Fuzzy

George W. Bush made the phrase "fuzzy math" a buzzword during a presidential debate, but in the process he could have been highlighting a broader characteristic of partisan politics: the "fuzzy" implementation of "fuzzy" principles. Politicians and political parties have historically been rather more flexible in the implementation of their "core" values while trying to keep power than they are dedicated to them while trying to gain it. Afghanistan has become an illuminating example.

As president Obama has spent months in agonizing soul-searching over his strategy Vi's-a-Vi's the war there, he has pleased almost no one. In a minor scandal his commanding general's opinion took center stage under the Klieg lights of public scrutiny long before Mr. Obama had a chance to formulate his own position. However, the president has not done himself any favors by appearing to dither while soldiers die.

It turns out vision and perception can also be fuzzy. In my younger days there was a popular fad involving brightly colored images of seeming geometric nonsense, which, when stared at in another field of vision, revealed "hidden" three dimensional images out of the apparent chaos. These images are called stereograms, and as I recall were in turns really frustrating and really cool. Perhaps these images have a lesson to teach us about our current president. On their own the pictures were rather decorative and appealing without being objective imagery--not unlike other modern art. Hanging on a wall at the dentist's office they were bright and fun and interesting distractions. However, their true purpose lay hidden beneath. Only those with the will and skill to see the deeper purpose could unlock the real story they had to tell.

This seems a lot like the current president: a lot of appeal on the surface, but a lot of concentrated effort required to figure out what lies beneath. Unfortunately, by casting himself as a stereogram during the campaign he invited each voter to see the appealing, vibrant image they wanted to see. It continues to come as a shock to many voters that once they "stare" at the image long enough, its true character is revealed. In this sense, candidate Obama wasn't a "blank screen" but instead a dizzying, bright, compelling but confused screen. Mesmerized by the busy, colorful tableau, few took the time to carefully stare into a deeper, truer level. Had they done so, he would certainly have had a much tougher race on his hands.

And here's where the rub of the whole fuzzy affair emerges: the president appears likely to again escalate the war in Afghanistan. Just as the stereogram is a useful illustration of the president's path to office, Afghanistan is just one useful illustration of the consequences of that path: in this case, disillusioned Democrats and pleasantly surprised Republicans. He is supported by a majority of the public, but NOT by his liberal base. Unlike the other areas of public policy where principles blur, Democrats are proving frustratingly anti-war even in power, while Republicans are proving surprisingly focused on victory even under an opposition president. Had liberals listened during the campaign they would have heard a candidate talking about the importance of Afghanistan--but they didn't see that beneath the colorful surface they adored. That they are now shocked and dismayed by his escalation of the war is no more surprising than the shock of all those voters who thought Mr. Obama was a centrist, pragmatic, non-partisan. Perhaps we'll all learn to stare deeper. Or it could be that my logic is just a little fuzzy.

NOTE: It is possible to see the hidden image above (Hint: it is apropos to the current discussion)

En Garde!

Compromise is a practice in desperate search of a few good practitioners. One quick definition of a compromise is “a settlement in which each side give up some demands or makes concessions.” Today’s political climate is almost completely lacking in an appreciation of this art; yet no less than the founding of the republic depended on deep, painful, morally questionable compromise. If the country is to avoid becoming ungovernable, these essential lessons of history must be relearned.

The political climate of the country over the past couple of years, if not the past couple of decades, is one in which compromise is undermined on opposing fronts in divergent ways. On one side Barack Obama—the most prominent political phenomenon of the times—represents a political paradigm that tends to simply take the republican virtue of compromise and sweetly and gently rock it to sleep. His is a powerful rhetoric of transcendence. Mr. Obama campaigned to be president from the curious premise of not being a politician. He is the post-partisan figure who is by relentless logic, patient education, and lofty persuasion going to heal the wounds of a nation straining at its seams. This concept of the noble savior-king descended from a more virtuous plane of human wisdom probably has ancient roots in human imagining. It is also a philosophy completely at odds with the tradition of democratic compromise.

