#polarizationpoliticsconservatismliberalismroleofgovernment

[meditationsfromthethirdrail]

Polarization

There is a widespread perception that the U.S. has become as polarized, politically, as it has ever been.  A careful consideration of America history suggests that’s not actually true, but I understand the sentiment and I often feel it myself.  Being retired provides me with an inordinate amount of time to ponder this problem and to try to make sense of it.  It’s become something of an obsession.

I like to mix it up a bit in social media - primarily Facebook - with persons opining on various social ills and political agendas and especially those blindly sharing fact-challenged propaganda, both from the left and right.  I’ve stayed away from Twitter, which by design strictly prohibits posts from being long enough to contain meaningful reasoning.  I like to save Instagram for pretty photos of flowers and birds and vacations.  But Facebook seems a reasonable forum with enough content flexibility to present ideas with some depth to them.  Social problems are inherently complex and nuanced, as evidenced by the fact that most of those problems have persisted, in one form or another, throughout human history.  Individually and collectively we often find ourselves in situations where there is no perfect, right answer or solution - certainly not one that can be summarized in a tweet.

Our response to dealing with COVID-19 is a good example.  There are enormous difficulties, economic and otherwise, with isolating ourselves from one another, and another set of bad outcomes resulting from not doing that.  The tendency, it seems, judging by most of the dialogue we see in social media (and most other media) posts and comments, is for people to take ideological positions, cherry-pick supporting facts (or worse, supporting falsehoods), and promote extreme positions.  By “extreme” I mean positions that ignore the truths that are quite often inherent in opposing positions.  Again using the debate over proper responses to the COVID-19 pandemic as an example, most people who originate or share political posts on Facebook seem either to be solidly of the opinion that isolation, shut-downs, masks, etc. are good policy, or they’re of the view that all those measures are counterproductive or even unAmerican.

Most people instinctively understand that neither of those views is exclusively correct, but people who are in the middle tend not to weigh in as often, perhaps because their confusion about the solution makes them feel that they don’t have anything meaningful to say.  I think those voices should be heard much more often than they are.  I feel like I have one of those voices, and that’s why I feel a responsibility to try to make myself heard.

Following is my approach to analyzing sociopolitical issues - that is, issues that can be addressed, at least in part, through government action or some other form of collective action by citizens working towards a common goal.  First, I try to understand whether and how the issue can or should be addressed by the government.  That question is itself a polarizing one.  Conservative ideology contains mistrust of government, especially Federal government, whereas liberal ideology contains high expectations that the government should intervene to address most social ills.  Neither of those views is inherently correct.  One of the the biggest challenges politicians face, when they’re focused on “doing the right thing” and not just getting elected, is deciding what the best role of government ought to be in tackling specific issues.  It should be obvious that the government is not the right institution to deal with some issues (the establishment of religion, for example) but it is the right institution to deal with some other issues (the defense of the nation against an outside military force, for example).

When I attempt to discern the proper role of the government, I avoid starting with the ideological answer.  Instead I try to look at it pragmatically.  Why is (or is not) the government equipped to deal with the particular issue in question?  Can government be effective?  Can government be efficient?  How will government fund its involvement?  What other institutions can or should be involved?  What’s the ultimate cost to society, economically and otherwise, to having the government more or less involved?  The calculus involved to answer these questions is exceedingly complex; nevertheless that’s what politicians ought to spend their time debating, and their debate should always begin with a careful gathering and consideration of relevant facts, dismissing ideology in favor of rationality and consultation with experts to the fullest extent possible.  

One time when I still had an active professional career, I was in Utah to give a presentation to the board of directors of a financial institution.  One of the directors was a former U.S. senator from the state, and I happened to be seated next to him when the board convened for lunch.  When he learned I resided in Pennsylvania, he asked me what I thought about the reelection chances for a well-known senator from my state who had recently switched his party affiliation.  That led to a discussion about certain economic policies, during which the senator delivered the low-tax mantra familiar to anyone who has ever listened to a Republican politician for more than a few minutes.  My response to him was that I had never understood why the White House, Congress and the Senate didn’t decide about the appropriate level of income taxes by first deciding a) how much does it cost the government to do the things that everyone agrees it needs to do, and b) what else is the government better equipped to do than is any other institution or group of individuals or companies, and how much does that cost?  The answers to those questions, I opined, would inform the government about how much revenue it needs to raise.  Cart before horse, as it were.  I thought the senator would have a ready answer but he seemed not to have ever thought about it that way.  Probably, I surmised, because he was more of an ideologue than a pragmatist.  Reducing taxes is Republican dogma if anything is.

