Nasty Politics

FWIW:

Many people are turned off by the personal nature of the attacks going back and forth in the current campaign and wish for a greater emphasis on the discussion of policy differences. That's a pious wish, but I think there are good reasons why political campaigns take the form they do. I also think that policy discussions are not quite what they appear to be.

Politics, like almost everything that human beings engage in, is about 80% emotion. That's probably an under-estimate. You will have noticed that policy discussions almost never, ever change anyone's mind. Well, of course they don't, because such discussions are nothing but rather thin camouflage for a clash of competing emotional commitments. The arguments trotted out are merely rationalizations for those commitments; defeat one argument, and the opponent simply comes up with a different one.

Now, if emotional commitments are highly resistant to evidence and logic -- and I think that's demonstrably the case -- then how are such commitments ever changed, or created in the first place? The answer, of course, is by direct emotional appeals. During the Viet Nam War, that single picture of naked, napalm-burned kids running screaming toward the camera was worth a metric ton of policy papers. What do you imagine the broadcast of an explicit video of a partial birth abortion would do to that "policy debate"? The point is this: political discourse is what it is for good reason. If genuine policy discussion was the more effective way to change opinions, then political discourse would have evolved in that direction a long time ago.

Most arguments against democracy build upon these facts, and on paper those arguments can be very seductive. It really is somewhat of a mystery how the whole mess can work at all. It shouldn't, but it does. Maybe it's mostly a matter of mutually canceling stupidities. That doesn't have a very admirable sound, but it's not a bad arrangement if you think about it. The aggregate effect is to keep change mostly incremental and policies within reasonable distance of the middle. The alternatives to that have proven to be uniformly hideous.

So, let the brickbats fly, I say, and let's don't pretend to a phony ideal that never obtained, never will, and for all we know, never should. Fortunately, for reasons not fully understood, it all comes out in the wash, and we end up doing OK. Policy discussions are fine, of course, and we should have lots of those for people who enjoy them. They can go home feeling morally elevated and intellectually responsible. But let's not be naive about what's going on there: it's the same emotional Cheez Whiz parading as camembert.

Byron