Chill Out About Political Differences

Politics is hard!

Politics provokes anger and divisiveness like little else other than religion and, in my case, anthropics. About 7 in 10 Democrats wouldn’t date a member of the opposite party and about three-quarters of people care a lot about their partner sharing their political views. To quote a particularly eloquent and gripping line that a person spoke after finding out that the person they were on a date with didn’t vote:

“And I was like ‘I’m never speaking to him again,” she said. “I almost kicked him out of my car.”  

This is a bit worrying for a lot of reasons, not least among them is that young women are a full 23 points (!!!!!^5) more liberal than young men. If people mostly only date those with their values, a lot of liberal women and conservative men will have a very difficult time finding love.

It also reflects a quite infantile approach to politics. You see, when I was young and libertarian, I thought being a libertarian was a test of basic sense. If one was capable of understanding fairly basic economics, they’d be pretty much a libertarian. Sure, maybe they’d have a few disagreements at the margins, but they’d be almost entirely on board with libertarianism. Those who disagreed, I concluded, were just incapable of grasping fairly elementary logic.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize how stupid of a view this was. Politics is complicated—political issues depend on quite complicated assessments, both empirical and moral. I have friends who are smarter and more politically knowledgeable than I am on both sides of the political spectrum. The world is a complicated place!

Politics is, in my view, quite a lot harder than philosophy. While philosophy can be decided from the armchair with sufficient thought, politics can’t. Deciding most political issues depends in complex ways on data analysis that I am, like most people, simply not equipped for. The reason people don’t want to raise the minimum wage, for example, is not generally because they’re evil or stupid—it’s because they worry about deleterious employment effects.

Yet in my naivete, while I sort of thought everyone who disagreed with me was stupid (in retrospect, this was an unbelievably dumb belief to have), it could have been much worse. I could have thought everyone who disagreed with me was evil.

Ask pro-choicers about why pro-lifers are opposed to abortion and the common answer is that they want to control women’s bodies. Of course, pro-lifers say that they’re against, you know, killing babies, but really this is all a front for wanting to control women—specifically their uteruses. This is quite profound error and hubris, coming out of the childish notion that those who disagree with you about political issues must be evil or cartoonishly stupid. Seeing as people find abortion to be so obvious that they just can’t imagine how anyone disagrees with them, they conclude that half the country is evil and wants to control women.

I’m pro-choice though I used to be pro-life. At no point was my belief on abortion dependent on some perverse desire to control women. What changed it was that I no longer think abortion—at least in the early stages—constitutes murder.

People have a startling absence of cognitive empathy when it comes to politics. It’s as if they just can’t imagine how anyone would disagree with them, even when lots of very moral and smart people do, and they’ve spent no time reading the other side. I think on pretty much every topic, a smart and reasonable person could disagree with me (except, of course, anthropics, where those who disagree with me are a bunch of immoral hooligans)!

Those on the left and right both find it inconceivable that anyone reasonable could disagree with them about who to vote for. Now look, as I’ve written before, I think Harris is the better choice by a mile. But I can certainly imagine how a reasonable person would come to disagree—one might rationally regard arming Ukraine to raise the risk of nuclear war, be worried about her support for abortion (if one is pro-life), and think that Trump was a decent president. I don’t think any of this is right, but I know many smart, thoughtful people who have heard the arguments on the other side and yet still think this is true.

Presidents appoint huge numbers of people to their administration and majorly affect many different regions of the world and areas of politics. Given this, it’s genuinely difficult to figure out which candidate will be better overall. Almost certainly one of them will be better in regards to some things, and the other will be better in regards to other things. It’s genuinely difficult to make holistic comparisons about who is better overall.

Even on topics that I regard as obvious where people aren’t appreciably biased—anthropics, for instance—there are smart people that disagree with me. The things that seem obvious to one person don’t seem obvious to others! So even if the permissibility of abortion seems obvious to you—probably because you’re ridiculously overconfident based on shallow reasoning—that doesn’t mean it is actually obvious enough that others can only disagree with you out of stupidity or malevolence.

The world is a complicated place. Treating one’s political views as a referendum on their moral sense is ridiculous and demonstrates a quite infantile refusal to acknowledge the complexity of the world.