Reading an interesting and wide-ranging article on political analyst David Shor (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/opinion/democrats-david-shor-education-polarization.html) I came across the following passage:

“[Shor] and those who agree with him argue that Democrats need to try to avoid talking about race and immigration. He often brandishes a table showing that among voters who supported universal health care but opposed amnesty for unauthorized immigrants, 60 percent voted for Obama in 2012 but 41 percent voted for Clinton in 2016. That difference, he noted, was more than enough to cost her the election.

“This can read as an affront to those who want to use politics to change Americans’ positions on those issues. “The job of a good message isn’t to say what’s popular but to make popular what needs to be said,” Shenker-Osorio told me.

“Shor’s rejoinder to this is that the best way to make progress on race and immigration policy is for Democrats to win elections. “

This is very interesting because it strikes at what I think has become (or what I have finally become aware already was) a very important issue: the divide between people who think the goverment should try to change Americans’ positions, and advocate for holdouts to join in working towrds (or at least understanding the value of) an ideal, vs people who think the government should represent Americans’ positions, without judging them as right or wrong.

I get it. Simply put, for example, some people don’t want government to try to jumpstart a shift to electric vehicles. They just want government to make sure nobody takes our stuff and missiles don’t rain down on our heads, and not much more than that. Ok, there’s obviously much more than that (and in practice those same people may suddenly want the government to do much more when it serves their own personal interests, and are less concerned about the principles of freedom when it’s someone else’s freedoms standing in the way of their personally desired outcomes rather than vice versa), but, I think I like that as an encapsulation of the right wing viewpoint.

For contrast, I think a similar overbroad description of the left would be, “We can band together and do more working together than we can on our own. Government is how we do that.” Honestly, I think that’s probably a fair attitude to have, but also, very easy to criticize as overlooking significant realistic difficulties with that approach… like, how do you draw the line? Where does it end? That kind of thinking is how we got to soft drink bans and similar “put the cart before the horse” solutions, not to mention love-to-hate-them efforts like California’s attempt to claim CA income tax from people who’ve moved out of CA up to 10 years prior. (Of course, that kind of thinking is how we would also get to proven working solutions like real healthcare reform and drug decriminaliztion. The reason I like the capsule descriptions is that once you depart from them you get into the weeds of far longer and more unwieldy conversations very, very quickly.)

In the broadest, most reductionist view, one perspective is more concerned with broader outcomes, with the real effects on people’s lives of delays in societal progress. The other perspective argues that in a free country it’s the job of private individuals and groups to advocate and educate to bring about willing changes in attitudes, not to have the desired results compelled by government.

From that governmentally conservative perspective it’s not the government’s job to shepherd a society towards, say, for example, greater ecological sustainability. Progress and freedom are not easy partners, because freedom means being allowed to be a stubborn and backwards jackass if you want to be. Even some people who are not themselves stubborn and backwards jackasses, and who lament that some people are stubborn and backwards jackasses, hold that point of view.

So you wind up with one side that wants freedom even if it means negative outcomes for people, and the other that wants positive outcomes for people even if it means taking away some freedom. That’s it, in a nutshell. Personally, my gut says a smarter person than I might someday come up with a clear-cut idea for a workable middle ground that enough people can agree on to resolve the conflict. Right now, though, it’s a contest between fairly intractable opposing views with no obvious place for an equally-principled and easily grasped compromise.

And it gets even more fractious because, really, neither being ok with bad things happening to people, nor being ok with taking away other peoples’ freedoms, is a very good look. At least, to big enough majorities, on one side or the other, that it’s a problem.

It also comes back to another idea I have, about the frictional cost of getting to the ideal situation from where we are in reality, which the left’s legislative solutions tend to ignore, much to the umbrage of the right. (At this point, I must acknowledge that the right’s more often preferred market-based solution to broad societal problems, “let’s just do nothing and let it work itself out, or not”, isn’t any better, just different.) This is an idea I have been writing about but haven’t got anything ready to post yet, although I will at some point. The basic gist is simple: If something is a good idea, there’s a big difference between choosing it at the outset, and trying to switch to it once we’re already materially invested in an opposing bad idea. Off the top of my head, if there are better power sources than coal, for example, it doesn’t mean it’s as equally good an idea to start using them now as it would have been if they’d been available when we first decided to use coal. We have jobs and infrastructure invested in coal and abandoning them will materially hurt living people.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t solve problems, even (or especially) if they’ve gotten out of hand already, but, we have to be cognizant that there may be frictional costs to solving them in reality, starting from where we’re at now, that aren’t present in the theoretical model. Changing horses in midstream is a different proposition from choosing the right horse before you cross. However, I recognize that this idea requires more explication; this is just a quick summary, not the full argument, and therefore is an introduction, not intended to be persuasive. That piece is currently roasting on the bonfire of things I need to get written, and hopefully, someday, will.

But, briefly, I think it might be easier to sell governmental solutions if they more clearly acknowledged and accounted for the practical difficulties in transitioning to what even might clearly have been an inarguably better option, to everybody, if it had been available from the start, before we ever went down the wrong road.

Tangentially, I should include this as a standard disclaimer on my political thoughts: I am pretty forgiving of even what I consider to be deeply mistaken opposing arguments. Most people nowadays are too damn busy. They have homes, cars, jobs, families. I have none of that. I have a lot more time to read, absorb, think, analyze. I really can’t blame most people nowadays, my friends on both the right and the left, for not always getting it, for sticking by their guns when their side has gone too far (which is usually.) It’s not their fault. They don’t have time. Sometimes, as a matter of practical concern, you have to just put your trust in the conclusions you’re hearing from the other people wearing your same team jersey, because you have other more immediate concerns occupying your attention. (Though I wonder, sometimes, if that isn’t, on a certain level, by design. It sure seems like however much we progress as a society, personally, people still always have to work and stuggle the same amount. You’d think people freeing themselves of that would be a goal; and it’s talked about, for sure; yet, over the decades, it never changes. But that’s a subject for a different post.)