful.

The media are responsible for the divide, and they have a responsibility to put that divide back together. In previous posts I’ve mentioned my frustration with CNN for trying to stand in the middle rather than on both edges, and specifically that letting Jon Stewart shame them into cancelling Crossfire was a mistake. But while that’s still important, I now suspect it’s doomed to failure without more sweeping changes, because the divide is now being driven by forces outside the media, and there’s probably no convincing Fox News to stop furthering the divide.

I don’t know anymore how to really begin healing the divide, or even stopping its growth. It will take a humanization of the enemy – a realization that there are real people who are persuaded by the other side, and they aren’t all misled or delusional – a recognition that we are all Americans who have to live with the people and ideas of the other side; a recognition that politics is not some sort of zero-sum game where the only goal is to “win” but something with real consequences; a sober assessment of our values, what they mean, why they’re desirable, and when they can be too much of a good thing; and above all, it will require a recognition that the partisan gridlock now afflicting Congress – a natural reflection, and microcosm, of the division of the country – is preventing us from moving forward.

I’m not sure if either side really wants to do any of this, and I’m not sure how to get them to – our political persuasions are so entrenched it seems impossible to pull them out of the trenches. But something needs to be done… or else I fear the shots that were fired near Tucson will prove to be the first shots of a new civil war.

Finding Common Ground and Starting the Debate

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We’ve seen two different viewpoints, two very different perspectives, on the current state of the union. You can see from today’s posts how heated and diametrically opposed the two sides are in our present political climate, and honestly, I don’t actually believe the posts I wrote would do much to convince someone on either side.

And yet, there actually is some common ground between the two sides, although some of this common ground may be believed more by one side than the other, and each side holds similar views of their own and the other side. Both state their faith in the greatness of America as the beacon of hope in the world, as a place where you can be anything you want to be, though Republicans are more adamant about it (and tend to deny the opposition their similar belief). Both sides claim that the opposition’s policies are bad for the economy; both want to protect against terrorism in different ways. Both accuse their opposition of needing to wake up to the “real world”, and implicitly, that their own position is rational while the opposition’s is emotional. (On the one hand, Democrats are emotionally attached to the plight of the poor while Republicans see the poor as a necessary side effect of capitalism; Republicans are emotionally attached to their limited-government, free-market principles while being allegedly blinded to their limitations.)

Both sides claim to have America on their side, claiming that most Americans believe in their principles (though the Republicans seem to have more credibility) and that they have America’s best interests at heart, and accuse the other side of being pushed by interests out to squash the message of their own side by spreading misinformation – “big corporations” in the case of the left and the “liberal media” in the case of the right – and this explains the focus on media bias, since if the media weren’t biased everyone would obviously believe their own side.

But perhaps most importantly, the difference between the parties comes down to a difference in priorities, and at least at first glance, these priorities aren’t incompatible with one another. Republicans are concerned with limiting the size of government and maximizing the freedom of business to serve as the engine of the economy; Democrats are concerned with ending poverty and the equitable distribution of the wealth. You will even see Democrats claim that their desire to reduce the influence of the military is partly a reflection of limited-government principles, and Republicans claim that unrestrained capitalism will actually make the poor better off (the familiar “trickle-down economics”). Both sides do recognize the force of the other’s priorities, at least under certain circumstances; they just differ on which to side with when there’s a conflict. Democrats claim that helping the poor is a moral prerogative while one can’t be dogmatically opposed to all government; Republicans claim that the total amount of wealth in the system is more important than how it’s distributed.

Here’s where the conflict comes. At least in theory, the Republicans are right to claim that, if the wealth were perfectly evenly distributed, no one would have any incentive to work because they couldn’t get ahead of anyone else. (There are a few problems with this theory, but we’ll assume it for now.) Similarly, if the government took 100% of your income, you wouldn’t have any incentive to work because no matter how much you earned, all of it would go to the government. (This is a simplified version of the problem with applied communism.) Therefore, any wealth inequity produced by capitalism should be allowed to stand, or else you’re robbing the capitalists’ incentive to keep producing more wealth. Any effort to smooth out wealth inequities results in a reduction of the total wealth coming out of the system, although Democrats deny this. Further, any government interference, such as a tax, in the machinery of capitalism reduces the profits earned by the firm producing goods, and accordingly, reduces the amount of product produced by the firm.

