The Trouble With Moralizing Politics

Why has politics gotten so difficult? Because we’re mistaking non-moral issues for moral ones, and it’s tearing us apart.

Why has politics gotten so difficult? Why can America no longer roll up its sleeves and solve hard problems? Because we’re mistaking non-moral issues for moral ones, and it’s tearing us apart.

A RECAP: THE ARENA AND THE LEVERS

My last essay, Embrace The Arena, discussed the difference between two theories of democracy: The Arena and the Levers of Power. The Arena is the model that supports American democracy. Its rival is the Levers of Power theory, which doesn’t.

In The Arena, politics is a place where we come together to debate and negotiate over what we want and need. Politics in The Arena is about consensus, a push and pull in which no one gets to oppress us, but we can’t oppress anybody else. Through our battles in The Arena, none of us ever gets everything we want. We end up with some of what we want, everything we need, and nothing we genuinely can’t accept. The Arena is the model of democracy around which America’s Founders based the American republic.

The rival theory of Levers of Power holds The Arena is a naïve fiction. It claims politics really is a zero-sum struggle over control of institutions using elections. According to the Levers theory, each institution in our society is a Lever of Power. Controlling Levers lets you force through your desires, while denying Levers to your enemies stops them from doing the same to you. Politics is a scramble to seize as many Levers as possible for “us” while denying them to “them.” The goal is forcing our vision on society while stopping our opponents doing the same.

The Levers theory is destructive and at odds with the ideals of American democracy. Solving problems becomes impossible because there’s no room to compromise or negotiate. You also give yourself license to cheat. When the goal is total control of institutions, and when your opponents winning any power is a catastrophe, you’re justified to do anything to stop them. A society embracing the Levers of Power is on a path to abandoning democratic principles—a path too many of us now are on.

Why is this dangerous transition happening? Why are so many Americans giving up on The Arena? Much has to do with a second dangerous trend—moralizing non-moral questions.

WHAT IS MORAL POLTICS

In its proper sphere, moral politics is good. Some issues genuinely are about good and evil. Some questions pit right against wrong. Some questions you can’t compromise over. You have to fight for right and defeat what’s immoral and wrong.

Slavery was a genuine moral issue. Enslaving people and forcing them to labor is evil. There’s nothing to compromise over with slavery, which is why slavery compromises historically never worked. If slavery is evil, it must be eradicated. If people fight to continue it, they must lose at any cost. You don’t compromise over evil, you defeat it.

Genuine moral issues however are unusual. They’re exceptions to normal politics. Normal politics is about debating, arguing, balancing priorities, negotiating, and reaching consensus. With moral issues there’s nothing to debate. You go to war and win or lose. Moral battles don’t go into The Arena and never can. Moral issues are total wars.

Moral politics is not glorious. You don’t want to wage these total wars except in the rare cases you must. These battles tear nations apart. They break longstanding norms. Frequently, they become violent. They only end when one side is victorious and the other completely vanquished. Then survivors must put the country back together and there will be scars that may take generations to heal. The cost of ending slavery was a years-long civil war of blood that ripped America in two, left hundreds of thousands dead, and left scars we’re still working through today. There are times when moral wars are necessary and worth the cost, like the one to abolish slavery. The cost nonetheless is always great.

America has only fought a few genuine moral issues. The struggle over civil rights, an extension of the legacy of slavery, was a moral issue. Women’s suffrage was a moral issue. Some progressive era reforms like ending child labor were moral issues. The war for alcoholic temperance—a political episode few Americans today understand, but that was a century-long moral war with many mostly-religious Americans convinced demon rum was a moral evil corrupting souls—was a moral issue. These all tore the nation up in different ways.

The vast majority of causes, however, aren’t moral battles over good and evil but clashes over rival strategies and interests. They’re morally neutral or morally agreed upon discussions over priorities and trade-offs. They’re arguments about how to weigh competing options. They’re about the effectiveness of remedies. They’re guesses about the likely effects of actions. They’re not moral battles over right and wrong but disagreements about the complexities and trade-offs of implementation—the best way to solve problems, their urgency, their priority, and their effectiveness. They’re the kinds of battles that go into The Arena.

Taxes, for example, isn’t a moral issue. Except for a few radicals on the extremes, our positions on taxes aren’t about whether it’s evil to levy taxes. They’re battles over the details of a morally necessary institution—how should we levy taxes and who should pay how much. People have moral intuitions about how to go about taxing people, and our answers are informed by these moral values, but nobody in the mainstream is rushing to the battlements fueled by a moral fervor that taxes are evil and must be abolished at any cost.

Climate change also isn’t a moral issue, even though climate politics is frequently driven by our moral intuitions. Most everyone agrees we would like the earth to continue to exist. Except perhaps for a few sociopathic lunatics, no one is actively advocating destroying the earth’s biosphere. This fight isn’t about evildoers who actively hope to destroy the earth, but details about how we intend to deal with a scientific challenge—disagreements about data, arguments about the best way to solve issues, or disputes over the urgency of solutions and priorities. These questions belong in The Arena.

