Unintended Consequences
In today's Times, Scott Elliott writes about politics fatigue in Washington State, where partisans are still trying to decide who one November's gubernatorial election. People still feel strongly about the outcome, but they don't want to talk about it. That's because the big lesson of the presidential campaign was that "the two sides have trouble listening to each other."
For most of my adult life, political conversation was conducted within the framework of the New Deal. People unhappy with the New Deal were completely marginalized until the Reagan Administrations, and even then they were unable to transpose the discussion into a key that did not take the Deal for granted. Who knows if they would ever have found a way to do so if Bill Clinton's private life hadn't been presented as some kind of proof that liberals are morally corrupt. As it happened, the really terrible legacy of the Lewinsky Affair was that it desensitized the public to outrage. And outrage quite perfectly fit the mood of those who felt that they hadn't been heard. Exploiting both the excitement and the repellence of angry insult, they finally seized the floor. But they are still very sore winners.
And we liberals are sore losers as well. We still can't believe that the dimensions of the arena have been enlarged to include people whom we were accustomed to regarding as unfit to participate in political discussion. Religious fundamentalists, libertarians, tax-starvers - what these people have in common, in our view, is selfishness: they put their pocketbook or their personal salvation (or both) ahead of the common weal. They argue that, if you can't be sure that taking action will actually fix something, it's better not to take any action at all. The inevitability of unintended consequences serves as proof that activist government is incompetent, if not evil.
We don't hear this argument, any more than they hear ours about social welfare. We can't stand by and watch obvious injustices and inequities without trying to fix them, and we're not going to wait for perfect solutions. As I've said before, we and they don't even share a common idea of freedom. For conservatives, freedom is negative, a freedom from; for liberals, it is a freedom to. Liberal freedom makes it possible for very different people to live closely together, as New Yorkers do. Conservative freedom is a portcullis that, ideally, locks the cities and their problems up behind their moats and frees the rest of the country to do what it pleases - which, in most cases, seems to be the quiet enjoyment of traditional life.
If the country really were split between all-red and all-blue states, we might learn to get along by simply ignoring each other. But if there are a few all- or nearly-all-red states, there are certainly none that are all-blue. So ignoring each other is not an option. Clearing the air of outrage is the only way to revive our civil discourse, and that is going to be very hard, because there is so much genuine, and understandable, contempt on each side. (For my part, I am outraged every time I hear the phrase "Christian nation" spoken with approval. Outraged!) Denying our mutual disapproval isn't going to do any good. Moderating it will help. But there's no getting around the bad-tasting medicine: we're going to have to learn to listen to each other. I'm not sure that we've ever done this before in the United States.
There may be one unintended, beneficial, consequence of our listening to each other. We may be forced to give up our childish determination to be unremittingly cheerful and nice.
