It’s easy to get caught up in ideological battles where because you want your political enemies to lose, you want to believe they are stupid and bad and everything they do is wrong, and to assign as much negative affect to them as possible. It’s tempting to want to laugh at absolutely everything associated with Donald Trump and Republicans (or whoever your enemy is.)
But our goal is not to spite the other side, but to try to make the world a better place. I think people I disagree with fail by not understanding how hard that is, and offering up too simple and easy solutions.
But the cross current to that is, it would be really great if they were right, and our problems could be solved that easily.
For example, Paul Ryan. AFAICT, Ryan is enabling an idiotic buffoon of a President by constantly offering him political cover, and not using the powers of his House to investigate him or withhold bills he would like. He is doing this, so he can repeal Obamacare. He is doing that so he can lower tax rates on millionaires in the long term.
Now this is not merely some self-interested goal. Ryan is fine financially, but not so super rich he is going to gain a lot from lower tax rates. It will barely effect his life. He’s doing it because he truly believes that lower taxes on the Job Creators will boost the American economy and solve the problem of health care (via everyone being rich) better than a government benefit will.
(Even from an entirely selfish and cynical POV: the only way Ryan will go down in history with a positive legacy is if this works. Otherwise he’s just another dictator lackey who cut benefits to the poor. I’m pretty sure he wants a better legacy than that.)
This is beyond stupid and I hope he fails. But part of me also really wishes it was all this easy. If only we could provide prosperity to the entire country by cutting taxes for millionaires. That’s much better than the actual very intractable problem that poverty appears to be.
Similarly for all the liberal and left activists out there, who want to save society by punching a Nazi, and driving out any racists from their social group. It would actually be great if we could just identify the bad people in our social circle, get rid of them, and have a safe and harmonious place again. It would be even better if doing that eventually led to all of America being an enlightened post-sexist utopia.
Instead I think this is a bunch of self-obsessed navel-gazing that elevates personal social and consumption choices into an ethical identity, and punishes random awkward and weird people for no real benefit. I think they are making zero progress (maybe negative) in making the world an actually more just place. But it’d be cool if I was wrong, and all this actually worked.
If you have this attitude, you can evade some of the reality-denying traps of ideology. I don’t think of empirical studies that disagree with my political goal as obstacles that need to be ignored or debunked, but rather as opportunities for me to be wrong and our solutions to be much easier than I thought. I’m usually disappointed, but every once in a while keeping an open mind has meant I was surprised and willing to try something that actually worked.
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