Deprincipled

Last post, I argued that part of our modern political dysfunction was rooted in failure to find any consensus in how we in the U.S.A. get to wield political power. This is pretty obvious; what's (relatively) new is that this failure is almost as abject within the major parties as between them. Parties need people, both officeholders and voters, to be loyal to them, and while those loyalties are largely intact — for now — they seem to be in danger as various factions within each party become increasingly doubtful that their intraparty colleagues are still allies and not obstacles.

Why all this disarray? I think it's because a lot of us have gotten hooked on the idea that the goal is for our own individual worldview to beat all the other ones, which is no way to recruit allies who have their own worldviews they could be rooting for. For people to make political alliances, they have to agree on principles. Hard to do when the participants forget their principles every time they might get in the way of beating the other side.

These days, voters of each party don't really appear to have much trust in their party's apparatus, while the parties are having trouble getting their government officeholders to speak civilly to each other. And I suspect the officeholders don't have much respect for their voters, either, though they'd be crazy to say so out loud.

Parties still have platforms that their officeholders and voters supposedly help assemble, and they still give lip service to those platforms. But what do you make of it when one party says it believes government is corruptible, so power should rest with individuals who interact via free markets — but it turns out its legislators have whole lists of ways they'd like Big Government to mess with individuals, while its voters distrust the people on top of those "free markets" as much as their opponents do? And on the flip side, the party that supposedly believes that the market is corruptible and needs government intervention in order to protect society won't actually intervene in any significant way because it's hard to do right without serious risk of breaking the country, and the party apparently hasn't got the wherewithal to find enough of the right ways, so it'll tinker with the "society" end of the equation instead, even if it means to hell with individual rights. And these parties aren't ignoring their own rules just to fuck with us; they do it because their major goal, and the goal of their voters and officeholders, is really to score enough points. Screw your principles, man, we want a solid win!

How else to make sense of it when the U.S. Senate filibuster is sacred to the party in the minority and an unfair obstacle that the majority party needs to remove — so when party control of the house changes, so do the parties' positions? Or that "states' rights" are a thing worth fighting for only when your party doesn't have the votes to impose a policy at the federal level but does in its local-level strongholds? Is the president abusing his powers; are the courts overreaching? Only when they belong to the other party; if they're yours, you'll wave away the same kinds of actions you'd been screaming about before.

We don't even have "opponents" anymore; we just have political enemies, and we're gradually shortening that to simply "enemies." Politically charged people have always suspected bad things about the Other Side, but mostly things like "their flawed policies will make our country unsafe/poor/unjust/immoral/tacky"; the crazy stuff usually didn't get said out in public forums. Now that every asshole is potentially his or her own public forum (said the blogger!), we can feed our own righteous indignation through Internet echo chambers, viral memes and "fake news" served up to eager audiences via equally bogus social-media likes, and we seem to actually compete to level the most outrageous possible accusations of evil against the Others: If They win this vote, it will be the last true election America will ever see! They will strip away all our rights and gleefully impose on us a terrible ideology of the sort we've fought world wars and Cold Wars against! They will turn all our legal systems over to an oppressive theocracy (either radical Muslim Sharia or fundamentalist Christian Leviticanism; take your pick)! They will even round up our innocents and send them to death camps! Death camps, for Christ's sake. I cannot believe I've heard that bit of bullshit from both lefty and righty hysterics, but dammit, I have.

And that's maybe the worst betrayal of principles possible: For those who actually believe the bullshit, they've given up the principles of basic common sense in exchange for the piss-poor return of having someone they can enjoy fearing and hating; for those who know they or their fellow-travelers are talking bullshit but let it ride because it's a great rallying point for the faithful, they've abandoned all pretense to claims of honesty or morality.

Right now, if you're reading this you're probably a few heartbeats away from a stroke because it sounds like I'm "asserting a false moral equivalence" — that I'm saying you're as just bad as your enemies, while missing the whole point that you're right. But save your tantrum, because you're missing the point, too. First, you really ought to understand "they did it too" doesn't fly with actual grownups; this is one of those Things We Were Supposed to Learn in Kindergarten. Second, is an argument that boils down to "Hey, we suck less than the other guys!" honestly supposed to win anyone over? Do you think it's impressive? Last, who cares whether you're right if you're also ineffectual because you can't play well enough with others to get things done?

Maybe it would be a good idea if we all just, for one minute, shut up and took a deep breath?

Thing is, as much as we like to gripe about "them" — even when we're talking about our supposed allies — all of these people are us. We love to gripe about parties, blocs, corporations, bureaucracy and other abstractions, but all of these abstractions are just collections of people, and really, it's a rare person who doesn't belong to some grouping that other people complain about (or belong to a grouping that they themselves complain about, cognitive dissonance being in no short supply among human beings.) We invent principles not because they're feel-good "noble" but because they're statements that are as much about means as about ends, so that other people will not only know where we stand but where we're willing to go.

And that's where the conversation starts. "Shut up and lose already" is where it ends.