Let’s return to the issue of the proper size and scope of government, which is a major bone of contention between conservatives and liberals.  I can think of numerous Republican friends whose belief that big government is wasteful, inefficient and disrespectful of individual liberty is perhaps the main driving force (among the forces that involve reason and not just culture, tradition and emotion) behind their party affiliation.  A strong preference for low taxes is a closely correlated issue.  I think it’s safe to say that almost everyone distrusts the government about some things if not many things.  Liberals also believe that big government is a problem, just in different ways - for example, too much spending on the military.  That’s a whole other issue in its own right and I don’t want to veer into a tangent here, but the point is that everyone wants limited government, and our Constitution is clearly designed to handcuff government overreach.  Where should the lines be drawn, to the extent they aren’t clearly spelled out in the Constitution, as potentially amended?

First I want to say to my liberal friends, it is true that the government is often wasteful and inefficient, and not just in the area of military spending.  Who hasn’t complained about long lines or call waiting times at government agencies?  Who hasn’t been affected by some kind of government error or bureaucratic hassle?  Who hasn’t heard tales of certain government employees and contractors being underworked and (seemingly) overpaid?  When my father died and my mother required constant care because she was disabled by Alzheimer’s disease, I spent many, many hours dealing with the Veterans Administration to obtain certain benefits for her, so I know first-hand what a nightmare that can be.  Because we experience these things, it’s easy for us to conclude that government is bad, or at best a necessary evil.  

But I ask my conservative friends who are particularly inclined to seize on the flaws of government as a reason to dislike government generally, are the alternatives to government necessarily better?  Many conservatives and libertarians contend that government ought to be run like a business.  Indeed, I used to be a big proponent of that theory.  Certainly if government were run like a business, it would be more likely to cut dead weight and strive for cost-effective delivery of services, because that’s how it would survive, fiscally.  At some point in mid-life, I heard someone whom I respected say flatly that the role of government is not that of a business.  I thought about that and realized my friend was correct.

A business operates not just to provide goods and services to its customers, but foremost to earn money for its owners and managers.  That’s the basis of capitalist ideology (more about that in a later blog).  The government operates (or should operate) in the interests of its citizens - all of them, or as many as possible.  There is no profit motive.  If social security, for example, were run as a business, the inevitable result would be that a relatively small group of people would take a sizeable chunk of our FICA taxes for themselves, and everyone else would either receive lower payments or they would pay higher taxes for the same benefits.  That’s basically what insurance companies that sell annuities do - they take their cut first.  I’m not being critical of insurance companies - annuities have a proper role in the personal finances of many people.  But annuities are not affordable for many.  The fact that our health care system is operated for profit to a much greater degree than are the health care systems of substantially all other developed nations is a primary reason why U.S. per capita health care costs are so much higher than those of substantially all other developed nations - about double the average, in fact.  Again, health care is another polarizing issue, and properly the subject of a separate discussion.

Briefly, another example:  let’s say a private enterprise, such as a mining company, turns an area of land into a toxic waste dump affecting water and air quality in the area.  One necessary role of government, I would argue, is to prevent that from happening, but it  does happen, primarily because of corruption, even if the corruption isn’t always obvious.  There is usually no profit motive for anyone to clean up the toxic land and quite often the offending enterprise has conveniently gone out of business.  So either the government steps in to repair the damage or we live with the negative consequences.

My point here is that although government has certain flaws, it’s the only prominent, powerful institution that’s designed to provide for the welfare of the people as a whole rather than just those who will profit from running it.  Corruption (again, a separate subject for another discussion) is the rot inside government that facilitates the generation of profit for a few at the expense of everyone else, and that’s why it’s extremely important that corruption be rooted out at every possible turn.  In a democracy, the act of voting for candidates who demonstrate disdain rather than tolerance for corruption is a critical function of voters.   Beyond that, as I said before, we should task our politicians to debate the circumstances and conditions under which government is the best source to provide services to citizens that private enterprise will not or can not.  Based on the consensus our elected officials reach, we should be prepared to pay taxes to fund what has been deemed necessary or healthy for the citizenry as a whole.

I believe in having as small and unobtrusive of a government as we can, so I guess that makes me a conservative.  I also believe in having a government that provides necessary and appropriate services for the benefit of all citizens, to the extent possible, which I suppose makes me a liberal.  The fact is that these labels just muddy the water and cause us to gravitate to extremes.  We need to focus on uncovering the best ways to get things done for the benefit of all the people while providing ample incentive and reward to those who make the greatest sacrifices and contributions to getting them done.  Those goals are not mutually exclusive - not at all.  Indeed, balancing those goals, and the roles of government, private enterprise and charitable organizations in achieving those goals, is the ultimate challenge for those who make the laws of the land.