-ophobia

Idly cruising Twitter this morning, I kept seeing a thread about how legal experts on the right and the left are continuing and intensifying the polarization that has afflicted us increasingly since the election of 1980. The thread addresses the alignment of the legal profession into partisan wings, and the presentations of argument and information by each side.

Justice may be supposed to be impartial, but the law is consciously and purposely partial. Laws are written to define what is legal and what is not. Judicial interpretations declare a winner. Discussions of legal interpretation will have their basis in the philosophical position of the interpreter. Lawyers go into litigation knowing who they want to see as the winner. Even a negotiated settlement starts from the premise that there are sides -- two or more -- to the question.

Polarization in American politics has waxed and waned many times since the country's founding. The height of tension usually yields to a partial solution good enough to bring things down from a boil while not really fixing anything in the long term. One time, the boiling escalated to the actual Civil War, but even that only brought the partial solution that ended open warfare between white people, but left African Americans subject to racism and oppression.

Side note: No crisis ever addressed the treatment of Native Americans in a dramatic and significant way. The treatment of the indigenous people grew from fundamental principles of capitalist expansion even more so than did slavery. Slavery might seem like the capitalist dream of labor, but it is economically debatable. Displacement of the natives and seizure of their assets is only morally objectionable, and morals have no weight in capitalism. If there's more money to be made being cruel and heavy handed, guess what's going to happen.

Today, humans face many issues that have been presented in a binary fashion: it must be this way or that way. You're either with us -- in complete agreement -- or against us. This attitude closes the door to both compromise and synergy. Compromise is often worse than polarization, as elements of each side's plan are instituted in ways that guarantee that neither one will work. But synergy draws from actual good ideas that may have come from disparate sources, blended into a policy that actually helps. It's extremely rare, but possible. The resulting policy might be almost entirely as one side wants it, but with some rough edges or sharp points sanded off, or some curlicues and doodads simplified as a result of beneficial critical input.

The situation is rendered more difficult by the fact that the side we refer to as the left has had a better vision of the future than the right since at least the early middle of the 20th Century. But the broad divisions of left and right encompass fringe elements that represent unacceptable authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is the lazy or desperate shortcut to enforcement of ideas that should be popular enough on their own to need no whip hand to keep them dominant. But the whip hand is attractive to some people. They may use social philosophy as a basis for their policy prescriptions, but they also just like whipping. "It's for your own good!"

The lawyer suggesting that inquiring minds delve deeper than the talking points and the exchange of clever snark between right and left stated that we would do better to listen to more voices on each side and find common ground. That sounds bravely intellectual, strong, and positive. And it can be. But it requires strength and courage to listen deeply and carefully to the intellectual proposals of someone speaking from a point of view opposite to your own. Common ground is very scary.

An argument against homophobia has long said, "What are you afraid of? That you might be attracted?" It calls upon the 'phobe to face up to their own inner self, to entertain the possibility that their own subconscious might entertain the possibility. Arguments for open consideration of sociopolitical solutions that incorporate elements from the conservative, racist side risk legitimizing it. Because both sides depend on basic principles that have to be accepted as absolute in order for the subsequent logic to hold up, following a logical path on the right inevitably leads back to their version of bedrock. Trickle down happens in porous limestone. "White supremacy is real, y'all, just look at how we have dominated every major trend in history for a couple of centuries." "You're just jealous of the wealthy and want to rob them of the fruits of their hard work and superior intelligence."

The most blatant straw-person arguments can be brushed aside. It gets harder when the opposition comes up with something that sounds okay, like figuring out that profit-driven health insurance is bad for small business and the self employed. I saw a thing on Breitbart once that I actually agreed with. It was very unnerving, because it was nested among tons of other stuff that I didn't agree with at all. So the brave intellectual sifting through for things on which to agree has to wonder how many poison pills will be thrown in with the little kibble of real nutrition that one might glean from sources more noted for their bigotry, and their hostility to inclusion and diversity.

By welcoming the input of opposition thinkers, each side complicates the chess game in which a benign move may conceal deeper strategy. Indeed, how could it not? We can't even really agree on the ultimate objective of society. Is it to provide necessary services cost effectively to the people within its boundaries, with a broader view of improving quality of life world wide? Or is it to facilitate the most ruthless and financially successful competitors in a winner-take-all world of endless conflict? Is it survival of the fittest? If so, fittest by what definition? Are the stakes life and death? Should the losers in capitalism be destroyed as quickly as possible to make way for the victors to prosper?

Should we throw open the town square and let every idea seek its popular following? The condition of the environment demonstrates how harmful pure democracy can be. Many people would say that they are in favor of a clean environment, but sales of fuel-guzzling vehicles remain robust, off-highway recreational vehicles (dirt bikes, ATVs and snow machines) are extremely popular toys, and motor boats far outnumber sailboats at most launching sites -- motor boats towed behind fuel-guzzling large vehicles capable of pulling them at highway speeds. People buy large houses of poor quality, built quickly, often on virgin land or former farm land. Most development chews up new land rather than redeveloping old sites, while developers continue to press for lenient environmental regulations so that they do not have to mitigate the effect of covering more and more ground with impervious surfaces. You might consciously vote every couple of years for lip service policies that restrain the destruction, but in day to day life the wallet votes add up strongly on the other side.

In a purely capitalist world, everything and everyone is for sale. If you're not for sale -- or at least for rent -- you deserve nothing from the marketplace of life. You might want to choose your clientele based on your personal principles, but this usually limits your income. Sometimes it limits it pretty severely.

In a collectivist world everyone has to kick in, too. Totalitarian collectivism might provide comfortable basic sustenance for everyone, but any human organization tends to develop some degree of hierarchy. "Some are more equal than others." Any synergy of free enterprise and collective sharing of responsibilities needs to take that into account.

A perfect example of how opposition input can destroy a collectively-based social policy is the so-called Affordable Care Act. As soon as the insurance industry had their operatives in Congress kill the public option, the ACA became just a herding mechanism for profit-driven insurance and health care providers. A lot of people believe that they benefitted by being able to get insurance when they could not get it before, but it's still a complicated bureaucratic mess designed around corporate income, not patient outcome.

Yes, we should listen to all intelligently composed input. But the answer still may be no, and perhaps even hell no.