Analogies: Evil with a Clear Conscience

Very few people choose to do evil in the world, but much evil is done by those who think themselves good. Through a combination of self-justification and selective awareness we often perpetrate evil while keeping our conscience clean.

When we’re driving down the highway and want to cut over to the fast lane, the proper thing to do is to wait for a opening, and we all know that, but sometimes we choose to force our way in. We know it’s wrong, but we maintain internal rationalizations that excuse our poor behavior: everyone else does it, it’s not a big deal, that car I cut off shouldn’t be going so fast in the first place. The wrong we commit doesn’t stick to us, but our conscience doesn’t matter to the car we cut off and the rest of traffic which gets slowed down by the cumulative repetition of such actions.

But sometimes we try to do the right thing and yet ultimately encourage the same evil we tried to prevent. Once in the fast lane, maybe in an effort to ease our guilt, we slow down to let someone else cut in. That’s good, right? But what if that person had cut off several others to get in that position? Our rewarding their bad behavior only encourages it more. And if the car behind us was rushing to the hospital, the consequences of our actions are negative. But we feel our moral slate is clean because our intention was good, despite the outcome.

The real truth is that we could have, and should have, expected the outcome of our actions and made our moral choice based on realistic expectations instead of blind ignorance. If we had paid attention to the world around us we could have seen the car we let in weave their way through traffic and known our kind act would only encourage them. The car behind us flashed their lights, honked their horn, and waved a bloody bandage to get our attention, but we couldn’t be bothered to interpret such signs.

There are more good people than evil in the world, but that balance doesn’t make the world a better place. Our intentions are rather meaningless if they are not carried out with a good faith effort to divine the likely results. Our internal justifications to excuse our bad actions do not make them any more palatable to the victims. It’s not enough to consider ourselves good, it’s not enough to resist those who actively pursue evil; we must be the most vigilant with regard to ourselves and face the unfortunate truths that we are part of the evil that needs to be resisted.

Conservative Legacy

The Wall Street Journal is a bastion of conservative thought, in many ways a standard-bearer for Republican ideology, and I’m sure home to many of the best and brightest journalists who lean to the right. So it’s not surprising that their piece on President Obama’s legacy (it might be behind a paywall, but here's the link: Obama's Legacy) comes to the conclusion that he was a failure, but the shallow level of analysis, the willfully ignorant arguments and outright misrepresentation of reality points not to Obama’s failure, but to the failure of the right-wing press and conservative intellectual arguments in general.

The basic gist of the article is that Obama and his progressive policies have left the country, the whole world really, in worse shape than it was in before. The fault lies with him and him alone. It starts by arguing that he chose to push through a left-wing agenda and rejected bipartisanship, ignoring the fact that Democratic control of government lasted for less than two years of his Presidency, that the Republicans in Congress literally stated from the beginning that their goal was to obstruct and defeat everything he proposed regardless of its merits or even their previous positions on issues such as stimulus spending or immigration reform. Even the Affordable Care Act, passed in that first window of opportunity, was ultimately a compromise, ceding a public option and prescription-price controls to satisfy the right - two of the largest weaknesses in the current law.

And while the Wall Street Journal does consider the ACA a failure, it doesn’t bother with the details of why or who is responsible - it’s simply Obama’s fault. That it is a failure is also glibly assumed, despite an additional twenty million insured, the lowest uninsured rate in history, and price levels that have risen slower over its lifetime than at any time in the last two decades. The ACA is flawed - all compromises tend to be - but it is far from a failure and the fact that no Republican alternative exists (after six years of claiming they would have one any day now) shows how hypocritical their attack on Obama really is.

They also blame Obama for the poor growth of the economy, contrasting his results with those of Reagan and Clinton. No mention of the recession he inherited from his Republican predecessor, no mention of the Republican blockade of any further stimulus from the government - something even most conservative economists agree would have been helpful. It's also quite telling that they don’t mention that Reagan’s government ushered in the modern era of crushing federal debt or that Clinton’s policies of de-regulation ultimately led to the financial crisis (a position that they’ve argued many times before). No, they threw in Reagan, analysis free, because conservatives blindly accept he was the last great President and they included Clinton in a poorly disguised (and ultimately futile) attempt to pretend they are not partisan and it’s Obama in particular who is a failure.

