There are some pundits who are pushing back that are a little too aggressive for my taste. It’s not that they’re wrong, they’re often right as far as they go. But their reactions are strong enough that they become prey to being pushed too far into their own position, and into being too critical (and cynical) of the opposing position and not critical enough or cynical enough about their own side.
I think Dave Rubín has started struggling with that a little, in fact I wrote to him about it. Ben Shapiro has always been that way. And Tucker Carlson. Obviously those people are needed, and they’re doing good work. I like to balance them out with a dose of the most reasonable leftists, like Jonathan Haidt, Bret Weinstein, Camille Paglia, and John McWhorter.
You need those culture warriors. Very much. To stand up to what’s clearly wrong and dangerous. But it can’t always be war; that’s not the end state goal, and there’s always a risk that in militarizing you lose perspective and create new problems covered and justified by the threat. And you can’t bet the future state on victory and elimination of the other side, because it’s clearly meant to exist. People vote their personalities, mostly. Ideology can either refine or distort those personalities. But they’re given by God, meant to be. So you can’t literally defeat or eliminate the other side without going against God’s design.
I’m not a warrior, but I do have an eye to the end game. Which is something more like balance or dynamic equilibrium or redemption. We need to lift up and encourage and become friends with the good people on the other side of the spectrum and watch out for when we go too far or become too comfortable in our own.
Or, more secularly, we need a more balanced equilibrium where the best elements of both sides are challenging and productively antagonizing and balancing one another so the worst tendencies of both sides are repressed and the most thoroughly tested and universally beneficial ideas that both sides can roughly agree on are what get through.
Whenever you have a functioning system, you want to only make the minimal amount of adjustments to it, that are the most carefully tested, or the most likely outcome is that you’ll break it. And then you will probably need to intervene and rejigger it even more to keep it going.
This is why I’m skeptical about either side actually getting what they want. I don’t think either side should. I believe in the struggle, the dialogue. Both as the state of nature that God designed, and in our political system as the best alignment of politics to that fundamental design ever devised. Politics should be a marriage, basically. It’s just a very bad, unhealthy one right now.
P.S. The recent shenanigans with unemployment payments come to mind as just one minor example of the kind of overbalancing Ive been taking about, the way that getting just what you want to solve a problem often just creates new problems that then themselves have to also be corrected.
The pandemic seemed to justify acting quickly, without much oversight, to help with unemployment. So at great cost, they quickly rolled out a program whose goal was just to get as much money as possible into as many hands as possible as easily and quickly as possible. And now, just in Colorado, they’re dealing with two huge problems that created. First, a gigantic amount of fraud that they don’t have the time or personnel or procedures to investigate and deal with. And second, they incentivized being out of work so much that now people don’t want to go back to work when they could. They would actually lose money by doing so. And that’s not entirely to their discredit, there’s a perverse incentive.
So now the government has to add even more costs and measures to their program. Partly to deal with all the fraud they created. And partly to deal with the owverse incentives they created. Now they’re offering large bonus payments to people if they’ll just go back to work and stop collecting the extra benefits. So they made a mistake paying people too much not to work, and the only solution they could come up with was to add even more payments and incentives to try to buy out those previous incentives.
And on and on it goes. Once you enact a program and it’s become institutionalized, it ossifies; it’s very hard to roll it back or adjust it in the face of feedback or outcomes. Often all you can do is just add a new system on top to try and correct for it. And so your attempts to fix the problem run into a continuous escalation of costs, trying to fix things you weren’t careful enough in designing in the first place.
Making Nobody Happy 