By attempting to transcend politics a leader such as Mr. Obama willfully infers that his wisdom and talents supersede the usual—and therefore inferior—mechanisms of policy-making and general governance. Whether this worldview is born of hubris or ideology is irrelevant insofar as it is at once tempting and destructive. Tempting because it promises to banish those messier bits of democracy the public finds so distasteful: argument, gridlock, and that great bogeyman—division. Unity is idealized at the expensive of substance. The problem of human organization is not the imperfection of humanity, but the sloppiness of its governing systems. Once unity is realized, the logic proceeds, a great revelation of solutions to problems and resolution of conflicts will be manifest. This is a seductive notion, and it bears mentioning that George W. Bush also embraced the Unity paradigm early in his campaign and presidency.

Nevertheless, this is a delusional view with destructive consequences: substituting intentions for results at best, and relying upon a carefully crafted cult of personality at worst. The true brilliance of this approach to politics is that it seems to share the spirit of can-do problem solving and togetherness which compromise is thought to entail. It is a candy-coated, uplifting message that serves as a salve on the voters’ collective sore spots. However, there is a key point of divergence between Unity and compromise when it comes to the terms under which disparate factions are brought together. In the former the masses are collected in a grand consensus of wishful thinking. In the latter they are brought together by necessity in a difficult and messy give and take designed to preserve a greater good at the expense of many smaller ones. By obscuring the need for this practice, Unity undermines exactly the sorts of systems intended to keep the country united and free from tyrannies of all variety. When the public is deluded into thinking it can be brought together by hope, it is inevitable that it will eventually be brought together only by coercion.

The phenomenon opposite the Unity paradigm is Purity. This is the path of perceived virtue being doggedly pursued by many opinion leaders within the conservative movement—and by extension the Republican Party. Purity is idealized at the expense of effectiveness. This political paradigm holds that anything short of doctrinal wholeness is a sign of weakness and gradual surrender to an ideological foe. Under such an approach to politics discipline is the highest virtue. Allegiance is repeatedly tested and those of potentially flexible minds are systematically drubbed out of the organization. Unlike the Unity approach, Purity does not seek power via mass acclamation. It is rather a Quixotic attempt to recruit new followers based on providing a wholesome, coherent worldview. It suggests that being right is more important than being popular in the hopes that the former will eventually yield the latter.

The practical impact of Purity politics is illustrated by the grassroots effort to impose conservative orthodoxy in Republican primaries. The New York 23rd Congressional district aside, there are many other Republicans in prominent senate races—Florida, Illinois and Delaware come to mind—where well known, moderates face primary challenges on the grounds that the front-runner is insufficiently devoted to the ideological cause—at a time when the party is in a desperate minority position in the Congress! If successful, the result of this Purity will be even less influence. While the approach of Purity is a logical reaction to the approach of Unity, it is also antithetical to the spirit of compromise. Better to get nothing done than show weakness through an inch of retreat.

A more in depth analysis of modern political history might reveal a growing pattern of these two paradigms alternating between parties and gradually gaining permanence in the country’s governance; however that is beyond the present scope. The critical point is that two opposing political philosophies—one vowing to transcend compromise and the other declaring it a mortal enemy—are currently entrenched in such a way as to mutually assure the exclusion of traditional political bartering.

This is a problem verging on a crisis. Should the situation persist the country will become increasingly ungovernable. In 2009 President Obama assumed office on the wave of the most decisive election in a generation, with large majorities in both houses of Congress, and with the most solicitous of press corps. Yet in spite of this seeming political trifecta he has demonstrated a surprising inability to achieve even portions of his agenda. Whether one agrees with his priorities and policies or not, one must acknowledge his apparent legislative impotence is alarming: if he can’t govern under these circumstances, who might do better, and how?

