Respect

David Brooks at the New York Times is one conservative I don't at all mind sharing a civilization with, even nowadays. Lately, as in, for the last year or two, he's seemed to alternate between trying to outline what he perceives as a decline in American values, but that's understandable: he's been watching his own political faction coming apart at the seams, and he's too intellectually honest to tell himself otherwise.

His latest on Romney is particularly worth reading.

Poor guy.

Woops.

Mitt Romney might just have saved the United States from himself.

A Machine Made of People

At its formalist ideal, the law is a simple, straightforward machine, taking in and processing facts and reasoning and coughing out results. The issue with this machine is that it tries to fit a fractal peg into a round hole. It is fundamentally unconcerned with justice; its only concern is processing the facts to determine the right legal outcome. The results can be fairly horrific. If the law says that pickpockets shall hang, then pickpockets shall hang, period, and it makes no nevermind that this sometimes entails stringing up starving children.

At its realist ideal (or maybe "ideal,") the law is understood to be no machine at all, but a vague set of guidelines by which agreements about how such-and-such a legal issue should be resolved are reached. This approach sees the fractal peg and tries to match the hole to it. The issue with this approach is that, here, there is no machine: just people coming up with answers-- and those answers often differ wildly based on both reasonable (subtle differences in the facts underlying the cases) and unreasonable (whether the judge had eaten lunch yet) factors.

What we actually have in practice lies between the formalist "order" and the realist "chaos," landing with some of the merits of both, a degree of predictability on one hand, a degree of flexibility on the other. However, we also end up with some of the flaws: areas where the flexibility refuses to stretch to include a particular situation on one hand, areas where discretion swings maybe a bit too broadly on the other.

It's only debatably a machine at all, but I think it's best understood as a machine made of people: soft-edged gears whose inner rigidity is no harder than bone, a construct flawed, imprecise, unwieldy, prone to failing in all the ways humans fail, and yet also self-balancing, self-organizing, and self-correcting in the ways humans and their institutions can be.

It's messy, but maybe there's no better way for us to organize human affairs.

A Cure for Folly

Recently the observation that we're a divided nation has gotten downright boring. Tedious. It's something everybody knows, and everybody seems to hate, but it doesn't seem as though anybody's really ready to give ground. And, of course, I'm included in that: to me, it looks as though the Republicans have gone wholly insane, as though their scorched-earth politics are to blame for a good percentage of our present troubles,  and as though the best move they can make is just to get out of the way.

I do not believe that the Dems are equally to blame. I do not believe that the GOP has a valid point to make. I do not believe that bipartisan compromise for its own sake is a worthwhile end: our government is brilliantly designed to produce gridlock in the absence of consensus, and it seems as though, in a sane world, a party that induces gridlock so that it can blame the other side for the consequences should pay a price in political blood.

Only, I'm not convinced we live in a sane world. If a human being is, as Heinlein would have it, a rationalizing and not a rational animal, and if political prejudices define a person's factual reality (as they seem to), if the American electorate has as lousy a memory as it seems to ... what are we headed towards, exactly?

If the Dems win, more discord and gridlock?

If they lose ... I don't quite see the Dems going to the same lengths to achieve their (our) ends, but we, the people, will certainly have validated obstructionism as a political strategy. That's not good.

... But perhaps that's the only way out.

Contemporary Republican economic policies are trash. They won't work. They'll inflict a great deal of unnecessary suffering. They're based on political and economic sophistry, rhetorical smoke and mirrors. And maybe the only way for the electorate to see that is to implement them, and watch the resulting disasters. We've gone that way before, and the reaction from the Right was to double down, but supposing they got everything they wanted-- a new Gilded Age, gold leaf over toxic sludge?

It couldn't last, surely?

Maybe that would make the point. But the devastation in the meanwhile-- national parks privatized, pollution pumped out, corporate fiefdoms entrenched....

If that's to be the cure, it's one history is going to have to produce on its own. I sure as hell won't be voting for it.