Politics is the business of rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies.
Let's grant that, and begin.
It is also the art of creating relationships, both cooperative and adversarial, where they previously did not exist. When a new country (the United States, say) appears and is recognized, the main point of recognition is to form a relationship (either friendly or unfriendly) with the new neighbor.
That's the big picture of politics, at the "system" level. It also applies at the state and personal levels, which are the politics you and I are likely to experience in our own lives: voting for or against a bond levy to fix a school building, for example, or trying to get friends and neighbors to sponsor a 24-hour AIDS Walk or a local kids' soccer team, or to organize a petition to recall a corrupt representative from the statehouse or change a law that discriminates unjustly.
I use these examples, because they are all examples of how politics is used to create friendly relationships, to foster unity of purpose and identity within often disparate communities with differing and diverging interests and ideals. Politicking that falls under the general heading of "uniting" is very important in democratic societies, because with mass voting comes the necessity of mass popularity for effective rule.
In a representative democracy, however, in order for rule to be effective, it must also discriminate, in limited and for the most part fair, ways. When a county picks its Board of Supervisors, or a state picks its Senator, no one from outside that county, or outside that state, is eligible for that office, including the vast majority of eligible-aged American citizens. Why would we want to discriminate in such a manner, to divide the mass public into county and state and city and country? Mainly, to leverage likelihood that a fellow who grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, or Patuxent, Maryland, or Redding, California has a better idea what the problems and concerns and politics of those places are, than someone who was picked by his party or his boss or a mass of her fans from across the world, to take that office and that responsibility to Guilford County or the northern Chesapeake, or the entire state of California.
We also discriminate in less fair, less limited, and more invidious ways, say against men who wish to marry other men, or to smoke a joint in the peace of their own home, or to obtain a job or a home in a neighborhood composed mainly of people whose skin is another color. (I won't even address how long-term socioeconomic trends are to ensure a permanent stratification, a long-term underclass and a long-term political-economic elite, other than to acknowledge its existence, and its general lack of fairness.) When in politics, this kind of discrimination is pointed out as unfair, or even as improperly limited, it is often termed "playing the race card," as if it were somehow also unfair to complain about or attempt to change, unfairness. As if, by pointing out a division already created invidiously and unfairly, one wished to create another unfair and invidious division, rather than uniting the community's diverse (and divergent) interests against the unfair and invidious division among them. I use this type of reactionary backlash as an example of the invidiousness of divisions based on arbitrary qualities. It happens. It is ugly. But it is anticipated and desired by the creators of the arbitrary and unfair division, to maintain their division of the mass society into groups (preferably large and mighty) which will support them and groups (less large and more meek) which will not.
The question is, how does a mass party like the Democratic or Republican one embrace both uniting and dividing politics? If one accepts that fairness must necessarily include some degree of division and some degree of unison in politics, then how does one decide who the friends and the enemies are, and how to unite and divide them respectively? Lots of methods and social-science tools help, of course, but mainly one has to rely on locality, fairness, and need. Fairness, of course, may be based on an assessment of need, but we'll set that aside for the moment.
Locality is obvious enough: in a federal system, there are many divisions of government, usually for sensible reasons of the size of problems. It doesn't normally take a national effort to support an elementary school, nor can most cities afford to support an army and a navy, and most of us would find it odious and weirdly overreaching to have state government decide on immigration policy or national government deciding where to put stop signs and posting speed limits. There are fair, rational, and necessary limits to the reach of government at every level.
Need is often less obvious, but it is inextricably tied to both fairness and locality. Do we need a floating currency, or a central bank to manage it? Do we need speed limits on residential streets? (they cost real money, you know.) Is it fair or necessary to decide that after 6 am on Sunday, no one can buy beer, even if they don't get off work on Saturday night until 7? All of those are examples of real laws, that were deemed necessary and fair by someone presumably elected in a fair and inclusive process. and are all affected by their "locality" within government, either national, state, or neighborhood.
