The Case for Moderation

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Stefanie Haeffele-Balch and Virgil Henry Storr write,

Moderation does not necessarily mean adopting moderate policy positions. [Adam] Smith is not suggesting we compromise our political views and values. Instead, he is suggesting that we think about how we present these views and values to others and how we characterize those who disagree with us. It’s a reminder to think of our political opponents as human beings, seek connection and embrace comity.

Pointer from Don Boudreaux.

My sense is that we have seen a decline in thinking about politics as a tool for problem-solving. Instead, we act as if our main goal in politics is anger validation. The stories that get the most prominent coverage are not necessarily the ones that deal with the most important topics. Instead, they are stories that encourage people to validate their anger. Unfortunately, we live in a TLP world.

9 thoughts on “The Case for Moderation”

  1. “Instead, we act as if our main goal in politics is anger validation.”
    It makes more sense to me that the main goal in politics is power, having your team win matters more than what they do once they win. People get so excited about symbolic acts like statues being erected or torn down because they are symbols of who is in power. The opposition to “Obamacare” seems to be more about hating it as a symbol of being ruled by the other team than about expanding the Medicaid income cutoff.

    Anger is an effective mechanism for generating support against this threat of being dominated by the other people, and, in your model, dominated by the other perceptual framework via which events are interpreted.

  2. War is a method of problem solving that doesn’t involve compromise in zones of potential agreement. And politics can be on the same spectrum of war in this sense, where there is no such zone. I think what we are seeing is that in such circumstances, the main goal of politics is to take territory from the other side, and as in war, even dominant forces gradually taking territory occassionally encounter strong defensive positions or difficult terrain and experience what appears to be a slowdown in momentum as they focus their efforts on “engineering” and undermining the effectiveness of the obstacle to further movement.

    What we are seeing now in politics is the “social engineering” equivalent of trying to undermine difficult obstacles. For example, in the US, the First Amendment and the principle of tolerance of free expression have proven to be quite frustrating for those who want to regulate, criminalize, and socially suppress the speech of their opponents. This tradition was much less of an obstacle to such legal efforts in European countries which criminalized certain kinds of expression a long time ago. So political engineering needs to spend a lot of time delegitimizing the principle, reducing public backing for tolerance, increasing public support for carving up exceptions for bad speech from bad people, and incentivizing “private” organizations to effectuate equivalent policies whenever the actual law lags behind their goals.

    Eventually the resistence to change in the deisred direction comes crashing down like the walls to a fortress after intensive bombardment. Or perhaps the walls are left standing, which would maybe mislead a casual observer, but their purpose has been defeated by means of one kind of circumvention or another.

    Meanwhile, inside the fortress, similar desperate political efforts are needed to try and preserve the structural integrity of the wall at all costs.

    This is my impression of what is happening now. A desperate struggle at a critical defensive point is causing both sides to allocate everything they’ve got at either making a breakthrough or holding the line, like the Siege of Petersburg. It was grueling trench warfare for nearly a year. But after the Richmond-Petersburg line ffinally ell, the war was all but over.

    • The question is, for those on the “inside” defending freedom of speech and civil discourse, what are the strategies most likely to work?

  3. TLP = Top Level Post? Surely not Traffic Light Protocol, or Troop Leadership Procedures, or Transient Lunar Phenomenon. Maybe Three Little Pigs?

  4. Static,

    I agree that there is a lot of status symbolism involved in what seem to be mostly symbolic acts, like statues, street names (both side, the naming and the removal), but I think you’re stretching your theory a little too far.

    I’m pretty familiar with the Obamacare opposition and I’ve never seen an opponent of it make the argument that they are against it because it was passed by Obama or the Democrats when they were in office. Note that almost all of Romney’s opposition from within the GOP came about because those most opposed to Obamacare also derided the Massachusetts version.

    If I squint a little, I can see where you could infer that from some of the politicians who are supposedly against it, but then cast votes to just water it down some or to not actually repeal in in reality, but that’s obviously those who are least committed to repealing it, not those who most dislike it.

    The stronger the opposition to Obamacare, typically the stronger principled reasoning around government control, regulations, socialism, etc… comes out in people’s arguments. The wishy-washy (i.e. let’s just pretend we repealed it, when really we just glossed over most of it, made a few “reforms” and reduced some of the regulations) crowd seem to be those you could most tag as caring about the politics/power of who did it, which would seem to be the inverse of what you’d find if the opposition was primarily about who was in charge when it passed.

    On a semi-related note, it does appear that the remaining vestiges of pretense of an unbiased media has been totally cast aside in the last year, so as Handle says, we’re seeing what may be either a winning domination or a last ditch effort at control in the stories which are published. Only time will tell which.

  5. TLP = Three Languages of Politics. I was stumped, too.

    This is a great blog. Professor Arnold has constructed a number of terms that he sometimes refers to without realizing that we don’t all know instantaneously what he is talking about.

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