In contrast to these two opposing paradigms, the historic legacy is that of a long, noble attempt to find compromise—even in the face of morally grave and seemingly intractable issues like slavery. The Great Compromise was the first in a series of painful compromises which served to avert constitutional crises and sustain the union through its first 85 years. Though the so called Great Compromise involved the seemingly mundane mechanics of governing, its ability to bridge the difference between autonomous and independent minded large and small states was the critical step in making the American Constitution possible. If pressed residents of California may to this day concede their frustration in sharing equal Senate representation with their compatriots in Rhode Island, but the point is that this system enabled them to be compatriots in the first place. After this grand bargain there were several “named” compromises that largely kept the union together in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. The notorious 3/5 compromise settled differences between slave and free states over Congressional representation. The Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850 each served to expand and preserve the union by diffusing the omnipresent issue of slavery. In each of these cases either side could have been justifiably angered by the loss to its respective cause. Yet each side recognized the grave consequences of no deal. Eventually slavery proved too big a moral blight to be settled through political compromise, but the point is that compromise was effective in providing the common ground upon which a young nation was formed and sustained during its critical stage of development. Note that this was not universal ground or unanimous ground, but awkwardly shared ground.

If compromise is the ultimately necessary model for a vast, diverse and continental nation, where are today’s grand bargains? Unfortunately as the Unity and Purity politics have gained supremacy, so has the Supreme Court. As the country has forgone political compromise, it is only too happy to let the Supreme Court divide the proverbial baby rather than work its differences out legislatively. Perhaps the road back begins with a bold push for a major compromise. Toward that end a constitutional amendment would carry several advantages. First, an amendment is fairly novel insofar as there hasn’t been an amendment seriously debated since the ERA failed to achieve adoption thirty years ago. Resurrecting constitutionalism would in itself require the public to think differently about the politics of the age. Second, it represents a permanency that legislation lacks. Minds would tend to focus and arguments sharpen around a functionally permanent change to the country’s founding document. This should serve to add seriousness to a political discourse too often characterized by the trivial and absurd. Thirdly, it allows multiple large issues to be resolved simultaneously, thereby avoiding a chicken and egg style standoff over which side moves first. In order to be effective the amendment would need to settle issues of significant concern to large segments of the population in a palatable if painful manner.

Consider the following:

Autonomy over one’s body and mind being the highest objective of Liberty, neither the Congress nor the individual States shall make any law contrary to the following:

1) A woman who has attained the age of majority shall not be unreasonably restricted access to medical procedures intended to terminate an unviable fetus.

2) No government jurisdiction shall by penalty of law, taxation, incentive, or other means control or influence the physical or mental health of any Person whether it pertain to lifestyle, nutrition, medical procedure or any other factor except as pertains to proximate and discreet public health threats.

3) The genetic information of a human person shall not be duplicated in whole or in part in any manner such as to produce a clone or approximate clone of any human person for any purpose. No part of section two of this amendment shall be construed to contradict this section three.

The foregoing is a hastily composed, flawed prototype of what could be a compelling compromise amendment. First, it would effectively end the abortion debate by acknowledging—but not altering—the status quo. While this would not change the facts as they exist, it would scuttle conservative dreams of overturning Roe v. Wade, while enshrining a major liberal talisman into settled constitutional fact. The important side effect of essentially removing a perennially divisive political wedge issue from the debate should have appeal to exasperated voters on all sides of the issue. Second, it would end conservative and libertarian fears about the most sinister potential impacts of government involvement in healthcare: that government obtains carte blanche authority to make a range of health related decisions in the name of a compelling government interest in controlling costs. The so called “death panel” argument could easily be ended. Finally, the potential future controversy over human cloning could be settled in a decisive manner that should reassure conservatives and clarify that autonomy over one’s body cannot be used as justification for cloning in any way, shape, or form.

There are surely a number of equally viable issues around which one might build a compromise amendment intended to yield benefits beyond the specific policy matters settled. These benefits should include refocusing on the proper constitutional mechanisms of government, rediscovering the vast political mobilization and conversation required to approve an amendment, and depriving the parties of their stranglehold on political discourse. This project could be adopted by an independent movement, organization, or third party with the goal of removing some divisiveness from politics, advancing sound public policy, and reclaiming republican democracy from the dangerous idols of Unity and Purity. Only when the country is willing to sacrifice meaningful principles in service to the greater project of nationhood will it begin to repair its damaged governance, social fabric, and economy. More than some nebulous concept of hope, the change needed is in the direction of ugly, gritty, distasteful compromise.