A Thinking Reed

Amen!

Written by

Lee M.

in

Will Wilkinson:

We’ve all seen, and have grown weary of, the wide array of red/blue/purple political maps. The purplish tones are supposed to show us, I guess, that even a “red state” is a mix of red and blue people. It’s not binary: all red or all blue. Yes. I guess. But the thing that gets in my craw is the fairly widespread assumption that individual people are either red or blue, which is just silly if you think about it for a millisecond. […]

One of the reasons I dislike politics, and especially our winner-take-all system, is that it creates a pressure to pick sides in a way that does damage to authenticity. I resent being asked implicitly to join my intellectual urban fellows in therapeutic anti-red scorn-heaping excercises, as if “red” and “blue” actually means something interesting. Let’s all just stick to hating the stupid and pompous, qualities that know no hue.

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Comments

2 responses to “Amen!”

  1. Bill

    I think Will Wilkinson misses the point of politics and parties. From what he has written, his ideal is a nation of 200 million or more political parties. One for every person. But that is simply not possible. There is no way to form the necessary consensi that governing effectively requires. Political parties that end up being described as red or blue or chartreuse, is one way of starting to form a specific consensus. If you closely questioned people that claim to belong to a particular party, you would find a great diversity of opinion and preference. What joins them together is that they essentially agree on a few major points, eg. that war of any sort is wrong, or that social welfare has to be reformed. Granted it requires a certain self-security to be able to say, “I am voting Demoblican but I don’t agree with everything they say,” and to be willing to be lumped with them for the current main issues. That is the nature of politics and political processes. In Congress it is called log-rolling, or compromise. In voting it is voting each candidate not the party.

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  2. Lee

    That’s fair enough. But I think Wilkinson’s main point was to disavow the pressure to reduce one’s identity to one’s political preferences. Just because someone votes for Bush/Kerry doesn’t make one a “red”/”blue” person. That is, a gay atheist who hates NASCAR could vote for Bush without signing on to some culture war between reds and blues.

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