Perhaps as importantly, all are examples of governing done fairly and right, even if it places a burden on some, even if it discriminates in some wise (as for example, those who receive speeding tickets on residential streets, or who run out of beers on Saturday, knowing they won't have time to get more before work that night.) Discrimination isn't invidious, when it is needful and it burdens no one unduly or unfairly.
When discrimination, on the other hand, burdens one's political enemies unduly, it smells to high heaven of unfairness and its needfulness is called immediately into question, as in the cases in Texas and Virginia, where women seeking to undergo abortion are required to leap ever-higher hurdles of regulatory barrier to a safe, legal, elective medical procedure which no one seriously argues they have no right to elect. (there are those who argue that such a right does not exist, but they are rarely able to argue in any seriousness) Such a burden falls only on the small segment of the population who want to exercise their private right (no exercise of political rights gets more local) to terminate a pregnancy, which a majority of Texan and Virginian (most states have some burdens) lawmakers felt needed to be greatly burdened with requirements above and beyond those demanded for safety and surety in medical practice or a reasonable "cooling-off" period to prevent impulsive and regrettable actions leading to arguably-irrevocable consequences. This extremity of regulation leads one to wonder, what makes it necessary? and what makes it fair, to burden such a small group in such a profound way? whose enemies are they, that they need to be punished?
It seems to me, that women who seek abortions separate themselves voluntarily (well, more or less voluntarily) and thus it cannot be fairly argued that they are chosen for an arbitrary quality. It also seems to me, that their "difference" from the rest of the non-abortion-seeking society is already somewhat burdensome, and making it moreso really ought not to be the business of government, because it is fundamentally against the rules of fair play and violates the basic principle that governing be necessary if it must burden some and not others.
While it may unite some of the community against a perceived ill (or against me) I call bullshit on this one. Picking women who want to exercise their most private of rights, those which should be anything but public record, for discrimination fails the fairness test, it fails the necessity test, it even in my view, fails the locality test, as in government should have the least reach within the private bedrooms and operating rooms of its citizens. It's discrimination of the most invidious sort, and it will take a great deal of uniting to overcome that non-arbitrary (for once) but still invidious, unfair, unnecessary division.
It is also the art of creating relationships, both cooperative and adversarial, where they previously did not exist. When a new country (the United States, say) appears and is recognized, the main point of recognition is to form a relationship (either friendly or unfriendly) with the new neighbor.
That's the big picture of politics, at the "system" level. It also applies at the state and personal levels, which are the politics you and I are likely to experience in our own lives: voting for or against a bond levy to fix a school building, for example, or trying to get friends and neighbors to sponsor a 24-hour AIDS Walk or a local kids' soccer team, or to organize a petition to recall a corrupt representative from the statehouse or change a law that discriminates unjustly.
I use these examples, because they are all examples of how politics is used to create friendly relationships, to foster unity of purpose and identity within often disparate communities with differing and diverging interests and ideals. Politicking that falls under the general heading of "uniting" is very important in democratic societies, because with mass voting comes the necessity of mass popularity for effective rule.
In a representative democracy, however, in order for rule to be effective, it must also discriminate, in limited and for the most part fair, ways. When a county picks its Board of Supervisors, or a state picks its Senator, no one from outside that county, or outside that state, is eligible for that office, including the vast majority of eligible-aged American citizens. Why would we want to discriminate in such a manner, to divide the mass public into county and state and city and country? Mainly, to leverage likelihood that a fellow who grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, or Patuxent, Maryland, or Redding, California has a better idea what the problems and concerns and politics of those places are, than someone who was picked by his party or his boss or a mass of her fans from across the world, to take that office and that responsibility to Guilford County or the northern Chesapeake, or the entire state of California.
