This blogger says something that can't be said often enough:
One thing that would really improve political discourse, and maybe even lead to some better results, would be for all of us to stop oversimplifying issues. Our culture has fallen into a bad habit of trying to turn nearly every subject into a simple duality, with two opposite positions and no gray areas, no third or fourth or fifth possibilities, no troubling ambiguities. It makes life easier in the short run. We don't have to think, all we have to do is try to yell louder than the obviously evil or crazy people on the other side. But it doesn't work most of the time. There aren't many issues that are really that simple, because if they were, they wouldn't be issues. The only way either liberals or conservatives can turn them into such exercises in obviousness is to omit big parts of the picture, and that guarantees that we're not seeing it accurately.
Hear, hear.
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This is more or less inevitable when "news" [politely so called] is delivered in brief sound and picture bites between longer stories about car crashes, murders, child abductions and rapes that makes up the bulk of the "news" on my local TV stations.
And the wholly unjustified pursuit of "balance" on broadcast news leads to he said/she reporting [politely so called]. And we get things like "that was John Doe, head of planetary exploration at NASA. For the other side of the issue, we'll hear next from Jane Doe, president of the Flat Earth Society." Yes, it's about that bad.
Any society that regularly has books about "new" diets on its best-seller lists has no interest in "complxity."
Is the comment describing a problem of oversimplification or is it a critique of a bipartisan political system which is permanently entrenched in the American psyche?
This reminds me of a conversation over lunch last week. I work at a place completely dominated by oversimplified, right-wing thought process. One of the people there made a vague reference to the "liberals" in a particular region of the country, a region encompassing about 4 states.
It occured to me that the ability to classify large groups of people in a binary fashion lends itself to a kind of bigotry that is acceptable in polite conversation. Making sweeping generalizations about millions of people is patent nonsense, and so is dividing the viewpoints about complicated subjects into two polar opposites. But it happens all the time, and allows champions of each side to speak out clearly and simply against the other in public.
Oversimplification is a problem, yes. But I believe it is a symptom of a troubled political situation.
There's right and there's right and never the t'wain shall meet.
I agree with the blogger. Most people are uncomfortable with ambiguity and large areas of gray. A black and white world is source of comfort for ideologues on both ends of the political spectrum. I run into discussions with some my cousins and many colleagues, who often try to put me down with the rejoinder "All you ever do is ask questions." Of course, I consider that a compliment because I abhor ex cathedra statements that purport to address a issue in toto.But that retort, or variations thereof, has come to infect our body politic to the point that any politician who wants to think through a prospective policy and examine its potential variations and ramifications is labelled either directly or indirectly as indecisive and not politically pure. The reality, of course, is that the real world, both the social and natural, is full of millions of shades of gray.
While the Democrats certainly haven't been innocent of this symptom of our disasterous political discourse, I believe the Republicans have relished in it. They have waged a war on legitimate politics by simplifying just about every issue, a perfect example is the stem cell veto and the crock of lies they spewed supporting that veto. The "flip-flop" campaign against Kerry in '04 is another prime example. Along with gay marriage, ID, etc. etc. et al ad nauseum.
I'm not sure who said this first, though it has a sort of Will Rogersness about it: "there are two types of people in this world, those who divide the world into two types, and those who do not."
Sounds a little like a yogi berra-ism to me..