The binary/continuum of left v. right assumes what’s at stake.
It assumes that all political disagreements are really a zero-sum conflict among various kinds of people. As soon as politics is imagined that way, then we’re in a conflict about dominance—which group should be in power?
It’s also wildly ahistorical, and simultaneously false and non-falsifiable.
When I point this out to people, instead of responding to my criticisms (it’s proto-demagogic, ahistorical, false and non-falsifiable), I’m told, “Well, everyone uses it, so it must be true.” In other words, they don’t try to show it’s accurate, except to the degree that it’s self-fulfilling—if the media frames all policy disagreements as fights between two identities, people will think in those terms. That same reduction has often happened with specific policy debates—what was actually a complicated array of various possible policy options was reduced to a binary or continuum of identities (disagreements as varied as the Sicilian Expedition, antebellum slavery, or the Hetch Hetchy Debate).
Everyone agreed with the miasmic explanation of disease. That didn’t mean it was true. The miasma v. germ theory binary also wasn’t true, but taken as a given for years.
The fantasy that our policy disagreements are accurately described in terms of a single axis, even if we’re only thinking about domestic policies regarding a social safety net (so ignoring foreign policy, issues of civil rights, environmental protection) fallaciously conflates two very distinct axes: attitude toward pluralism and support for social safety net policies. A person who is in favor of the strongest of social safety nets is not necessarily someone who refuses to settle for anything less, or who believes that everyone who disagrees with them is spit from the bowels of Satan. A third-way neoliberal (a centrist) is not necessarily any more open to compromise and negotiation, or any less oriented toward thinking of everyone who disagrees as having been spit from the bowels of Satan.
Extremity of policy is not necessarily the same as extremity of commitment, let alone extremity of opposition to dissent.
The horse race/tug-of-war frame for policy disagreements sells papers and evades complicated questions about objectivity, so it was adopted in the 20th century by major media as an apparently “fair” way to cover politics (Jamieson and Patterson have both written about this for years). When the “fairness doctrine” was abandoned, hate-talk radio hosts and openly partisan media used the “us against them” frame to promote the GOP in a way that evaded engaging in reasonable policy deliberation. They advocated policies and candidates largely on the grounds that the hobgoblin of “libruls” hated those policies and candidates.
A person might be opposed to wars of choice for reasons, and opposed to the death penalty and abortion for similar reasons, and in favor of easy access to effective birth control and accurate sex education for the same reasons—thus, they have principles that they apply across policies, yet not in ways that put them in a neat place on a single axis of left v. right. But, were we to think about politics in terms of policies, we’d argue policies, and the GOP especially doesn’t want policy debates. Hence their reliance on a politics of negation—vote for us because we aren’t libruls.
Thinking about politics as a tug-of-war between two sides is necessarily connected to a way of thinking about policy disagreements—good people all know what the right policies are on every issue, and anyone who disagrees does so because they’re a bad person (they’re at the wrong place on the axis). Anyone who disagrees is spit from the bowels of Satan.
So, what could be reasonable and very difficult disagreements about the complicated and uncertain world of policy—what are our options, the relative ads and disads of various policy options, the potential consequences, the feasibility and likelihood of success—become accusations and counter-accusations of bad identity. And the less reasonable are our policy disagreements, the more the GOP benefits, since it ceased engaging in reasonable policy deliberation in the early 80s.
And, to be clear, by reasonable policy deliberation, I don’t mean simply being able to give reasons. Anyone can give reasons for anything. I mean putting forward internally consistent arguments that engage the smartest opposition arguments, and that meet the barest minimum of policy argumentation.
[When I say that, sometimes people think I mean a way of arguing that excludes personal experience, or necessarily marginalizes already marginalized groups. It doesn’t. On the contrary, it’s people in power who are most likely to fail to meet those standards because they don’t have to—as shown by the difference in reasonableness of advocates and critics of slavery. The latter were far more reasonable than the former; even though the former claimed to have positions grounded in logic and science. The same was true in of the advocates v. critics of segregation—the latter had the more reasonable rhetoric and position, despite the former’s ability to cite experts and authorities.]
Because the GOP is now the party of anti-libs, the more that opponents of GOP policies accept the (false) frame of policy disagreements as a continuum of left v. right, the more we empower pro-GOP rhetoric. The more that opponents of the GOP argue about our situation in terms of a conflict among identities—whether “centrists.” “leftists,” or “liberals” are more to blame, the more we help the GOP.
All the GOP has to do is foment conflict among its opponents, and I think they (and, tbh, Russian trolls) have done that quite effectively.
My reading of history says that we won’t get out of this by blaming other opponents of authoritarianism, or by trying to purify the opposition, or purify our commitment to a single policy agenda. I think we need to stop gatekeeping identity, and make a coalition of people opposed to GOP authoritarianism, and work together to save democracy. I think that’s the only thing that works in this situation. But I’m open to persuasion on that. Not by deductive arguments about what should work, nor arguments that X must work because what the “Dems” have been doing hasn’t worked (that’s the fallacy of the false dilemma), but arguments from history as to what has worked in similar situations.
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