We also discriminate in less fair, less limited, and more invidious ways, say against men who wish to marry other men, or to smoke a joint in the peace of their own home, or to obtain a job or a home in a neighborhood composed mainly of people whose skin is another color. (I won't even address how long-term socioeconomic trends are to ensure a permanent stratification, a long-term underclass and a long-term political-economic elite, other than to acknowledge its existence, and its general lack of fairness.) When in politics, this kind of discrimination is pointed out as unfair, or even as improperly limited, it is often termed "playing the race card," as if it were somehow also unfair to complain about or attempt to change, unfairness. As if, by pointing out a division already created invidiously and unfairly, one wished to create another unfair and invidious division, rather than uniting the community's diverse (and divergent) interests against the unfair and invidious division among them. I use this type of reactionary backlash as an example of the invidiousness of divisions based on arbitrary qualities. It happens. It is ugly. But it is anticipated and desired by the creators of the arbitrary and unfair division, to maintain their division of the mass society into groups (preferably large and mighty) which will support them and groups (less large and more meek) which will not.
The question is, how does a mass party like the Democratic or Republican one embrace both uniting and dividing politics? If one accepts that fairness must necessarily include some degree of division and some degree of unison in politics, then how does one decide who the friends and the enemies are, and how to unite and divide them respectively? Lots of methods and social-science tools help, of course, but mainly one has to rely on locality, fairness, and need. Fairness, of course, may be based on an assessment of need, but we'll set that aside for the moment.
Locality is obvious enough: in a federal system, there are many divisions of government, usually for sensible reasons of the size of problems. It doesn't normally take a national effort to support an elementary school, nor can most cities afford to support an army and a navy, and most of us would find it odious and weirdly overreaching to have state government decide on immigration policy or national government deciding where to put stop signs and posting speed limits. There are fair, rational, and necessary limits to the reach of government at every level.
Need is often less obvious, but it is inextricably tied to both fairness and locality. Do we need a floating currency, or a central bank to manage it? Do we need speed limits on residential streets? (they cost real money, you know.) Is it fair or necessary to decide that after 6 am on Sunday, no one can buy beer, even if they don't get off work on Saturday night until 7? All of those are examples of real laws, that were deemed necessary and fair by someone presumably elected in a fair and inclusive process. and are all affected by their "locality" within government, either national, state, or neighborhood.
Perhaps as importantly, all are examples of governing done fairly and right, even if it places a burden on some, even if it discriminates in some wise (as for example, those who receive speeding tickets on residential streets, or who run out of beers on Saturday, knowing they won't have time to get more before work that night.) Discrimination isn't invidious, when it is needful and it burdens no one unduly or unfairly.
When discrimination, on the other hand, burdens one's political enemies unduly, it smells to high heaven of unfairness and its needfulness is called immediately into question, as in the cases in Texas and Virginia, where women seeking to undergo abortion are required to leap ever-higher hurdles of regulatory barrier to a safe, legal, elective medical procedure which no one seriously argues they have no right to elect. (there are those who argue that such a right does not exist, but they are rarely able to argue in any seriousness) Such a burden falls only on the small segment of the population who want to exercise their private right (no exercise of political rights gets more local) to terminate a pregnancy, which a majority of Texan and Virginian (most states have some burdens) lawmakers felt needed to be greatly burdened with requirements above and beyond those demanded for safety and surety in medical practice or a reasonable "cooling-off" period to prevent impulsive and regrettable actions leading to arguably-irrevocable consequences. This extremity of regulation leads one to wonder, what makes it necessary? and what makes it fair, to burden such a small group in such a profound way? whose enemies are they, that they need to be punished?
It seems to me, that women who seek abortions separate themselves voluntarily (well, more or less voluntarily) and thus it cannot be fairly argued that they are chosen for an arbitrary quality. It also seems to me, that their "difference" from the rest of the non-abortion-seeking society is already somewhat burdensome, and making it moreso really ought not to be the business of government, because it is fundamentally against the rules of fair play and violates the basic principle that governing be necessary if it must burden some and not others.
While it may unite some of the community against a perceived ill (or against me) I call bullshit on this one. Picking women who want to exercise their most private of rights, those which should be anything but public record, for discrimination fails the fairness test, it fails the necessity test, it even in my view, fails the locality test, as in government should have the least reach within the private bedrooms and operating rooms of its citizens. It's discrimination of the most invidious sort, and it will take a great deal of uniting to overcome that non-arbitrary (for once) but still invidious, unfair, unnecessary division.