Drawing the lines

In preparation for my upcoming year in China, I’ve been meeting with native speakers to help improve my Mandarin. Even though our topics of conversation are admittedly only vessels for a richer vocabulary and more accurate grammar, it speaks to my seemingly inborn knack for strife that the conversation usually turns to politics.

I was explaining the American two-party system at the time, and failing miserably in my attempt to emphasize the importance of this division (which to my friend seemed like a treatise on the differences between types of sesame seeds). I finally thought to explain the basic philosophical difference between the left and the right.

After I finished, I wondered to myself, “Who else knows this stuff?” I only knew because years ago I read it in a textbook and it stuck – the answer to a question I had never thought to ask, but was nonetheless centrally important.

And so I endeavored to find out. I only looked in channels where people discussed politics, like Facebook, and only aimed the question at people who professed their allegiance to a certain party. The results were disappointing.

Of 10 people I asked in my admittedly small and unscientific study, not a single person (three of whom worked in an official capacity for a party member) could tell me the essential difference of ideals between liberalism and conservatism.

I didn’t mean things like “Republicans typically support ...” or “Democrats usually favor ... .” Whenever someone started out that way, what they said was, if not outright wrong, inherently skewed. Most people looked you square in the face and repeated something so biased it would make Bill O’Reilly blush.

This inability explained a few things. The first is why political debate is so frustrating. Most people can’t argue intention, so they debate statistics and toss meaningless percentages or isolated slivers of history at each other. They blithely assume that the lives of politicians and wars alike trace one unflinching route, and if things were ever a certain way, they were always that way, amen.

The second is that most people don’t have any business declaring themselves on the left or right. The people I spoke to would end up casting mostly meaningless votes on the issues. Explain to someone the philosophical basis for their own party’s values without betraying your own beliefs, and they study your face intently, trying to figure out the answer that aligns with their party, instead of what they really believe. And man, do they get pissed off when they choose wrong.

Washington never believed in political parties; he thought the idea was counterproductive. And he was right. All it serves to do is reduce the question of how best to govern into a rivalry no more eloquent than that between the Red Sox and the Yankees. The people I asked are evidence of this.

As for actually explaining the differences between the parties, I won’t do it here. If you don’t know already, you’ve got a lot of reading ahead of you before November, and I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise.