Party People

There’s been a lot of talk over the past few years about the increasing “polarization” or partisanship in American political life. The so-called red states are full of NASCAR-watching, gun-toting die-hard Republicans, and the blue states are where the latte-sipping, Volvo-driving, NPR-listening Democrats make their home. And never the twain shall meet, apparently. Some reports have suggested that there’s an increasing amount of self-segregation occurring among red-staters and blue-staters. We’re huddling in our little enclaves of ideological purity and thus never have to encounter anyone who might challenge our views.

Now, I wonder how much of this is a reality taking place on the ground and how much is hype driven by a media-imposed narrative growing out of that famous electoral map in 2000. But, even more, I wonder about the phenomenon of partisanship itself.

After all, the platforms of political parties don’t consist of internally coherent sets of policy prescriptions deduced from self-evident first principles (okay, except maybe the Libertarian party). Rather, the platforms are the result of a lot of haggling between various interests groups and then cobbled together and given a gloss to make it appear as though there are some consistent guiding principles at work. Add to this the fact that in practice, all parties depart from their platforms to greater or lesser degrees as need arises.

Therefore, no reasonable* person will agree with a given party 100% of the time. So, in deciding which party to support, it seems to me one has to do two things: 1) decide which issues are the most important at the time and 2) figure out which party is most likely to act in ways consistent with one’s own position on those issues. Since most major parties are hopelessly inconsistent, it seems best to identify one or two issues of major importance and vote accordingly (assuming one thinks it’s worthwhile to vote, but that’s a different topic!). This approach is often derided as “single-issue voting”, but, surely there are some issues that really are so important that they pretty much trump anything else. And, besides, the alternative seems to be the mindless partisanship of “My party right or wrong!” Now, it may be that a lot of politics is driven by this kind of tribal affiliation with a certain group, but is that the best position for a rational person to take?

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*I’m using “reasonable” here in a rather minimalist sense to mean having an internally consistent set of beliefs, and bracketing the question of whether those beliefs themselves are justified or likely to be true