The Radical Moderate's Guide to Politics (Part I of Infinity)
While this is not primarily a political blog, let's be real. Politics is, in part, what divides us these days. Partisanship and polarization have been increasing over the last few decades for a variety of complicated reasons. We are more and more segregated and siloed by income, profession, and yes - political affiliation - than ever before. Even more than that, over a few decades as political observers, we Radical Moderates have arrived at the conclusion that we're getting a lot of really really important political things very very wrong. And getting political things wrong matters -- quite a lot -- because politics affects the ways human beings live in almost every facet of their lives.
We'll be doing a series of posts on how to be a Radical Moderate about politics, including some topical posts on current events when appropriate, but for now we want to lay out some principles that we think apply across the board. And the good news is that the things that go wrong in politics are often the things that go wrong in other areas of human life too, so we can apply what we learn in one area to others.
Remember that important post What is Radical Moderation? (If you don't, go read it!) That's where we laid out our starting principles: humility, a respect for complexity, an appreciation of real diversity, a commitment to community and civility, an awareness of tradeoffs, and a deep respect for individual human beings.
On some level it's simple enough to apply all those things to politics and political disagreements, but on another level it's much more complicated. But let's start, knowing we'll end up clarifying, expanding, and maybe even changing some of these as we get going.
Radically Moderate Principles for Politics
Humility is perhaps the most important concept here, in part because it is a necessary consequence of all the others we'll discuss. At an even more basic level, humility is crucial because humans are neither omniscient or omnipotent. We have limited capacities to know things, particularly things about how humans will interact with each other and with various incentives and disincentives in the complex ecosystem that is a city, state, or nation. And really, that's what laws and policies try to do: incentivize some behavior and disincentivize others. The problem is that incentives are tricky, and we may accidentally create incentives we don't want. Taxes too high? People will move wealth offshore. Drug laws too harsh? People will create a thriving black market. Even more than incentives, it's very hard to know all the details about what people actually need and how they will use the resources at their disposal.
Humility is so important precisely because the political lives of humans are extremely complex, which is our next Radically Moderate principle. Human life, especially now, is made up of a range of ways of living that carry with them diverse ways of looking at and understanding the world. Essentially what we have is a complex and interconnected web of human beings who live very different lives but who all need to be able to live together and cooperate with each other. Like a spider web, it's really hard to know whether adjusting one end of the web will harm people living on the other end.
We see this all the time in public policy. A seemingly simple policy like health care actually affects thousands of different professions and institutions. In response, a bureaucracy grows up to deal with the complexity and lobbying groups spring up to make sure the needs of their particular groups are met, and you end up with a complex and expensive system that doesn't do what it could do. Even more complicating is that the needs of people are almost infinitely diverse. Some people need high quality primary care, others need home health aids or health coaches, while others need intensive hospital care. It's very hard or impossible to know ahead of time who needs which kind of care and at what rates, but we need that information to make decisions about allocating resources. Making things worse, each policy action causes a reaction among individuals and groups responding to the policy, which in turn requires some kind of policy shift, and the cycle continues.
This diversity and complexity can lead us to polarization in politics, because when we're carving up a finite set of resources, we can start looking at other people's needs and wants as antagonistic to our own. Suddenly that person who needs one kind of resource is a competitor to my own needs for a different resource. We view each other through a lens of competition rather than remembering that we're members of a complex community.
The increasingly antagonistic way political decisions are framed encourages us to look at other members of our community as members of distinct out-groups, rather than as fellow citizens. It becomes all too easy to look at someone with different values as an enemy and to dismiss their values as the result of stupidity or greed (more on this later). Even more concerning: once in these groups, our views polarize even further. In a complex and diverse community the need for civility and community is greater than ever before, and yet it is precisely when it fails the most visibly.
Complicating all of this is the reality that resources are finite and that every political decision we make to fund one area involves defunding another. The reality of tradeoffs might be the most important principle of a Radically Moderate politics. We can't get everything we want. Politics deals with finite resources. We have limited knowledge, limited time, limited money, and limited energy. Because of this basic limitation, time/energy/money in one area will generally require moving time/energy/money from another. Sure, we can develop more efficient systems and that helps. But particularly now, with modern policy focusing so much on human-intensive services, we're really butting up against a basic limitation of scarcity. We just can't give everyone everything they want. Or a better way to put that might be that we can't just give everyone everything they want with the government. Every government program we put in place takes money/time/energy from somewhere else. So if you want a really active criminal justice system that locks a lot of people up, you'll have to pay for that by taking money away from something else. This is especially true for those human-intensive areas like health care, education, and criminal justice.
Making all this more complicated is a polarized and fractured media environment where misinformation is common, competing facts appear out of nowhere, and where stories go viral in record time. Being an informed and deliberate citizen is more difficult than ever.
All that being said, there are some basic Radically Moderate principles to navigate the chaos.
First Steps for Thinking Like a Radical Moderate
Realize that you probably don't know everything there is to know about complex policy issues. The first step to becoming a Radical Moderate is admitting that things might be more complex than they first appear to you.
Because of this complexity, try listening to what other people have to say about why they believe what they do. Instead of immediately challenging someone's policy position, ask them why they believe that's the answer. Instead of disagreeing with someone's choice of candidate ask them why they support them. You might be surprised by the answers you get. And of course you might not, but you won't know if you don't ask.
Shift your perspective when disagreeing with other people, either on the internet or in person (try to avoid talking politics on the internet generally, but we'll talk about why later). Ask yourself: am I trying to understand what this human being in front of me values or am I trying to win a fight? Is this a cooperative conversation between equals or am I treating this conversation like a competitive death match? If the latter, at the very least make sure the other person is on the same page. Sometimes arguing for the sake of arguing is fun (we do it all the time!), but both parties have to agree to those rules. A boxing match where one person doesn't understand they're boxing isn't boxing at all; it's assault.
Do your research. Before posting something to social media or expressing outrage to a friend, do a quick fact check. It can be as simple as Googling to find a competing or higher-quality news source. You can also Snopes or Wikipedia if you're in a hurry. But doing really basic fact checking can help prevent misunderstandings and the spreading of false information. This won't make you an expert, but it'll eliminate the really obvious errors right off the bat. (And oh how many errors we have made in our day!)
While doing your research, ask yourself whether this specific problem needs to be (or can be) solved by government at all. Not all things do or can. And often transferring a specific task to civil society (more on this later!) can defang the anger and antagonism that goes along with political solutions.
And finally, try your best to remain civil. This isn't always possible in a world where not everyone has read our blog, but it's worth the effort. And remember: civility doesn't mean you have to treat this person as a friend. But you do have to recognize that given the limitations of the modern nation state, you currently share this plot of land with this person and you share resources with this person and you're both stuck together on this rock hurtling through space and life is more pleasant when we're not at each other's throats. We've also found this rule helps limit my own anxiety about useless fights on the internet. We engage in less of them, which is good, but we also don't have to spend mental energy defending our own anger and incivility later.
And remember! Being a Radical Moderate doesn't mean we don't have strong beliefs about right or wrong or about what politics can and should do. We have plenty of them! But there's a process for how to develop and defend those beliefs that is Radically Moderate in nature. Radical Moderation involves both political content (meaning we do have specific views about politics that we'll develop as we go) and a process for thinking about political things. The first step in becoming a Radical Moderate is thinking more about the process. The content comes a bit later.
What do you think? Are we missing any principles? Are there specific things you struggle with more than others? Are you going to try one or more of these starting points? Which one? Let us know in the comments!