Polarization

A while ago I wrote a blog post about the health care system in the USA. On my blogspot it didn't get much notice, but on the facebook feed it unleashed a discussion. This discussion went largely along predictable lines, though it did remain surprisingly civil (given the topic and the participants) and I did learn one or two new things from it.

I've been meaning to re-visit the topic for a while and have been reluctant to do so. Part of the reason is that I'm not American, and I know how annoying it is for an outsider to tell you what's wrong with your system.

But I've long been thinking (and the health care issue is as good an example as any) that America, though a worldwide pioneer and role model of democracy, has long been operating under a serious handicap: a two-party system. When I talk politics with Americans, I find that the ideas are much less nuanced and the positions much more entrenched than when I talk politics with anyone else. And I think that it's because, for as long as we can remember, America has had a "whose side are you on" approach to politics. If you're pro-life, many people assume that you also oppose gay rights, that you believe that going to war is good for your economy and socialized health is bad for the economy, that you have loaded guns hanging on your walls at home, etc., etc. What do these issues have to do with each other? From an outsider's perspective, practically nothing. For an American, they have everything to do with each other, simply because of the way they're associated with "right wing" or "left wing" thinking. The circumstances under which these issues have landed on one or the other side of the partisan divide are sometimes quite accidental.

As I was thinking about this, I read this:

http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_twobucket_mind/

I already linked to Scott Adams' blog on my last health care rant, and I'm doing it again now. He usually explains things better than I could. What I find interesting in this entry is that he asks the question of whether our brains naturally polarize ideas, or whether that's an American thing, where you're trained to think that there are two sides to an issue, but not a third possibility. I think both are true: our brains naturally start their categorizing by making two broad fields, but we can continue thinking up categories if we try. But if we live in a polarizing context, it limits our ability to create or imagine further categories.

You can see this everywhere in America. Someone like Rush Limbaugh makes his money by disagreeing with whatever the Democrats do. If Obama defended a certain course of action for a certain situation, Limbaugh would oppose it on principle. Even if Obama's decision were to be atypical -- even if he were to go with "Republican" values -- Limbaugh would make fun of it because it's Obama's idea. This is what polarization does. You know who you disagree with, and then you rationalize your disagreement by showing that you're only holding on to the values you've been defending all along. The easiest example is to consider who would be saying what if it were the Democrats who were making it difficult for 9/11 first responders to get their health care.

This happens, everywhere, not just America. Actual arguments about a matter, good or bad, are often something we construct AFTER forming an opinion about it, and the opinion itself is mostly a manifestation of a sense of identity, of where we see ourselves on the political spectrum. But I wonder how America's politics would work if they weren't so polarized.

(And yes, I've been saying that the USA is a two-party system even though you have the Green Party and the Tea Party. To me, these don't really qualify as "third point of view", they're just the more radical and less populous further reaches of the existing political divide. )