The news media is stuck in the mindset that all coverage of political issues should be framed in terms of liberals vs. conservatives. One reason is because politicians like it that way.
Imagine you are seeking political power. In a democracy, you gain political power by convincing people to support you. They need to care enough to donate money, work the phones, and eventually to vote for you. You must convince them that you will support their positions on issues they care about.
When an issue is solved, when consensus is reached, it no longer has the ability to divide us as a people, and is no longer a source of power for you as a politician.
I’m not saying that people in government intentionally avoid finding solutions to problems. The majority of politicians are well-meaning. But if you’re always looking for how an issue can be used for political leverage, you may overlook answers that can achieve consensus.
Political parties depend upon contentious issues to draw people to their way of thinking, and into supporting their party. Politicians who are “team players” are useful to the parties. Politicians that don’t line up on the correct side of every issue are portrayed as “mavericks” and “independent thinkers.” Party leaders consider them unreliable. So as a politician, making a decision based on your own conscience and beliefs can be damaging to your position in the party. And without the support of the party and party leaders, your political career could be brief.
So issues discussed in terms of liberals vs. conservatives are easier to understand, easier to cover journalistically, and provide a source of power to political leaders.
Our media and our politicians have bought into the liberal/conservative mindset because it works - for their purposes.
But it doesn’t serve the rest of us, the citizens. It doesn’t serve the purposes of uniting us as Americans and finding useful answers to the issues facing us.
And what exactly is the difference between a liberal and a conservative?
Seriously, what’s the difference? I want to hear your ideas.
Liberals and Conservatives: what do those terms mean?
I'm no philosopher or political scientist, but I think it is useful to draw a distinction between two separate definitions of those terms. There is the popular conception, the one used often in conversation and media: liberals are bleeding-heart, money-mad arugula munchers and conservatives are tight-fisted xenophobic blowhards.
ReplyDeleteThen there's the more academic definition (or at least one of the definitions I've heard in a more subtle context): a liberal is someone who counts as one of their highest moral values the goal of eliminating suffering. A conservative is someone who recognizes that any change to a complicated system brings about unintended consequences, so changes should usually be small and slow.
This second definition, while more exact, is harder to deal with, because it reveals that two contradictory points of view can both have value.
And then there's this: Jonathan Haidt claims that liberals and conservatives have different moral matrices, weighing differently values having to do with harm, fairness, authority, group loyalty, and purity.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html
Thank you for sharing your perceptive comments, and the TED link. They have a lot of thought provoking talks there, and that was one I had not seen.
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