Spurred by the radical discourse within the Tea Party and Occupy movements, more and more political debates I witness express themes of desperation and animosity. They are desperate in the sense that each participant perceives an urgent crisis. According to recent polls, three out of four registered voters think the country is on the wrong track. And worse, these debates are increasingly hostile, because each side refuses to re-think, or even re-articulate, their convictions about what is wrong and what ought to be done. Many of these exchanges culminate in a mutual feeling that the opposition represents a root cause of the current mess — "It's idiots like these," they conclude.
These sorts of conversations are common between Republicans and Democrats — case in point: the Congressional supercommittee — but I get the impression that even within the left and right poles of the political spectrum, there is pugnacious disagreement about what policies would reinvigorate our economy and restore faith in the government.
Dialogue can be immensely productive, but only if there are some beliefs that all parties endorse at the outset. My first contention is that the bitter arguments about the direction of the country result from a lack of a basic consensus on what I like to think of as political first principles. By political first principles, I mean explicit agreements about how political debates should be resolved and adjudicated. Think of them like the contents of a social contract. The Constitution represents a system of political first principles, because it establishes a set of procedures that constrain political decision-making.
The problem in this country, as I see it, is that even our most basic political institutions are themselves coming under heavy suspicion, perhaps rightly so, and this is making our political debates counter-productive. For instance, following the news that the supercommittee failed to devise a budget to reduce the national deficit, Brown's website posted an interview with Wendy Schiller, associate professor of political science, in which she remarks, "Congress cannot function anymore. … Congress now is an outdated, antiquated institution that absolutely has to be changed from the outside." One can easily find similar rebukes of the executive and judicial branches.
I think if we look even deeper, this lack of consensus on political first principles is a symptom of a more fundamental cultural crisis. That crisis is the lack of a unifying narrative of what our nation is and should be. This is a very broad and abstract claim, so let me try to clarify.
The Constitution was born from a vision of a nation meant to represent a clean break with the monarchical authoritarianism and religious oppression of the mother country. In addition to this shared historical context, the wealthy white men who wrote the Constitution also shared a congruous world view that was rooted in Enlightenment philosophical ideals and a Christian cultural tradition. There was of course disagreement among the founders, but to a large extent they were on the same page. This is what enabled them to settle on a social contract containing a robust set of political first principles.
In the current post-modern era, any attempt to come up with a similarly unifying historical and ideological narrative or vision for the United States is either laughably naive or depressingly hollow. American culture is anything but homogenous. In fact, American culture is just as disjointed and cosmopolitan as the planet itself. We have everything here: communists and libertarians, atheists and fundamentalists. Therefore, given that we value this non-conformity, the only solution is to forgo a common national narrative and create a set of political first principles that, instead of forcing us to come to substantial political agreements, promote cultural and political autonomy while preventing the domination of one group by another. That is, we should not be aiming to bring 300 million citizens into political agreement. We should instead be interested in how we can keep the peace while allowing like-minded people to self-organize into their own communities.
In summation, I believe that the impossibility of a shared national consciousness currently precludes agreement on any robust political first principles, which in turn perpetuates an increasing sense of desperation and in-group animosity. The only reasonable solution to preventing societal decay then is to simply agree to disagree. We must somehow allow ideologically similar people to form their own, more or less autonomous, political entities. Concrete implementations of this might be the separation of the country into two smaller nations, perhaps one conservative and one liberal. Or it could be a return to a more federalist form of government in which the individual states are thought of as policy laboratories, free to experiment with laws and institutions as they see fit.
There is one significant problem with my proposal — modern economic globalization forces our political entities into awkward juxtapositions and competitions. This is the central obstacle to the sort of political revolution I am suggesting. As I see it, the hard problem 21st century leadership faces involves enabling diverse cultural and political institutions to thrive while maintaining stable economic relations.
Jared Moffat '13 is a philosophy concentrator from Jackson, Miss. He hopes someone will publish a response and plans to write a follow-up column to expand on the last point.
