Why Politics Matter (Mostly from the Left)

Thanks to Phil Eil for including me among the nine folks opining on “why politics matters” for his latest article.  Just about everybody else included is from Left, with a couple that are either center Left or just conspicuously enigmatic.  Given space, Phil cut out most of the explanation of my conclusion.  Here’s the full text that I sent him:

“Politics” has become a dirty word because it is associated with scheming, lying, cheating, and (maybe worst of all) forcing policies to adjust to the completely irrelevant desires and feelings of powerful people. Those aspects of politics, however, don’t make a political system any less necessary to a society.

The problem is that the political system is the avenue that a society takes to balance its full range of interests. The economic system is mainly concerned with the flow of money and the production of things. The culture is mainly concerned with the identity of the society and the values that define, for it, what is good and bad, beautiful and ugly. A variety of other systems can be included, depending how many lines we want to draw: religious, academic, educational, scientific, and others.

Whatever place a group of people picks to make its decisions will attract those willing to game the system for advantage. The challenges compound when too many questions are passed through the political system (when it becomes an avenue for one system to trample on another), mostly because self-interest comes to be one of the stronger motivations.

But the desires and feelings of different factions are not irrelevant. The marketplace and the academy should be tempered by the morality of the people. At the same time, our charitable intentions can’t be allowed to undermine the economic health and technological advancement that gives us space to have such intentions in the first place.

In our polarized society, people have come to shy away from politics, I think, because they think it’s a winner-take-all battle between interests, and they can plainly see that it’s usually true that people on all sides have legitimate points. The last thing that government in Rhode Island and the United States needs less input from people who aren’t interested in taking up the causes of any given faction. Rather, we need more people to bring their own perspective on how to balance the endless cascade of claims made on the political system.

What’s most interesting in Phil’s collection of blurbs is how those on the Left see politics in precisely in the terms that I warn about in my own blurb. The progressive radio journalist writes in terms of economic us versus them.  The “writer, activist, teacher” writes in terms of racial us versus them. The union organizer writes in terms of a broader array of uses versus thems. The drug legalization activist writes in terms of us versus them, but with the further assertion that our political system is the method by which we do (and should) battle “for our society’s heart and soul.”

Frankly, a moment’s thought reveals that structural principle to be absolutely nuts.  The political system should be where we balance our society’s head with its heart with its soul with its stomach.  The vision of politics that all of the above people describe is one founded on isolated groups that — by assumption — have their own independent economic, cultural, spiritual, and academic interests as a group based on some aspect of their identities.  These identity groups then fight for leverage, even dominance, against other identity groups. I find that to be dehumanizing, denying the complexity of each of us as human beings.

Politics should not be the way in which one faction tells another what is right and what is wrong.  That’s true as a matter of political philosophy, and it’s true as a matter of practical strategy.  If we’re a bunch of identity groups striving for leverage, there’s an industry of people willing to promise victory if only we give them power.

It’s fascinating how progressives, liberals, or whatever they want to call themselves wind up acting in the name of the people in a way that ensures that they’ll end up under the foot of the powerful.  Some of them probably just haven’t thought things through well enough.  Others, we can be sure, know exactly what they’re doing.

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