Pacific Views

Less For The People...

Speaking of Dean, I heard the following quote come from an unnamed southerner interviewed on CNBC's Capital Report with Brian Williams earlier this evening. The segment was discussing the Flap That Shall Remain Nameless:

[I used to agree with (Democrats) but I don't agree with anything they say anymore. They seem to be] "less for the people and more for the minority."

A small army of poli-sci and psych folks could spend hours deconstructing that statement, but this is the problem of 'identity' politics. Some fear-mongering neo-con reeking of eau de Moral Majority can come in and convince a person like the one quoted above that an intention by a political party to help someone else will materially injure them. That any type of aid, social, economic, legal, etc., will be coming directly out of their metaphorical pocket.

The 'minority' in this statement is clearly excluded from the category of 'the people', and it would be difficult in the extreme to see this construction in a charitable light. And though problematic, it's true in the strange mirror-world of conservative political logic.

Much has been said about the conservative tendency towards projection, of accusing their opponents of what they're doing themselves. And it's clear that before anyone can make charges stick about their peddling to the tiniest of minorities in this country, the ultra-rich and super-unprincipled, that they've accused the Democrats of putting minority interests above the broader interests. And that idea seems to be sticking pretty well.

Subsidizing Sin

People's interests, while cultural to a great extent, are still best understood by resource concerns. Even cultural clashes have an economic basis, with conservative dialogue having upended the realities of the direction of cash flow in the world as we know it. There's an implication, stated or not, in conservative dialogue that all of these shocking liberal programs, besides being immoral, are taking money directly out of the pockets of struggling voters. Yes, you, the virtuous voter, are being asked to subsidize sin.

Dialogue is then reduced to whether or not an action is good or bad. And practically any action can be argued in some sense to be bad if convenient. Note that while we're discussing the merit of an action in this fashion, outcome becomes both superfluous and irrelevant. In fact, it becomes almost irreverent to discuss actions as though they might have some kind of effect that ran counter to the clearly good intentions of its supporters.

This is great if you want to talk up the evils of taking any resources at all away from working families to pay for the 'lazy' and the 'immoral' few who benefit at the expense of the many. It's wonderful if your political life depends on reducing debate to simple terms that exclude the idea of indirect or diffuse benefits.

It neatly disguises the fact that you're going to take it away anyhow, but give it instead to the wealthy and the powerful. It sidesteps the issue that the typical middle class family receives more in government services (both direct and indirect) than they pay in taxes. It avoids mentioning at all that programs like school funding get badly impacted, often first cut, corroding the very base of potential future wealth in any community.

And it doesn't come within shouting distance of the river of ill-gotten gains that flow in torrents to individuals whose activities are barely regulated because there just isn't enough money to do so. But hey, man, sorry about that pension. Sorry about your healthcare. Sorry we can't afford after-school programs for your kids, or pay for retraining when your industry goes belly up. Sorry you have to skip a few heart pills here and there.

We, The People

We have a lot of different 'we's in America, not that this makes us different from anywhere else, mind. (How do you pluralize 'we', anyway?) And it's easy to switch back and forth from one 'we' to another 'we' without remembering that our context has changed completely. Did I mean the 'we, in the state of WA', or the 'we, at my school', the 'we, in my political party', or some other we? It's easy to lose track, because 'we' know what 'we' were thinking when 'we' made a sweeping statement about what 'we' want, and it isn't our fault that the listener didn't keep up.

But how is it that when referring to the population of a place as big as the US do some people get it in their heads that 'we, the people' excludes large groups of legal citizens? In some areas, what would be perversely called majority-minority communities? How is it that people in the same financial circumstances can be made to fight other people in those same or worse circumstances, without any conception of a common interest?

Identity

In "The Tipping Point", a book I highly recommend, the author spoke about a tendency for human beings to be able to keep good track of no more than about 150 people. Give or take. With competition from TV personalities that pretend to be our very best friends, the steady vanishing of free time, and the greater effort involved to break out of your default social set, it can be difficult to expand our personal universe to include very many people at all.

It's easy to generalize, not just in a negative way about people you don't know, but about the universality of your own experience. It's supposed to be a hallmark of the autistic spectrum to assume that other people think and know pretty much the same things that you think and know, but when it comes to extrapolating past our own circles, it takes a great deal of energy and attention not to manifest this trait. Not to assume that the reality of other people's lives mirrors that of your own and that of your friends.

To some extent, of course, there are commonalities in everyone's life. But that shared external experience doesn't reflect the inner experience. The impression of an event or piece of information, the feeling you get from something. Inner experiences that do tend to match up with those of the circles we choose and are molded by, such that a person can forget to distinguish between similar inner and external experiences.

And a politician who wants to play this in a bad way can have a field day, pushing people towards the lazy route of blurring the line between inner and outer commonality. Instead of encouraging people to put themselves in others' shoes, they push people to put others in their own shoes. To assume a similar set of motivations and attitudes.

The skillful manipulator then clothes itself in the best intentions of the person's own ideals, and splits the disturbing aspects of self into a characterization of the by-now alien other. And we all want to identify with someone who does such a good job of portraying our better self, and to disavow our less savory side whether in ourselves or others. And disavow it/them we must, because we wouldn't want to disappoint our 'mentor.'

Down To Earth

In our little corners of the world, we know why things happen. Mostly it's just people muddling through, periodically doing stupid or careless things, usually trying their best. And those others in our purview get the empathy of proximity, of a genuine sense that, 'hey, that could happen to me.'

The best and most revered teachings in the world strive to broaden that empathy. And the worst and most horrible things have happened because of cultural attitudes that narrowed it. The bigger our 'we' is, the more accurate and humane our picture of the world becomes. But it's a mistake of the broad-minded to exclude those perceived as narrow-minded from their 'we.' (Of course, dear reader, you are definitely included in the broad-minded category.)Especially when talking about our country's political future.

Liberal dialogue, for all the 'touchy-feely', tends to be very result and outcome based. External. Conservative dialogue, for all the 'ruggedness', tends to be inherently emotional and internal. None of us are even talking about the same things. But in liberal terms, many fellow citizens are in dire inner poverty.

Living in fear. In terror. Someone has told them that their sole means of protection will be pried out of their hands. Their children corrupted and ruined. They're afraid that when all is said and done there won't be enough left over for them, and that no matter how hard they try, they will never get anywhere in life. They may even live in fear that they might be exposed for their petty sins, having listened for too long to people who pretend that it's possible not to have any.

They're as afraid as anyone that their livelihoods may be taken away, but they aren't always looking at the same culprits.

That poverty is what's holding us back as a country from achieving our full potential. That poverty is what holds us back from lifting people out of dire economic straits. That poverty condemns us to dishonest debates founded on unworkable ideology, stymied by people talking past each other.

Is there a way to heal this rift in our dialogue? To make our 'we' bigger right here at home, so that it includes people we might like to forget about? Or maybe most importantly, a way to start talking about common needs in language that reaches everyone.

'We' had better think pretty hard about this.

Posted by natasha at November 6, 2003 04:47 AM | TrackBack