So a limited government, in this model, is a precondition to the smooth workings of business, which may or may not naturally create a gap between rich and poor. A gap between rich and poor is, therefore, one possible consequence of limited government, or at least limited government in certain areas. (The argument applies more broadly when you argue, as Republicans are wont to do, that in general, people following their natural inclinations without government interference, only government protection, results in the best overall outcome for the economy.)

It does not follow, however, that the converse is true, that closing the gap between rich and poor requires a governmental solution. At least in theory, even the free market can solve some problems of wealth inequality, even if you don’t agree with trickle-down economics per se, so Republicans may be excused if they’re skeptical about Democrats’ belief in small government and their claim that government involvement is just what works to help the poor. You will sometimes even see Republicans claim that government interference itself is actually a cause, or even the cause, of wealth inequality. On the other hand, Democrats argue that, if closing the gap between rich and poor creates more consumers, it could have a positive effect on the economy that outweighs the negative effect. Now that we’ve reached this point in the debate, Democrats and Republicans could start brandishing numbers and studies backing their respective viewpoints, arguing over whether it’s better to limit government or help the poor, but they can also start debating ideas that synthesize both their priorities, rendering such debate over priorities unnecessary. (One is at the above link.)

We agree that America is the best country on Earth, the symbol for the ideals of democracy and freedom around the world, and a place where the lowliest of children, at least ideally, can grow up to become a titan of industry, though we may disagree on how realistic that is. We agree that we need to be attuned to the way the real world works and not become overly attached to our principles, and work to achieve what is best for America. We agree that, necessity aside, too much government can strip us of our freedoms and make us less happy and less prosperous, that absolute power corrupts absolutely, that even at low levels it leads to confusing and expensive bureaucracy, and that this has been proven in the past. We agree that, necessity aside, the gap between rich and poor and the existence of poverty is not something we like.

If we all admit that we are all in agreement on these four principles, it will not necessarily be easy to extend the common ground from there, especially when we are prone to disagree on basic facts, but if we focus on these principles we can use them as a framework to find solutions to our problems and disagreements that we can agree on. Some of these solutions may not be comfortable for one side or the other; they may represent a major concession. Then the question becomes to find out why one side or the other is uncomfortable, and either to explain why such things are not problems, or to find some other solution that takes those problems into account. Sometimes Republicans may have to accept a governmental solution because the cost for some group of people is too much; Democrats may have to accept a less equitable solution because the cost in government control is too much. And sometimes, we won’t be able to find a middle ground in this calculus because the difference in the proposed solutions comes down to the difference in priorities, and neither can be said to totally outweigh the other. Hopefully this last class will turn out to be smaller than it now seems.

Over the next few days, weeks, and months (I originally intended this past week but was stupid and procrastinated for two weeks, just as I’ve been procrastinating on this whole series all summer), I’ll be making several posts intended to illustrate how we can debate the issues by laying out our positions and trying to adjudicate between them. Rather than yelling and name-calling, I will model how we can have a civil debate by focusing on the issues themselves, recognizing our opponents’ concerns and reacting to them rather than dismissing them out of hand, and always keeping in mind our agreement on the four principles – and potentially more that will come out over the course of the debate. I can’t say that we will come to an absolute best solution for every problem, or that if we do it’ll be the right one, but I hope to bring each side to an understanding of their opposition and either a moderation of their perspective or at least a clarification of it through the perspective of the opposition. In short, rather than merely calling to “restore sanity” as Jon Stewart will do on Saturday, I’ll be trying to show how we can actually do it.

It won’t be easy, it won’t be pretty (these will still be emotionally charged debates), I can’t guarantee any sort of success, and I certainly can’t guarantee that I’ll singlehandedly heal the rift between left and right in this country, certainly not before the election, but someone needs to start the dialogue. And it needs to start by doing what I’ve tried to do: explain each side’s position in terms explicable to the other. Even if the dialogue is just me publishing the debate going on in my own head, an abstract liberal and conservative talking to each other is better than nothing. My hope is that real liberals and conservatives will take up where I leave off and continue it – and maybe then we can start to heal the rift.