Tribalism in US Politics
I've really been enjoying the spectacle of thousands of American conservative cranks descending onto our nation's capital to vent their hatred of Barack Obama. Now, if you take the protestors at their word you may come away convinced that they were a united band of citizens concerned about runaway public spending. But this isn't true. After all, how many of the assembled people voiced these concerns under the last president, under whose guidance US debt skyrocketed? I thought so.
What it boils down to, essentially, is that the people who marched on DC simply don't like the president. Some of them dislike Obama because he supports (some) abortion rights. Some of them don't like him because he wants to extend health insurance to all Americans. Some of them don't like him because they think he's going to take away people's guns. Some of them, and let's be honest here, don't like him because he's dark-skinned.
(I think there's certainly a legitimate criticism to be made about Obama's performance, which as far as I am concerned has been somewhere between lackluster and mediocre. In my opinion, he hasn't gone far enough to repudiate Bush-era policies regarding torture and civil liberties. I also think Afghanistan is a quagmire and that we should probably get the hell out. With health care, he has been too timid in asserting his control over the issue and has instead delegated too much of the policy work to the idiots on Capitol Hill. But I digress.)
If you consider the particular policies that define contemporary conservatism- or liberalism- precious little philosophical consistency exists. In my lifetime conservatives have stood for a reduction in government spending, yet almost universally have supported a belligerent, assertive foreign policy. Conservatives are opposed to abortion yet support capital punishment. They favor de-regulation of business and industry yet want restrictions on cultural products that disagree with their point of view.
I'm sure one could write a similar list about liberals, which drives at my point. These internal contradictions don't matter so much as a shared sense of identity politics brings.
I consider myself to be fairly open-minded, but my first instinct upon learning that one is conservative is to recoil, almost as if a small voice in my head says that he is one of them. Consider some of the public figures, like blog-goddess Arianna Huffington, who undergo a major transformation mid-career. I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure she's gone from being an across-the-board conservative to an across-the-board liberal.
Likewise, back in the halcyon days of the Bush administration quite a few liberals voted for Bush due to their support for the Iraq War and neo-conservative foreign policy in general. Despite their protestations, these so-called 'security Democrats' have pretty much just become run-of-the-mill Republicans in the years since. Once one sympathizes with the opposition on one issue, it becomes easier to sympathize on every issue, no matter how unrelated they may be from each other.
All of this goes against what we think of ourselves; we imagine that we rationally develop opinions on each matter of public policy and vote according to how we prioritize these opinions. To a certain extent, this is true.
Then again, in the case of American politics, in which there are only two parties of influence who don't share power in any meaningful way, I think people develop their opinions from an a priori basis. In other words, when you like a politician you'll probably just like what he likes, no matter what.
