House of Eratosthenes

Lately I have been doing a lot of thinking about things that had previously made no urgent call on me for additional thought, because I have an eight-year-old son who likes to ask questions. Maybe that’s a good thing. Blundering into intellectual territory, in my patriarchally babbling way, that demands some definition for “red states” and “blue states,” I find myself wondering what things must be like for him. When I was his age there was nothing going on in politics that intruded into an eight-year-old’s domain — with the possible exception of this thing about uppity women and that “Lib” stuff. But regardless of your age, you just can’t get away from that issue about colors of states. It’s everywhere.

I’m terribly concerned about what is happening here. Long ago, before I was ever really interested in politics, I learned that the “spectrum” of liberals and conservatives was a myth. If it wasn’t mythical, then at least it could be said the single dimension fell woefully short of describing why people voted the way they did. And even now, if you exclude moderates from your analysis, attending only to True Believers on the right and on the left, it remains true. What *is* a “Conservative”? Several people willingly call themselves this, and among them, the faction is badly splintered. Some of them harbor no reservations about George W. Bush, or anything he does. At least, none that can’t be tolerated for the sake of a larger ideal. Others within this camp, have some real misgivings about him. These stalwarts insist that our President spends too much money; he lets too many illegals into the country; he does far too much compromising with the Democrats in Congress. And furthermore, anyone who would tolerate such things can’t call himself a “Real Conservative.”

That’s a hot-button issue. Another one is the Harriet Miers nomination to the Supreme Court. At least those two disagreements are supported, on both sides, by hard facts. Then there is the matter of the upcoming — perhaps? — indictments of Scooter Libby and Karl Rove. As of this writing, if you’ve made up your mind on whether Libby, Rove, and other indictees are deserving & worthy of continued support, you’ve made up your mind ahead of the facts. But that doesn’t stop conservatives from disagreeing about it. That’s three issues. There are more, that threaten to splinter and fray this end of the “spectrum”. That isn’t what spectrums do, so this is one reason why I find the single dimension inadequate for our times.

The same thing is happening on the liberal end. It has become a sure-fire tactic, for the red-stater cornered by an unsolicited debate about Iraq at some social gathering, to narrow his attacker’s footprint by coaxing the opposition into describing the anti-war position in more narrow, specific terms. He can say, Let us dispense with “Bush Lied, People Died” for just a second so I can get a good understanding of your position. Are you saying, Mister Liberal, that Saddam Hussein was a beneficial influence on Iraq, or that he was a source of great harm but this problem was entirely out of our bailiwick and we should have left well enough alone? Was it an acceptable exercise to invade Afghanistan and not Iraq, or were both operations morally reprehensible? Whether the “Liberal” chooses A or B, he suffers strange bedfellows who would answer the opposite, en masse. Suddenly, the pro-war defendant is arguing with an antagonist who represents not 55 or 60 percent of the electorate’s wishes, but something more like 12. But that’s something more important than a shrewd cocktail-party tactic; it’s a symptom of liberal dry rot which most liberals, if they can’t cure it, would like to keep under wraps.

This union under bumper-sticker-slogans, thinly masking a complicated division beneath the surface, is the source of the crushing defeat suffered by The Left last fall. Before a list of complaints about the status quo can be energized into a New And Imroved Plan B, several of the complaining factions lending their voices to the complaints must be alienated. They would have to be told they have joined a critical majority in complaining, but are part of an expandable minority in forming an alternate vision. Having formed both the complaint and the vision with their most turgid emotions, liberals have left themselves unable to reconcile with that bittersweet message. Even for the sake of eventual victory.

There is another problem with this one-dimensional, blue-state red-state canard — one that stems from the complex issues involved with time. Today the question of state color is defined along short-term situations. Blue-state people think George Bush is an idiot. Fine and good, but as far as being an issue, the man carries a built-in expiration date. Red-state people have their temporal problems too; they think we should stay in Iraq until the job is done. That’s wonderful, but someday the job will be done. Throughout that day, and beyond, most people who identify with one side or the other are going to want to stick with that side. They’re supposed to have deep-rooted, philosophical reasons for being there, and let’s face it: “I think George Bush is too stupid to eat a pretzel” is not a deep-rooted, philosophical belief.

