We “The People”

Something that is increasingly driving me around the bend is the tendency to make appeals to “the people”. Politicians and pundits do this all the time in trying to argue for a particular point of view they happen to be extolling, as if you can reliably count a broad cross section of individuals as thinking in a certain way at all times on particular class of issues. Appeals to “the people” are supposed to be a justifying buttress to one’s argument by demonstrating that you must be right because most individuals agree with you.

Now, in a democracy it is certainly true that a particular course of action or decision on a certain issue requires legitimizing by demonstrating support from those for whom the decision or course of action will have consequences. But on the face of it, the fact that a certain cross section of people agree with and idea doesn’t mean that a particular idea is a good one. Individuals can and have been known to support bad ideas for a variety of reasons. But my distaste for this type of appeal doesn’t just have to do with undermining a good faith debate on ideas based on the merrit of those ideas. Rather, I find the appeal to be disingenuous in terms of the way it describes the content of the subject at which it is aimed.

Talk about “the people” is, by my lights, on par with reference to the “masses”. When appealing to “the people”, one is doing violence to the individuality that is exhibited by thinking citizens of democracy, and thereby disenfranchising those thinking citizens from the process of determining the direction of their polity. It goes without saying that in a democracy there is no way of homogenizing the beliefs and stances of citizens on issues at any time. Not only does the diversity of views means that it is next to impossible, nor desirable, to realize complete unanimity on any given issue, but individuals will change their views on issues over time. So assuming some kind of static consensus on even the most minor of issues within a certain graft of people is nothing more than a convenient rhetorical tool. But the assumption of consensus as a means of justifying an argument/idea/decision/course of action functions as short cut to actually discussing the issue and inviting individuals to consider all of the nuances on a particular topic to arrive at what they might think to be the correct conclusion. The effect is to have prominent voices and personages essentially dictate to citizens what they will think on a particular issues based usually on some kind of ideological identification. The approach is anathema to democracy in the extreme.

The additional bur in my saddle is that this type of appeal points directly to what I think is a troubling limitation in our current party driven political discourse. Even placing aside the obvious fallacy that citizens as whole can be seen to arrive at some kind of unifying consensus on an issue, there is the exasperating notion that even ideologically homogeneous individuals will all agree on a particular issue. It just simply isn’t the case that all conservatives or all liberals or any other ideological identification you might choose to point out will all think the same at all times on particular issues. So even targeted appeals to particular political persuasions all agreeing on an issue are contentious at best. Certainly people identifying with particular ideologies will have orienting tendencies that often place them in similar orbits on a variety of issues. But more often than not, when we drill down into the specifics on particular issues, the devil will continue to be in the details and differences will emerge where unanimity may once have been presumed.

Yet our political discourse continues generally to ignore this reality and feeds a sense of unhelpful partisanship that hampers meaningful communications on issues. Part of the underlying phenomenon of unhelpful partisanship (as differentiated from productive partisanship — I’m not advancing some broad argument against all elements of partisanship as noted here) is a failure to really see one another and the complexity of our beliefs and thoughts on different matters. We take what are articulated to be the common attributes of a particular ideological class of people to be the whole story of who those people are and what they think without ever bothering to check in about those articulations to get to bottom of where our supposed opponents actually stand on the issue at hand.

In that regard, while I understand the usefulness of party based politics in getting things done, I continue to believe that our practice of politics in this manner does us a grave disservice in arriving at a well considered and accurate assessment of the actual state of affairs on ant given topic. In short, we don’t give each other enough credit for the complexity of our beliefs and views and tend to apply a fiat attribution of beliefs to a small handful of spokespeople, both in terms of identifying what particular groupings of people think and in determining for ourselves the role we play in charting the direction of our overall discussion and the decisions that flow from it.

Being as that a situation where party driven politics evaporates in the short term seems unlikely I remain at a loss of what to do about this troubling (at least for me) feature of our figuring out how to live together — except to say that we owe it to ourselves and to each other to look more deeply into the ideas we discuss and our willingness to communicate with one another about those ideas.

Tagged as: beliefs, communication, consensus, discourse, ideological stereotypes, partisanship, party driven politics, the people