In 1996, my sophomore year of college, I had my first opportunity to vote in a presidential election; and in my mind, I took my civic duty really seriously. I studiously read the voter’s guide; I listened to other really serious people talk about the candidates; and I probably even prayed about it since I was a holy-roller Evangelical Christian back in those days, and I spent more time praying than I spent masturbating by a long shot.
The night before the election, I was hanging out with my friends Heather and Karen in their dorm room, and naturally, we got into a discussion about for whom we’d be voting. Another of their roommates, Samantha, piped up and said that she was going to vote for all the Republicans on the ballot. It quickly became clear that she knew zilch about the candidates, and somehow even less about the issues that were being debated during that election cycle. She was also a Christian, though of a different flavor than my own, and she was following the consensus of the kids in her Bible study group.
Prone to speeches, I made an impassioned case against blindly voting for a single party. I told her that if she happened to like each of the Republicans more than their corresponding Democrats, by all means, vote for them; but I cautioned her that elections are about issues more than party, and she needed to look at each candidate and decide which of them represented her values most rather than merely punching a chad for every darn politician with an R next to their name. She needed to do her research and make an informed decision, because her vote could have a dramatic effect on her life and the lives of others from sea to shining sea.
The next day, I walked into the voting booth and cast my ballot for Bob Dole and nearly every other Republican running for office.
That night, Samantha approached me, giddy as a schoolgirl. She told me she’d taken my advice to heart, and was pleased as punch to report that she didn’t vote for only Republicans. She mixed it up and voted R, D, R, D, R, D all the way down the ballot. She had completely missed my point; she hadn’t looked at the candidates or the issues, but she felt like a good citizen by filling in the bubbles evenly between the political parties (this is probably how she’d taken the SATs, too). I could have slapped her in her big dumb face, and when she would have turned the other cheek, slapped her again.
Bob Dole lost that election to Bill Clinton (thanks, America!), and the country wasn’t lost to idiots like me. I’m not saying I was an idiot for voting for Republicans (though that was certainly true), but because despite my pontification about issue voting rather than party voting, my vote was almost as dumb as Samantha’s. We’ll return to this in a minute.
My political views changed dramatically over the next couple of years, and it’s no coincidence that my migration from Right to Left occurred at the same time I went from being a Christian to an atheist. Until then, I’d considered “conservative values” to be “Christian values,” but once I was no longer religious, I had to reexamine the issues on their own merit. I realized that the “liberal agenda” to keep prayer out of schools wasn’t an attack on Christians, but a concerted effort to protect religious freedom for all. I realized that the “liberal agenda” to provide condoms in schools and provide sex education wasn’t a nefarious plot to encourage kids to fornicate, but rather an attempt to keep kids safe from STDs and prevent teenage pregnancy. Once I no longer felt the need to defend Christianity (because I was no longer a member of that club), I realized that I’d never been under attack in the first place, and the issues championed by Liberals made a whole lot of sense to me.
I’m a hedonist at heart. I’m a wino. And as a hedonist wino, my sense of social justice and responsibility revolves around equal access to prosperity, love, health and good times. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of fucking happiness. I’ll agree to refrain from dropping a rock on your head and stealing your shit so that I can rest assured that you won’t drop a rock on my head and steal mine. If I can get married, you should be able to get married. You should show me the same respect for being an atheist as I show you for being a Christian even though we vociferously disagree (and though we can both agree that the Scientologists are bat-shit crazy, we should extend them the same courtesy). When we occasionally need to restrict rights or control behavior, it should only be because said rights or behavior are hurting others’ access to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You don’t have the liberty to murder me.
That’s not to say I call myself a Democrat. I’ve adamantly refused to register with a political party, because I still believe in issue voting and won’t declare loyalty to a party when their values may not always reflect my own. If a liberal Republican and a conservative Democrat were competing for office (imagine that!), I’d vote for the candidate that most closely matched my own opinions. And while the Democratic Party tends to align with my lefty political views pretty consistently, they can still really piss me off sometimes.
