The Anti-Broder Center Redux
Over at Balloon Juice, E.D. does some ‘splainin’ about his worldview. I must say that it’s one of my favorite pieces ever from our humble webmaster. A brief taste:
Some issues are divided into sides that many of us would rather not be on. Artificial opposites are manufactured and if we don’t hop on one bus or the other we must be squishy moderates, trying to please everyone. We have all sorts of false dualisms in our society. We have to be Republican or Democrat; we have to be liberal or conservative; we have to be pro-choice or anti-abortion. Well even my three year old understands what a false choice is: “do you want peas or carrots” almost inevitably turns into “neither, I want goldfish crackers.”
Earlier: E.D. and I discussed the need for an Anti-Broder Centrism.
I took 1 st loans when I was not very old and it aided my business a lot. Nevertheless, I require the financial loan once more time.Report
But E.D. doesn’t, for example, resist the conservative/liberal dichotomy in practice. He embraces the conservative label, or at least I thought he did. If he wants to reject it, I’d love to read that essay. It’s false that you have to be a Republican or, if not, a Democrat. It’s not a false dualism, it’s a real dualism, because, yes, there are only two major parties, but it’s not binding. You can just not be one of those. You can have as nuanced a position on abortion as you want. It’s only if you care about the order of battle on those existing dichotomies in the prevailing political conversation, which amounts to a willing embrace of them, that they have power over you. You absolutely are free to reject them: just do so. But don’t simultaneously choose to engage them and complain that social battles take that form. So society divides itself into us and them and goes to battle… well, we very much knew that, and it’s a much deeper, older phenomenon in human affairs than what a few 21st-century thirtysomethings complaining about it could possibly add up to an effective critique of in my view. It’s well-worn territory. But it’s an entirely elective activity for any one person to engage in. So just don’t, if you’re not inclined to. But it doesn’t actually say much about your politics or anything interesting to make that observation. It’s just an observation about a well-known phenomenon. If you don’t want to take sides, don’t take sides — express yourself freely. But not taking sides, or expressing discontent with the terms of debate as they stand, is nothing to pat yourself on the back over in my mind, especially in a generic context. Just go ahead and improve the debate you don’t like, or start it anew, with innovative, complex, well-considered thoughts of your own if you can. Who’s stopping you?Report
@Michael Drew, Dude, it’s not about patting myself on the back. I’m basically saying look you can’t call every position that doesn’t fit nicely into an ideological corner “high Broderism”. That’s a cop-out. Sure, much of the time it’s ‘us’ vs ‘them’ but how much of that is just a game we’re supposed to play because the powers that be want us to continue down that path? I don’t know man. I just don’t see that as very productive.
And I guess you missed a bunch of my writing lately that basically boiled down to “I don’t know if I can keep calling myself a conservative.” Like thisReport
@E.D. Kain, Erik, TPTB did not introduce the tendency to divide into pro- vs. anti-, us vs. them camps into human nature. And you never had to buy into any of it. The pose you take is very much one that says, “I’m too good, too smart, too preciously complex for these crude boxes The Man is trying stuff me into.” Just say what you have to say, man.Report
@E.D. Kain, And for all the agonizing, what is it that’s keeping you from taking the leap – rejecting the label definitively and finally? Nothing external, that’s for sure, ConservoList be damned. What is it that got you to join the conservative team to start with? It couldn’t be that you willingly accepted the terms of that particular false dualism and decided to care how one side did against the other, could it? If you’re rethinking that, wonderful, but what’s keeping you from doing just whatever you feel like doing? People join together in ideological groups because they want to, because they want to be on a team, or because they think it furthers their agenda. But they do it because they want to. This is America, no one has to do it. You’re free to cut the rope. You really are.Report
Excellent post, E.D.Report