Nontheless the beliefs are there. If you understand a complete stranger is opposed to abortion, for example, you have better-than-even odds that this person is also opposed to gun control, even though on the surface collecting guns doesn’t appear to have much to do with a woman carrying a pregnancy to term. Evidence of peer pressure? Not at all. When it comes to gut-wrenching policy decisions like these, most people seem to write their decisions in the indelible ink that comes from the well of their personal convictions. Whether that inkwell resides in their hearts or their brains is another question altogether, but based on what I see, even the most docile and compliant among us are unwilling to switch sides to please whoever is present. The “Chameleon” who changes his colors based on the company he keeps, seems to be on the brink of extinction.

I think that’s a good thing.

What are the philosophical questions people ask before they decide whether to become a blue-stater or a red-stater? That is the list that must be made before one can achieve true understanding about what is happening here. And that is no simple task by any means. If you’re going to chart this out into some kind of “pie” diagram — I’ve taken my own crack at this, below (click the thumbnail to view) — you can only entertain two or three questions, but it would appear there are a few more than that. Maybe as many as eight to ten, and that’s after you’ve weeded out the identity-politics questions like “Can a black guy be a racist?” and “Are men scum?”. I’ve identified five, and only five, out of what remains:

1. Sense Of Purpose: Now that we’re here, do we have some kind of moral obligation to do something meaningful, or is it a waste of time & energy to even try?

2. Faith in Authority: In a democratic society, once the commoners have invested governmental authority in the elites, which of these halves labors under the obligation of earning the trust of the other? Those who govern, or those who are governed?

3. Abundance of Life: Does the sanctity of life, in *all* its forms, preclude the worthiness of the individual goals we have formed for ourselves as thinking people?

4. Quality of Life: Is the quality and comfort of our day-to-day existence a critical goal of that existence that precludes all, or most, other goals? (Mutually exclusive from #3).

5. This is more important than the other four. I can’t capture it on the accompanying diagram, so I’ll cover it in another post later.

These are elementary questions, from which more complex positions can possibly be charted with greater precision than the old “red/blue” spectrum would allow. For example, if your answer to Question #1 points to a nihilistic mindset rather than a purposeful one, and you think what little point there is to our existence is more toward making life a more secure venture rather than a higher-quality one, you might be inclined to adopt all kinds of furry animals, and oppose the death penalty. Beasts, murderers and pedophiles, after all, have as much right to eat food and breathe oxygen as the rest of us. And your odds of being a “Blue-Stater” would probably run about 60/40. Conversely, a pure-bred capitalist would be overwhelmingly likely to be a Red-Stater, and answer “No” or “Not Applicable” to Questions #3 and #4. If you think we are driven by a great purpose, and that purpose has to do with improving the quality of our lives and the lives of others, your answer to Question #2 can be almost definitely ascertained: You are suspicious of authority, and believe our leaders should earn the trust of the electorate, rather than the other way around.

They are also very heady questions. Polite company will avoid them, and for good reason: People don’t want to “hang” with other people who would answer these questions in different ways. Even those who endlessly extoll the virtues of “diversity” — when the rubber meets the road, those people are talking about “diversity among those people who would answer Morgan’s four questions exactly the way I would, everyone else can just go pound sand.”

That’s the way people are, I’m afraid. It is our nature. We’re a tribal species.

And that is why we are so contentious today. Our political lines have been drawn based on how we look at life, and what the ultimate purpose of that life really is. It is easy to decide that stuff based on feeling, and difficult to base it on thought. The feelings are hazardous, because they’re not up for debate.

I hate tomatoes. Many a woman has tried to argue with me to make me like them, starting with Mom. They’ve all failed. You can’t argue with a feeling. And that’s the arguing we do today. It has to do with conclusions that are deeply personal, and aren’t going to be changed. Yet our public policy demands acceptance, or refutation, of these personal convictions so they *must* be debated. Perhaps we are doomed to keep yelling at each other, and calling each other big doo-doo-heads, until some of the things in our governmental structure are tucked back into our portfolios of personal preference, where they belong.

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Political PieSaturday, October 22nd, 2005

Political Pie
Saturday, October 22nd, 2005