Normal politics is a negotiation to balance interests and solve problems. We come into The Arena representing our priorities and interests and come out with a consensus we can accept. Moral politics is the rare exception. It’s total war.

THE DANGER OF MORALIZING NON-MORAL ISSUES

A major reason America is now tearing itself apart while failing to address real problems is we’re indulging ourselves in too much moral fantasy, moralizing non-moral issues.

For most of the twentieth-century, America was shockingly effective at engaging with and solving problems. The New Deal was a flurry of practical answers to the Depression—some wise, some less so, but all practical and concrete. The Great Society was an array of concrete policies and programs staggering in scope, many of which remain in place today. The Reagan Revolution was a stunning collection of concrete reforms that rolled back programs, altered regulations, and changed how government operates. In between we won a global war, built rockets to the Moon, waged a cold war against a peer world power, and built the most powerful military earth has ever seen. America transformed with the astonishing growth of new industries, infrastructure, and technologies. We built a creative empire in Hollywood, spread ideas and art, and forged an elite university system developing critical knowledge that was the envy of the world. Then, sometime around the 1990s, that stopped.

Over the last few decades, American politics became more heated and divisive. At the same time, fewer meaningful things were getting done. If you listened to the people shouting on talk radio and cable news, you would think the world was getting pulled into crazy new directions. In reality, little of substance was getting done. Aside from a handful of policies and programs, few new reforms or solutions were implemented. We built fewer important things. We erected fewer infrastructure marvels. There were no more rockets to the moon, much less onward onto Mars. We made fewer masterpieces like The Godfather. We developed fewer groundbreaking new ideas. This wasn’t exactly decline in the sense of going backwards, but more a slowing of the engine of America. The more people screamed the world was ending due to the horrific acts of their enemies, the less was actually getting done.

Why?

We decided to frame more and more non-moral questions as moral ones. America divided into two moralistic teams wearing matching colored tabards. Each proclaimed lofty goals and denounced opponents as impediments and the pushers of evil plans. Their enemies weren’t simply wrong. They didn’t just have different priorities. They didn’t simply want to address problems in different ways. They were actively malevolent, seeking to destroy the country if not the world. Policies stopped being actual policies to solve problems and became symbolic standards to organize armies marching toward total victory. Nothing could get done because getting things done no longer was the point. Good things would happen once enemies were vanquished and total war was won.

We stopped negotiating for solutions and began denouncing those who talked with opponents for platforming enemies. We stopped working on policies to better draw contrasts. We started talking about one another not as factions or interests or opponents but malevolent forces actively working to destroy. Each team came to honestly believe their preferences weren’t just better but morally required. Politics fell into total war.

One you see an issue as moral war, it’s impossible to compromise. It’s impossible to work with opponents. It’s impossible to cut a deal everyone can live with. It’s only possible to destroy enemies with every weapon in your arsenal, even if it puts your country in the ground. Everybody abandoned The Arena because moral issues don’t work in The Arena. There now was only seizing control of Levers of Power to enact the good agenda and punish enemies pursuing evil goals.

MORALIZING POLITICS IS IMMORAL

Moralizing non-moral issues isn’t just dumb and destructive. It isn’t moral.

The total war of moral politics is only appropriate for genuinely moral causes. These exceptions to normal politics we only allow because their moral weight justifies terrible actions and dire consequences. Treating ordinary issues that can be dealt with in The Arena as moral war means abandoning the American conception of democracy. It tears the nation apart, blows up norms, makes solving problems impossible, and leaves scars that take generations to heal. It justifies cheating and destroying anyone standing in your way. It inevitably brings turmoil, disorder, and possibly even violence. It abandons the ideal in which no one oppresses anyone for one in which the goal is to seize the means to oppress and rule. To do that for normal issues of life is national vandalism.

It’s immoral.

Moralizing non-moral issues is also deeply narcissistic. It feels good to frame yourself as a hero fighting evil. You get a halo and grandiose sense of purpose. It absolves you of doing the tedious work necessary to solve problems, as such labor can be put off until total victory is won and the evildoers you blame for your failures will no longer stand in the way of your utopia. This is childish, self-indulgent, vanity. It’s great hubris to assert all your views are not just good, but so clearly righteous they cannot be questioned. It’s delusion to dismiss anyone who questions your preferences as evil. It’s staggering arrogance to believe you can justify anything just to pursue your goals—even destroying the values of democracy itself.

Solving this won’t be easy. Too few are yet capable of even seeing the problem. Too many are stuck in this moralistic mode of thinking, believing they’re good guys doing the right thing not immoral ones dragging everything down. We’re not accustomed to seeing unwarranted moralizing as the dangerous and shameful thing it is. Ironically, the one genuine moral issue of our time may be reversing this unwarranted moralizing of politics.

Why have so many Americans embraced the moralizing of non-moral issues? In the future, I’ll be talking about that more.

What do you think about the moralization of politics? Join the Renew the Republic community in the comments.