For example, during George W. Bush’s second term, the Democrats were in the Congressional minority, and were pretty regularly using the filibuster to prevent the Republicans from passing some terrible legislation. The Republicans were pissed and proposed changing the rules to prevent so much filibustering. With a bunch of hand-wringing, the Democrats cried foul: the filibuster was a tool built into the system to prevent the tyranny of the majority; it was a feature, not a bug, that prevents the minority from being railroaded by bullies; it was a process designed by our founding goddamn fathers, and the despots in the Republican party wanted to take that God-given right away. I was convinced, and damned the GOP for their douche-baggery. Well, skip forward a few years when the Democrats had control of the Senate and the Republicans were filibustering the shit out of everything. The Democrats proposed (and eventually passed) some measures to prevent certain kinds of filibustering to overcome Republican obstructionism. Look, assholes, you can’t have it both ways. I get that the Republicans set new records for the number of filibusters successfully executed and by doing so, ground the government to a halt; but they were following your lead and just because they did a more thorough job of it than you did when you were in the minority doesn’t change the nature of filibusters—the issue is the same. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
While I refuse to call myself a Democrat, over the past few years I’ve increasingly labeled myself a Liberal (or Progressive if you like new-and-improved packaging of the same product). The label seemed fitting, and it’s an easy way to sum up my political perspective without explaining all of the component parts. Yes, I believe in progressive taxation. Yes, I believe in the separation of church and state. Yes, I believe in Welfare, Social Security, Medicaid, Unemployment, universal healthcare and other entitlement benefits. Yes, I believe in gay marriage. Yes, I believe in diplomacy over warfare. Yes, I believe in anti-discrimination laws and equal pay for equal work. Yes, I believe in global warming and think we need to do something about it. Yes, I believe in providing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
The Liberal label isn’t a perfect fit, though, since facts, data and logic should still prevail. I believe in gun control, but you know what? I think many of the individual proposals for ways to curb gun violence are merely reactionary, make for powerful visuals and sound bytes, but would ultimately be ineffective. You know what else? I’m not against GMOs. Huh. (Monsanto can eat a bag of dicks, but “golden rice” seems pretty great.) I haven’t yet subscribed to Mother Jones.
I’ve been thinking about all of this for the past week after my friend Dennis—an Adam Smith libertarian type—pointed out that I often describe myself as a Liberal as if the label was important to me. He wondered why. I told him that it was merely a descriptor, but was it?
It takes no great insight to recognize that the Republicans and Democrats are more divided than ever before, not only among politicians, but even among the populace. Recently, Crispin Sartwell posted a really provocative article in The Atlantic in which he proposed:
Transcending partisanship is going to require what seems beyond the capacities of either side: thinking about the left-right spectrum rather than from it.
Sartwell smartly points out example after example where ideologies between the Left and the Right are often identical, and where positions within one end of the spectrum or the other are often incompatible. The Left holds up equality as a prime virtue, but an increase in economic equality necessitates an increase in political inequality. The Right holds up liberty as a prime virtue, while opposing gay marriage and marijuana legalization. Basically, looking at issues from the perspective of the Left or the Right contributes not only to extreme partisanship, but can muddy the waters of your own values.
Still, it’s so easy to approach an issue from within the framework of your preferred political philosophy. It saves time when you don’t have to research all of the fine points of each new problem before you can have an opinion about it. You just have to look at what others with the same bent are saying about it, and you’re ready to bloviate about it at the local pub.
In science, there’s something called “confirmation bias.” It’s easy to cherry-pick or interpret data that supports the hypothesis in which you have an invested interest. The same holds true in politics. We choose our trusted pundits and news sources based on how they align with our standing opinion, and then gobble up their take on the snippets of data they present. Just because Republicans are shady as fuck doesn’t mean Democrats can be trusted implicitly. Randi Rhodes is just as bad as Rush Limbaugh. Ed Schultz is just as bad as Bill O’Reilly. Keith Olbermann is just as bad as Sean Hannity. Any one of these talking heads may or may not be on the right side of the issue at any given time, but there’s no way to tell by listening to them because of their narrow-minded, lockstep zealotry for their end of the political spectrum. They all spend more time bellyaching about the other side and defending their own that they don’t grasp the complexity of the facts or offer a deep-dive analysis of the data. They’re shills.
My vote in 1996 was dumb despite my ostensible dedication to issues voting, because my understanding of the issues was framed by my conservative bias. While I was arguably more aware of the issues, my stance on each of them were as ill-informed as Samantha’s. There was really no difference between her initial blind loyalty to the Republican Party, her final symmetrical voting pattern or my myopic dedication to conservative values. None of them were based on a comprehensive understanding of the candidates nor the issues.
Now, though I’m clearly a lefty, I do believe in formulating political opinions based on the facts surrounding each issue (as Stephen Colbert once said at the Whitehouse Correspondents Dinner: “And reality has a well-known liberal bias.”), wherever those facts may lead. While I think that the Left is correct much more often than the Right, I must be vigilant not to take their word for it. I must guard myself against confirmation bias, to be aware of when my preferred media outlets are merely parroting partisan talking points, and to call bullshit when I hear it from politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle. To quote Ralph Waldo Emerson:
I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.
But I’ll probably always have a big (unrequited) crush on Rachel Maddow.
