Last updated on May 11, 2014
Until recently a common understanding of reality drove cross-party policy making. A Republican president, Richard Nixon, created the Environmental Protection Agency with bipartisan support. A Democrat, Bill Clinton, worked with Republicans in Congress to reform welfare, and came close to a deal to preserve the long-term sustainability of Social Security. Such comity is growing harder to find. Right and left do not just disagree on how to regulate pollution; most Republican voters do not accept that man-made global warming is happening. As for America’s future solvency, leading Democrats, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, question whether Social Security faces a crisis at all, suggesting that its benefits should in fact be expanded.
What is going on? Democrats have an explanation. The whole country is polarised, they say, but the right has moved further from the centre. What’s more–say Democrats–too many Republicans live in a bubble of para-facts and propaganda, fed to them by Fox News or sham studies paid for by conservative billionaires. That is a bit too glib. For one thing, the left has its own shibboleths of irrationality. Just ask about genetically modified crops, declared safe by the scientific establishment, but reviled as Frankenfoods by the Subarus-and-sandals set.
A recent Lexington column in The Economist, which touches on so many of the things I’d love to blog about, but which would probably take me five or six posts to cover much less elegantly and succinctly than The Economist does. Among other things:
- Policy making is a process that is fashioned by compromise. Each side begins with what they want, but in most cases, we can only get a mix of what we want and of what the other guy wants. What many in this country seem to have forgotten over the last few decades is that ideological purity is a luxury which only totalitarian regimes can afford.
- The recognition that both sides are full of it. The right is anti-science, you want to type on your MacBook Air from the comfort of your favorite hipster hangout on Selby Avenue? Sure. But the left is just as bad; see the part I emphasized above.
- Is there even such a thing as a rational opinion anymore? On most questions outside religious matters, most of the information is out there for us to acquire in order to form a rational opinion. There is a whole Internet full of scientific results that can serve as fuel for our thoughts, but confirmation bias is strong, and at the end of the day, it looks as though most people are merely driven by their values and beliefs.
- Finally, in the interest of full disclosure, I am not a member of the Subarus-and-sandals set, but I am a card-carrying member of the Subaru set…