Sunday Night Journal — June 19, 2011
A few weeks ago I was having lunch with some relatives whom I don’t see very often. The conversation turned to politics, and as has been my habit for a good while now when people are discussing politics, I listened but didn’t speak. Eventually someone noticed this.
“So what do you think, Mac? Didn’t you used to be into…causes and all that?”
I took the opportunity to make the first announcement of my plan to form a new political party. I call it the INTS Party: It’s Not That Simple. You may consider this post the public announcement. Anyone is welcome to join this party; the only requirement for membership is affirmation that the namesake statement applies to almost all political positions and debates and programs as presently shouted at us: whether they are on the right or the left or somewhere between or altogether outside, most of them most of the time take a complex situation or decision and oversimplify it. Normally the result is a few sound bites and slogans that are intended to make any disagreement untenable by portraying it as insane or immoral or, preferably, both. Since everyone is doing this, the result is a lot of bullying and yelling by people who have no intention of making an effort to understand how anyone can see things differently.
Since I classify myself in a broad way as a conservative and tend to sympathize more with the right than the left, most of the examples that come immediately to my mind are cases like the current controversy over Medicare, in which the Democrats seem to have decided that their chief debating tactic will be to accuse the Republicans of planning to kill old people. But it certainly works both ways. Just the other day John McCain labeled anyone who questions our military action in Libya as “isolationist,” a word that has become almost completely meaningless. That most people on both sides of most questions may simply want what is best for the country, but have different ideas about how to reach that goal, is not an allowable admission. (The underlying disagreement is often over the definition of “best,” but that’s another discussion.)
Perhaps what I’m really objecting to is not so much the proposal of over-simplified policies as the reduction of the debate to over-simplification—hostile over-simplification. (There are a few pundits who don’t do this—Ramesh Ponnuru and Jim Manzi of National Review, for instance, and I’m sure they have their counterparts on the left. But they are not much listened to.) It certainly cannot be said that a policy such as Obamacare is simple. Its complexity is in fact one of the objections to it. But both it and many of the objections to it—not all, but many—rest on a simplistic assumption that the health care problem can be “solved” in some magic way that will be socially, fiscally, and medically sound without some serious sacrifice on someone’s part. I feel perfectly confident in saying that it cannot be.
At bottom I’m relatively uninterested in politics. I do care, and I do pay a modest amount of attention, and I do have my opinions, but politics is simply not anywhere near the top of the list of things I’m interested in. This was the case even in my left-wing days; I always thought people who expected to transform society through politics were at best very naïve. (One could argue that to a great extent they did succeed in transforming society, but it was less by means of politics than by reshaping cultural habits and presuppositions.)
My move away from the left originated in this realization that things are not so simple, and I can say with some accuracy exactly when that movement began. In the early 1970s I knew two married couples who lived across the street from each other. Each had a new baby, their first child. Neither wife held an outside job. One husband worked as a retail clerk making two dollars an hour. The other worked as a welder making three dollars an hour. You can see where this is going: yes, it was the welder’s household which an observer would have considered poor in comparison to the clerk’s; it was the welder’s wife who occasionally borrowed money from the clerk’s wife to buy milk for the baby. The reason for the disparity was that the welder spent so much of his pay on marijuana and beer. Hmm, thought I. It’s not that simple.
That was one of my first steps away from the left. A few years earlier I would have subscribed to an idea that I haven’t heard of for some time: the guaranteed annual income, in which every citizen would be given a certain amount of money every year, whether he worked or not, and so the problem of poverty would be solved. But this experience gave me some insight into the mess ordinary human failings would inevitably make of that scheme. This sort of observation, in which the liberal-left picture of reality was compared to the evidence of my own eyes and came up wanting, was repeated more times than I can count. The result, by the end of the 1970s, was what I call a generally conservative view, but for me this means a recognition of the limits of politics and programs. (I know of people who made a similar transition from youthful right-wing zealotry to something more cautious and balanced.) It certainly does not mean the adoption of an equal-and-opposite-to-liberalism ideology. It is, in the practical sphere, empiricist and pragmatic: what is actually the case? And what is likely to be the result of any action? Good motives are not enough. Even good principles are necessary but not sufficient, because they may be misapplied as readily as bad ones.
(Possibly the greatest and most tragic failure of liberal hopes in my lifetime has been the end of legal segregation; the disaster that has befallen the black family since then, and the huge percentage of young black men who are in jail or otherwise under the loving care of the criminal justice system, oblige one to say that at the very least things have not turned out anything like as well as expected. And what are the reasons for the failure? Well, to any single explanation I would have to say it’s not that simple.)
It may be that practical politics has to operate in this either/or mode of false dichotomies and poisoned wells, or at least politics in a democracy, or at least politics in a democracy in which marketing is all. Well, so be it: that’s why I’m not in politics. As one with no more power than resides in a single vote, I have the luxury of being able to look at both sides of any question and come to a conclusion that does not fit on anyone’s bumper sticker.
It occurs to me that It’s Not That Simple would make a good bumper sticker.
By the way, my announcement was well received by my relatives. Perhaps there’s a constituency for the party.
Light On Dark Water 
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