Politics Makes Us Immoderate... How to Stop

De-politicize your life for the good of your country

My fellow-blogger Chris Freiman had a great post today that dovetails really well with the life guide part of the book I’m working on right now. Go read his post, but his point, which he’s made extensively elsewhere, is that we give politicians and politics way too much mental space. He has an entire book on this topic, helpfully called Why it’s OK to Ignore Politics, so go read that too.

Why This Matters for Radical Moderation

While Chris is making a broader point about about the corrupting nature of politics, I’m going to zoom in and focus on its effects on radical moderation. The TL;DR version is that politics is bad for moderation and our peculiar form of politics in the U.S. is very bad for moderation. This happens for a few reasons (this list is not exhaustive… I’ll probably add more later):

1. Politics and partisan thinking turns us into members of a tribe, triggering all sorts of motivated reasoning that results in bad and irrational behavior (see Haidt’s excellent work on this). Tribalistic partisan reasoning makes us much less likely to see alternative paths (like third parties, but also lots of non-state actors) because we’re so focused on “winning,” even though the real way we all win is by reducing human suffering and increasing human flourishing. And spoiler alert: both sides have something to offer that effort.

2. Politics also gives us tunnel vision. Excessive focus on government and who holds government power convinces us that politics and political contests are the best way to engage in improving our moral and social landscapes, crowding out alternative options like mutual aid, innovation, and philanthropy/charity and so on. Politics, when adequately integrated into the broader social/moral/political landscape, can do good things (often on the local level). But the way we’ve turned politics and political contests into a giant and mind-bogglingly expensive sporting event makes us not only less likely to see the alternatives that don’t occupy a clean partisan landscape, but also much less likely to fund those alternatives.

3. And for everyone in the back, politics is a mind-boggling waste of resources, at least in the U.S. The expense of our elections is truly mind-blowing and it's not just in absolute dollar terms. By some measures, members of the House and Senate spend a whopping 50% or more of their time on the fundraising treadmill. But going back to the link above, the 2020 election was estimated to cost around $14 billion dollars. $14 billion dollars! How many people living in pits could that money have helped? How many people without health insurance? How many people without homes? How many people without decent mental health care? How many people in desperate need could have been assisted?

It’s become a battle cry on the Left that this is all the fault of greedy corporations trying to buy our elections, but let’s also be clear: corporations wouldn’t pay millions for campaign ads if we weren’t watching. Politics has become a massively expensive spectator sport and we gamble with our small contributions the same way we do at the race track.

Even more foundational than this, it’s at least partly the Left’s fault that political power is so valuable in the first place. As we give more and more power to the government to legislate and regulate behavior, who gets to make those decisions becomes an extremely valuable commodity. We can’t blame corporations for getting in on the action if they can. As David Schmidtz (who I’m reading for a reading group right now, so apologies if he keeps sneaking in here) points out: “When political power is worth billions, billionaires will compete for it.”

Making things even more complicated, the evidence on whether money actually buys elections is pretty hazy. There’s likely some effect, but it’s not a direct one and it’s certainly not the case that the candidate with the most funding always wins. It’s also true that maybe the vast majority of campaign spending is just wasted, having no effect on voters one way or the other at all. And, finally, many corporations donate to both parties about equally because what they really care about is access to political power, not necessarily influencing the election in one way or another.

But before this becomes a post about campaign finance reform, the overall point is that we spend a massively whackingly large amount of money on elections with very very little to show for it. That money could be much better spent helping people out of pits.

And it’s in large part because we’ve given government so much power over our lives that, by extension, the political races that decide who wields that power have become the corrupt Hunger Games spectacle that they currently are.

It should be clear already, but it’s not just partisanship and our hyper-polarized world that’s making us immoderate. It’s politics itself. The more power we give to politics, the more we spend our time, energy, and money contributing to the belief that politics is the way out and that whoever holds power will somehow solve the problems that ail us, the less we focus on the real issues, the real pits, the real ways in which we can help other people. Chances are good the most impact in real measurable terms will not come from politicians like Biden or Trump, whatever their campaign slogans. The real impacts will come from researchers and scientists and grassroots mutual-aid organizations and yes, even some corporations.

What To Do Instead of Politics

This week, instead of following the most recent Trump indictment or Biden’s latest gaffe, Google the people on the list Chris posted on his blog. I’d add to that list people like Elinor Ostrom, Dorothy Day, Father Greg Boyle, and others, though I know Chris’s intent was to list people whose innovations saved millions of human lives. But we can also celebrate the people who spend their days pulling other people out of pits on a smaller scale too. Whatever you do, give your brain a break from politics, read about some awesome people saving the world, and maybe even look around to see if there’s someone in a pit near you who you can lend a helping hand.

As always, let me know what you think!

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