They blame Obama for pulling us out of Iraq too soon without mentioning he simply followed the scheduled Bush had structured, and they completely ignored why we were there in the first place. Obama was a bad president because of Syria and ISIS, but no mention of Al Qaeda and 9/11 which resulted from the policies of the (supposedly) great Reagan and Clinton years. The responsibility for all the world’s problems lies solely on Obama’s shoulders with no effort given to find any other possible explanation.

They even blame Obama for the poor state of our race relations, noting that as a black President he surely should have done better. While not stated, it’s clear that by ‘better’ they mean keeping the black folk from complaining so much. Because you can’t make the claim that life was better for oppressed minorities under Clinton and Reagan - all the data shows it was just as bad if not worse - but the wealthy white folk at the Wall Street Journal (and by extension their readers) didn’t have to hear about it. They actually think Obama failed because minority groups now feel they have a voice and the freedom to speak out.

It’s common for partisan news outlets to slam the other side, and any President’s legacy is open to interpretation and argument, but to do so with such openly motivated reasoning and disregard for the obvious complexities of reality and thoroughly documented facts of the past show who is the real disappointment over the past eight years: the Wall Street Journal and conservative intellectualism and integrity.

Analogies: Self-Interest

Let’s say you’re having an office party potluck and Brian is assigned to bring the dessert. What do you think of him if he says he’s going to bring peanut butter cookies because he likes them and doesn’t care what other people want? Or maybe he says he likes them and asks if it’s OK with everyone else, and a majority of people say peanut butter cookies are fine with them, but Mary in accounting says she’s deathly allergic to peanuts. Brian says he’s going to bring the peanut butter cookies anyway because they’re his favorites and most people will eat them. Brian is simply pursuing his own self-interest, perhaps even taking into account the majority opinion, and that leads to the best results, right? That's what the free market is all about and Brian is just a good consumer, right?

In the real world, we call Brian an asshole.

It’s just Politics; Politics is Everything

It’s a common phrase thrown out in the middle of a heated Facebook discussion or an exhortation aimed at those who seem most disturbed by our recent election results: it’s just politics. The message is: it’s not something worth getting upset about, or being so angry at me for, or worth all the fuss. This dismissal of politics is a distraction from the facts or an attempt to shift blame. It’s an excuse to save ourselves from accepting the results of the choices we make. But it isn’t a rational response to deeply held beliefs or a proper understanding of the world we live in.

It’s true that politics includes the mundane. School bonds, county zoning commissions, national ice cream day. Much of it deals with economics: tax exemptions, anti-trust laws, worker compensation rules. These things can be important to individuals but most would agree they are not core to our self-identity or instrumental to improving the life experiences of the average person. But that is not the sum total of politics. Not by far.

Politics also includes anti-discrimination laws. It includes social welfare programs that save lives. Politics decide which countries to fight and which to support. Politics started World War II, ended slavery, gave women the right to vote and gay people the right to marry. It now threatens to curtail a free press, register people based on their religion, and normalize racial resentment as a viable world-view. At its core, our laws and government express how we as a society treat one another, and politics is the manner in which we discuss our morality as a people. To suggest it shouldn’t be a factor in friendships or worthy of an emotional response begs the question: what should?

Should I get upset when someone says my child’s life isn’t as valuable as theirs, but not when the claim is made towards a refugee? Should I break a friendship over insults to myself but not to a class of people that doesn’t include me? Is it okay for me to dislike you for being a racist but not for supporting racist policies? Politics is a true indicator of who we are while how we treat specific individuals is clouded by personal histories and in-person biases.

You don’t have to agree with my preferred policies, you don’t have to belong to the same political party, but if you disagree with my assumptions that all human beings deserve equal rights and to be treated with dignity and respect, that in a wealthy country we can afford basic care and support of those who can’t help themselves, regardless of the reason, and that democracy, while imperfect, is far better than any of the alternatives, you are encouraged to unfollow me and I promise I won’t get upset about it. After all, it’s just politics.