Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I was one of the more intelligent kids in my high school days. I wasn't a fantastic student, but I was good enough, and I ended up attending Rutgers (a better-than-average state school) as an undergraduate student. For the first three years of college, I worked a work-study job as a front desk attendant at the college gym. Starting in junior year, a weird thing started to happen: I started to see people I went to high school with, specifically people whose academic abilities in high school I thought should have prohibited them from ever attending any four-year university (let alone a decent one like Rutgers) check in at the gym's front desk as students.
I could have had any number of reactions to this, but the reaction I chose was fairly pragmatic; I realized that (a) these high school classmates, whom I had rashly written off as idiots while in high school, were late bloomers, and likely had a completely valid type of intelligence that I couldn't myself understand because it wasn't my type of intelligence; and (b) more generally speaking, different people can take radically different paths toward the same ideal, or the same solution, and each path can be equally valid.
Taking this analogy one step further, I've come to the conclusion that my worldview (and yours, by the way) is fundamentally skewed toward the biases that have been ingrained in me (and you) since the age of about two. This doesn't make me stupid; however, if I were to completely ignore this fact, and go about my adult business assuming that - for whatever reason - my worldview is "more correct" than yours, or "more correct" than some huge group of individuals who share a conceptual grouping (e.g., people of a particular race or people of a particular political persuasion)... well, I think that would make me stupid.
I think that most rational adults get this fact, and 95% of the time they implement it wisely. People who have obtained even modest success in academia/business have undoubtedly encountered many situations where they have been struck by their own narrow-mindedness. With time, they learn to adapt their actions, almost as if they are "scaffolding" against their own limitations.
But not when it comes to politics. No, when it comes to politics - just like when it comes to operating a motor vehicle - everyone acts like a goddamned expert. Even worse, perhaps due to the daunting scope of the problems that politics are supposed to solve, everyone seems to think that the solutions to these problems are obvious. (As examples, "we just need to cut taxes across the board," or "we need to spend more on governmental services".) Further, people seem to generally think that politicians of one political party have the "correct" solution, while the plurality of individuals who affiliate with the other party are completely "incorrect" (to be polite).
(If you disagree with the above statement, then you disagree with the basic premise of my argument so there's really no point in reading any further.)
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(DISCLAIMER #2, THE DISCLAIMER WHERE I DO A VERY POOR JOB OF EXPLAINING MY OWN POLITICAL BELIEFS: I am a registered Democrat, and when I vote, about 80% of the time I vote for Democrats. (The other 20% of the time, I vote Republican.) I find that this is the case mainly because I align myself with Democrats on social issues that are "must-haves" for me, and also as an athiest, I shudder at the forced values of the modern Republican party. However, compared with the rest of my immediate family (who happens to skew very much to the left), I have some political views that can be described as conservative. For instance, I don't believe in many gun control laws - I believe that people should be allowed to arm themselves to the teeth, if they feel like it, to the extent that they abide by the law. Also, when President Obama compromised with Congress yesterday to pass a bill that included a payroll tax cut, I was so excited that I woke up my fiancee from a nap to tell her that we were likely, as a household, to gain an extra $3,XXX in take home income in 2011. So I like lower taxes, too.)
To provide a (really terrible) illustration, below is a figure from a completely unscientific "Politics Test" from an online dating site (it's what popped up first when I Google searched "politics test"; leave me alone) called OKcupid.com. I don't trust it at all, especially since one of the attributes I was asked to rate my agreement with was: "It should be legal for two consenting adults to challenge each other to a duel and fight a Death Match." - my answer on a 4-point scale from "Completely Disagree" to "Completely Agree" was "Agree," by the way - but nonetheless, here it is. I am a centrist. Make of this what you will.
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| Figure 1: I am socially liberal and economically moderate. |
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So, getting back to me exposing a rather striking flaw in how most otherwise intelligent adults view the world.
I don't know about you, but I don't vote for a candidate (especially for President) because I want them to follow an agenda that I agree with. This is not to say that I don't care about their agenda - I do. I vote for them because, after making a calculated judgment regarding not only the agenda they represent but also their intellect, psychological disposition, and overall readiness to assume office, my opinion is that they are the most competent choice to move the country forward in a reasonable direction.
This is why, when I hear the President getting so much crap from people on the left regarding selling out his ideals/his "vision"/his progressive agenda, it only takes me about 0.6 seconds to call bullshit. Last month, Americans voted overwhelmingly in a way that indicates strongly that a progressive-left agenda is not currently viable for this country. The truth is in the data, and the data - collected in aggregate, with 100 million-plus data points - does not typically lie.
Does this mean that the President needs to become a Republican? Of course not, and strategically speaking, it makes a great deal of sense for him to point out the reasons why Republican leadership in Congress is presenting "suboptimal solutions" wherever possible over the next two years - politics is essentially a game of marketing, and the President will get re-elected in 2012 if he markets himself as being better than Republicans. (By the by, I hope he pulls it off: I like the President, I want to see him get re-elected because I think he's a smart dude.)
However, it has become clear to me over the past two years of paying really careful attention that a divided government is itself an optimal solution, in the sense that it allows both parties to carry real weight in passing forth legislation. I further believe that disagreeing with the previous statement is essentially saying the following: [DEMOCRATS/REPUBLICANS] are more correct than [OTHER PARTY], due to some developmental/dispositional/philosophical attribute(s) that no one has ever been able to determine but I know it exists because I don't think deeply about serious issues and I eat my own poop. And this, well, I'm sorry, but this makes you an idiot.
Why can't it be that you agree with one political party more than another party, for reasons that you are able to explain rationally, but still have respect for the other party? Why all the name-calling and generalization? (More fundamentally, why do we only have two political parties in this country? Err... that's a topic for a completely different blog post.)
As someone interested in how people behave in groups, I am fascinated by these questions, as I think they provide some really useful insight into how our minds work. I don't know any of the solutions - I recommend John W. Dean's 2007 book Conservatives Without Conscience, specifically the chapter(s) regarding the study of authoritarian behavior as it relates to modern conservatism, as a useful point of reference for those who are interested - but I imagine insights can be constructed.
For now, I think it would really help America if liberals adopted a wait-and-see attitude and allowed the President to shift naturally toward the middle, because - if you believe, as I do, that everyone is at least "a little correct" - the best way forward is probably somewhere in the middle. And conservatives, since you're pretty happy right now, if you could go ahead and explain these whole Jesus and family values obsessions to me, I'd really appreciate it, because I don't really get either of these things. Thanks.
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