Red and Blue

In 1999 the pairing of red and blue took on a certain ominous and pivotal meaning thanks to the movie, The Matrix. Who could have imagined that the following year it would take on an even more ominous and pivotal meaning in the context of American politics. One could draw all sorts of interesting parallels between the two pairings, but I’ll just leave it at “ominous and pivotal” for the purposes of this essay, since I want to focus on the political pairing. 

            I certainly have my ‘favorite”: I’m blue (and, like most Blue Staters, not just in the political sense!). But the point I would like to make now is that red people and blue people are not necessarily crazy and sane, respectively or mutually, but in fact can both be made out to have legitimate positions on various issues, even in the eyes of both. Well, I must immediately qualify that statement, since, even though I have two eyes, both are blue (figuratively speaking); so I will still only be talking about how things appear from the blue point of view. But I would hope there are people with red eyes who would agree with me. After all, it used to be possible in the United states for Republicans and Democrats to respectfully disagree with each other on various matters (and even actually agree on a number of things – o halcyon days!).           

            So take the matter of individual freedom, a central divider today (or proclaimed to be by some). Red can be made out to favor freedom as an inviolable value and personal right. Thus, reds rail against governmental intrusion thereon. They sense a slippery slope down to dictatorship – in effect, the kingship that this country’s origin and essence were a revolution against – in legal requirements to wear helmets on bicycles and get a host of vaccinations when we are children, then for adults to wear helmets when motorcycling and to refrain from cigarette smoking in various locations and now as I write during the pandemic to wear masks, and even to abstain from making certain kinds of jokes. The government is treating all of us like children who are incapable of being responsible for ourselves, and in fact supplanting the parental function of actual parents as well, thereby minimizing the incentives for both children and adults to act responsibly toward themselves and others. The ultimate result is a nation of people who will never grow up and will depend on a father/dictator for direction in their lives. 

            Of course there is a logic to that point of view. Furthermore as a leftie I too surely appreciate personal freedom. I grew up during the Vietnam era and became a semi-hippie, who resented any intrusions on my “countercultural” activities. I also remember the military draft, FBI surveillance of civil rights marchers, the absurd advisories the government gave, presumably set by experts, for school children to hide under their desks in case of atomic attack, for everyone to eat meat and dairy and iceberg lettuce for good health, and to avoid demon weed at all costs (leading ultimately to the disastrous war on drugs). However, blues like me are also aware of the failure of individuals, if left to their own devices, to provide for the common good. This is not merely humans’ innate selfishness but, according to decision theory, may be inherent in individual rationality itself (the tragedy of the commons). And the clincher for us blues is that the reds themselves are inconsistent in their allegiance to personal freedom. For example, they typically oppose abortion and homosexual activity and have traditionally opposed every manner of liberalization of social mores, even with the force of law. 

            The same goes for economic issues -- capitalism versus socialism, as it is sometimes framed – which is an extension of the freedom debate to businesses and corporations. Reds inveigh against government regulation of commerce: setting minimum wages and working conditions, letting special interests (like animal rights groups) or the opinions of supposed experts (like climate scientists) determine national policies, and so forth override the judgments of people who know their own businesses best and ultimately bow before the aggregate wisdom of the free marketplace. You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time; so after a while people just ain’t going to buy hunting dogs that don’t bark. To try to enforce good sense on the country’s economic activity puts so many roadblocks in the way of good business sense that owners become hamstrung to make the products people want and to grow the economy so that people can afford to buy them. The ultimate nightmare of socialism is perfectly illustrated for reds by the collapse of the economy with government shutting down businesses right and left and denying people employment during the pandemic, then having to pay for the consequences with taxpayer money to boot. 

            As a blue I can of course appreciate the feelings and even facts that ground the reds’ resistance to government regulation of the economy. But I am also acutely aware of the inequities and even downright horrors that a laissez-faire attitude to the economy allows and even exacerbates. 

            Another way red and blue differ is with regard to our respective dreams or ideals for the country (and ultimately the world). Thus, when I think of impoverished people and struggling minorities (racial, ethnic, gender-based, with disabilities, and so forth), my heartfelt desire is that they all be made whole to the degree feasible. I want everyone to be living a middle-class lifestyle, with equal access to a good education, good healthcare, a good job, and so forth. I don’t want there to be homeless people living on the streets or in shelters, uninformed or otherwise disenfranchised people not participating fully in civic life, unskilled people unable to find meaningful employment, people suffering from every sort of painful and disabling illness and addiction because of poor lifestyle options and choices, desperate people crowding the prisons, etc., etc. Clearly there are countless societal and individual causes for these various conditions; but my empirical hunch is that a large infusion of good old money would go a long way to ameliorating all of them. (Granted, there are plenty of middle-class people who display the same maladies or others distinctive to their conditions. Life is tough in any circumstances. But let’s begin with the worst off in regard to fundamentals.) 

            But of course a “blue” person would have a different ideal: of a just world order in which the hard-working and conscientious and patient are “rewarded” in the end, and the lazy and criminal are punished (literally and figuratively). For the blues, this is a matter of both intrinsic morality and instrumental pragmatism. Those who don’t “make it” in society deserve their lot; and if there is any hope of their changing for the better, tough love is the only efficacious method. Just throwing gobs of money at them and their problems won’t help but will only encourage and entrench the bad habits that sustain their sorry state, and at the same time it almost literally robs the rest of us of our hard-earned wages and security to pay the taxes that support those deadbeats and scalawags. 

            My response to that is to be able to empathize to some degree, but also to overcome those feelings when I advocate for certain causes and when I enter the voting booth, This is because I am acutely aware that we all live in a single society and hence are all affected by the conditions of all of us. To paraphrase JFK at the Berlin Wall: When one person is impoverished or sick or ignorant etc., all are not well off. (More precisely it would be: “no one is well off”; otherwise it is simply a tautology.) Not that I want to turn this into a selfish argument according to which all that matters in the end is our own welfare, so we have a merely indirect motivation to help others (for example, so we won’t be robbed by the poor person). I am moved by direct caring as much as by self-interest, I would like to think.. But I would address the argument to the reds who so resent the intrusions into their pocketbooks and wallets by government welfare programs; for it is still their pocketbooks and wallets that pay for the police and the prisons. Also, if society is framed as good guys versus bad guys, then we who want protection from the bad guys must either arm domestic government to the teeth, which would seem to violate the red principle of minimal government, or arm ourselves, thereby turning our society into an armed camp instead of a pleasant living space. 

            Obviously, then, some mixture of red and blue ideals and attitudes is advised, and in a nation (and world) where individuals’ intuitions vary over the whole range from one end of these continua to the other and from one particular issue to another, compromise or voting after reasoned efforts at mutual persuasion would seem to be the order of the day. A related point I wish to make that is relevant to today’s politics is that moralizing these disagreements is a sure-fire way to make them less tractable and resolvable, whilst jacking up mutual animosity in the bargain. The simple fact is that we are all a hodgepodge of desires, who belong to various groups based on small and large sets of desires held in common. Red and blue are two such sets, which are not necessarily coherent even unto themselves.

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