Poisonous politics

The blog Dead Wild Roses, written by a Canadian blogger calling herself The Arbourist, regularly posts worthwhile insights into politics and modern social issues.  One recent post in particular, "Friend-enemy politics is the operating system of political decay", perfectly assesses the toxic polarization bedeviling our politics today.  As the opening has it:

One of the most destructive temptations in politics is the urge to turn disagreement into moralized tribal war..... Friends and enemies.  Allies and traitors.  The pure and the contaminated.  Once that frame takes hold, politics stops being about order, restraint, and judgment.  It becomes a loyalty machine.

One sees this again and again in the political blogosphere.  Those with different views are not merely mistaken but depraved, vile creatures to whom no courtesy or fairness is due.  Arguments for a position contrary to one's own are not opportunities to test the validity of one's own beliefs and spot possible errors -- they're a source of, yes, contamination, to be avoided lest they sully one's ideological purity.

As The Arbourist points out, this type of politics can (and does) manifest itself in any ideological camp:

The vocabulary changes.  The mechanism does not.  A public enemy is named, and then a moral test is imposed:  how fully will you align against him?

Typically the true hard-core ideologist's hatred is not only for the opposing camp -- it's focused equally (or even more) against those in his own camp who don't hate the opposing camp enough.

You either join the mobilization or you are suspected of serving the enemy's cause.  Hesitation becomes complicity.  Refusal becomes betrayal.  Moderation becomes guilt.  That is how political movements become purge machines.

The purity/purge mentality leads to ludicrous exercises in making the tent smaller.  Compromises which are necessary to win actual elections in the real world are denounced as heresy and betrayal in the ideological echo chamber.  Voters whose opinions, or even priorities, differ from those of the zealot fringe are denounced as fools or enemies -- never mind that the political party favored by the zealots themselves may need their votes.  And of course any suggestion that the political party should cater to the voters and reflect their wishes -- an integral part of how representative democracy is supposed to work -- becomes anathema when the party is no longer viewed as a mechanism for expressing the voters' will but rather as a temple charged with safeguarding and promulgating immutable holy writ.

Of course, genuine evil does exist in politics.  Nazis qualify -- real ones, not in the fatuous modern "everything I don't like is Hitler" sense in which, for example, anyone who votes Republican is denounced as a Nazi.  I have asserted here, and I stand by it, that opposing the current military campaign to overthrow the Iranian theocracy is evil, given the immense evil of that regime's ideology and actions, and the bravery with which the Iranian people have repeatedly rebelled against it.  But I've also made it clear that this issue is a very unusual case in that way.  And even with this one, I know well that most Americans know very little about Iran and are probably not consciously aware of the depth of the evil they are working to preserve by taking such a stance.

The zealot fringe offers no such courtesy or nuance.  Several of my posts about Iran have gotten comments consisting purely of insults -- not arguments or questions, but just name-calling and denunciation, because I'm not marching in lockstep with what the ideological left quickly and mindlessly established as its party line on this issue.  Readers don't see those comments because of the comment moderation.  If right-wing trolls don't do the same here, it's because most of them don't know I exist -- and those that do, don't perceive me as "one of theirs" who keeps straying off of the plantation.  When I've occasionally gotten drawn into arguments in the comment threads on right-wing zealot blogs, the fervor and crackpottery I've run into there has been, if anything, even worse.

I'm now actively trying to neutralize any perception that my blog is a political one, partly because I'm genuinely fed up with the subject, but also because I'm tired of being perceived as a leftist who keeps venturing into heresy and needs to be scolded back into line.  I agree with the left on far more issues than with the right, but in our current hyper-polarized and ideological-purist climate, being identified with either political "side" is not only miserable and exhausting but inconsistent with my intellectual integrity.  It's two fringe groups of paranoid fanatics screaming "fascist!" and "communist!" at each other over the heads of the increasingly exasperated and turned-off mainstream majority.  My only possible place is with that majority.  I do mean what my Blogspot profile says, "I speak only for myself and not for any ideology, movement, or party."

As The Arbourist concludes, "A civilized society cannot survive on those terms."  I strongly recommend you read her whole post.