I want to make this clear from the start: I have never done a single thing, nor held to a single position, in all my life because it was conservative or liberal. Not once. I am a Democrat, as I’ve mentioned before, but I would be Republican in a heartbeat if the positions they espoused more closely resembled my state of mind. The fact that a specific position is held by the Republican party means neither more nor less to me than it would if espoused by the Democrats. The position is the position, and it should be evaluated on its own merits.
If you’re like me, let me just tell you: we have a problem.
While much of America thinks like us, neither of the houses of Congress do. There is a frighteningly stark illustration of this in Andrew Gelman’s book, “Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State.” The graphic is this:
The chart estimates the positions of members of the House and the Senate according to their votes on key issues; the positions of voters are estimated through a set of survey responses.
As you can see, the average position (mean or median, frankly) of a voter is pretty close to the average position of our houses of Congress. But the distributions are wildly different: where you and I fall (as you would expect and statistics would predict) somewhere in the middle on a lot of issues, the folks representing us almost never do.
Even worse, note the tails of the Congressional distributions: liberal congresspeople and senators are vastly more liberal than normal people, and conservative legislators are even worse: they are way, way, way right of almost any of us. It’s horrifying, really: Look at the peak of the Senate curve on the conservative side, and you’ll see: Many, many U.S. Senators hold ideological positions that are shared by very few Americans.
This produces precisely what you would expect, and what we see all the time: legislation that simply does not represent our opinions, and frequent stalemates in government over issues deemed to be conservative or liberal doctrines. (Am I going out on a limb suggesting that, in a representative democracy, having legislators who fundamentally disagree with us is not a really good thing?) It’s no surprise that we’re seeing a huge rise in ballot measures and constitutional amendments on our ballots: if our legislators don’t represent us, we must represent ourselves.
The problem of jerking knees goes beyond our legislators, though: I know a lot of people who jump directly to the position of their party — hard. When you’ve taken up your party’s flag, there is a strong temptation to plant it just about anywhere, and this can produce unfortunate results (and even comedy).
To wit: In a recent article in the Millenial Star, Mike Haymond takes Pixar to task for the rampant environmentalism of the blockbuster movie, WALL*E. The movie is set far into the future, when the human race has completely used up earth and has left behind a robot, the movie’s namesake, to clean up the trash. Humankind is fat and lazy and is flying around on a huge space station waiting for a sign that the earth is habitable again.
The movie is cute and cuddly, as a love story flowers between two robots. It is not an environmentalist screed: I think the notion that if we project our current behavior far enough into the future we will see disastrous environmental results is pretty normal thinking. Haymond’s idea that the movie is, and I’ll now quote him directly because it’s so hilarious, “another card in the deck of fear-mongering tactics employed by our common enemy” (and by this he means the devil, for crying out loud), is a huge pile of bovine excrement.
But this is what happens when you accept too easily your party’s positions: You find yourself painted into some very weird corners. I think it’s fair to say that Democrats are currently more environmentally sensitive than Republicans. But, come on: this doesn’t mean that a Republican can reasonably hold that we should just drive what we want when we want, and to hell with whatever it means to the environment or national security. That’s just stupid, right?
(No, wait: conservative darling Ann Coulter actually said this: “The ethic of conservation is the explicit abnegation of man’s dominion over the Earth. The lower species are here for our use. God said so: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and rape the planet — it’s yours. That’s our job: drilling, mining and stripping. Sweaters are the anti-Biblical view. Big gas-guzzling cars with phones and CD players and wet bars — that’s the Biblical view.” Yikes.)
Meanwhile, Democrats cannot reasonably insist that we all drive golf carts and grow our own arugula. The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in the middle — right where most of America is, it turns out, if we could just get our legislators to agree with us.
As it happens, this is where Barack Obama also seems to reside. It has been suggested that he’s “flip-flopping” (which for some insane reason is now a mortal sin in politics) with respect to his current view that some limited drilling is not such a bad idea, so long as we think the environmental impact will be limited. I’d suggest that he’s just listening to people, and he’s willing to learn. This is categorically a good thing.
I don’t want to vote for a Democrat, and I don’t want to vote for a Republican. I want to vote for a man or woman who is smart, and who will listen when we talk.
