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Potter: Partisans need to make a choice — do we define ourselves by what we believe in or by what we despise?

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As a public space in which good faith and civil democratic debate can occur, the United States looks to be pretty much finished.

Cass Sunstein wrote in a recent column for Bloomberg that the problem with America is something much worse than polarized politics. He sees the country as beset by what he calls “Political Manichaeism,” where political disagreements are not seen as reasonable disputes among fellow citizens, but instead “as pitting decent people with decent character against horrible people with horrible character.” Basically, it’s good versus evil, with each side defined less by what they actually care about, and more by what (and who) they despise.

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There is a good discussion to be had about why this is the case, a fascinating story to be told about how we got here. Does the steady march toward polarization go back to Reagan, or Nixon, or Kennedy? Is it the fault of Republicans, or of Democrats, or is the whole political system to blame? Is it third party financing, or maybe the media? And if it’s the media, is it Fox News, or CNN? Was it the FCC’s elimination of the Fairness Doctrine? Is it because of the decline of mainstream media, or is it the rise of the internet — and is that just tomayto/tomahto? Is social media the real culprit, or fake news? Is it adherence to “balance” in journalism that drives the appetite for partisan media, or is fair and balanced journalism a bulwark against it?

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Poke around a bit and you’ll find arguments for and against all of those possibilities. What is not really up for debate is the reality of the situation. The election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 looked like the low-water mark of partisanship in America, and the description of American politics as “two troops of apes shrieking at one another across a great partisan divide” looks optimistic in retrospect.

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U.S. President Donald Trump
U.S. President Donald Trump Photo by Antti Aimo-Koivisto /AP

As bad as it is, what is more disturbing is how the situation has evolved up here in Canada. We’ve long flattered ourselves that our politics are more civil than it is in the U.S., maybe because there’s less money involved, or because the stakes are lower or the parliamentary system is better, or because our media are more concentrated, or just maybe because we’re all so much nicer.

But as anyone who has followed the recent debates in the #cdnpoli precinct of Twitter are well aware, Canadian politics is well down the same path as we’ve seen in America, perhaps irreversibly so. And what makes what is going on so unnerving is that it is not a case of anonymous trolls or party hardliners dragging the moderate middle to the rough edges. Instead, the steady march into the pit of vulgarity, meanness, stridency and unrelenting bad faith is being led by experienced members of parliament, high-level political staffers, and even cabinet ministers and their opposition shadows.

There is nothing to gained by naming names or describing incidents or repeating verbatim exchanges — if you’re paying the slightest attention, you know what is going on. And arguing about who started it only underscores the problem: A line seems to have been crossed, where even the politicians and other actors who have seemed most committed to resisting the tug of good-versus-evil Manichaeism have decided to go all in on painting their opponents not as basically decent people with different views on things, but as horrible people with horrible character. And again: neither side is blameless in all of this.

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At some level, we all know that we’re entering a pretty dark place. And there is a pretty broad consensus emerging that social media is a big part of the problem. The former journalist (and, it is worth adding, former speechwriter for Justin Trudeau) Colin Horgan wrote a nice little thread on Twitter where he noted that the problem with the platform is that it isn’t a medium designed for accountability. “It is built for bots. It is built for trolls. It is built for fake accounts. It’s built for all of those things, and more besides. And it’s built so that things you say don’t last. It’s built for not being responsible for what you say. That’s what it is.” And politics, he added, is supposed to be the opposite of that.

As a result, what happens when politicians and their cronies start using Twitter as their primary means of communicating with their audience is that it stops being communicative and deliberative, and it takes on a much more performative sort of cast. And that alone means that there is a lot to be said for demanding of our MPs that they simply get off Twitter — it is hard to imagine any aspect of our politics that wouldn’t be improved by such a move.

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But at the same time, we need to be wary of falling into a sort of soft technological determinism where we recite pidgin McLuhanisms as a way of avoiding assigning responsibility where it is rightly due. It’s true, the medium shapes the message. But the problem with blaming the media or the platforms for everything is it leads to blame-shifting: if we only heckle the New York Times editorial page editors enough, or bully newspapers into calling Trump a liar in their headlines, or if enough of us complain to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey about Twitter bots or parody accounts, or we hold a mass prayer for Mark Zuckerberg to be hit by a bus or for Facebook to be broken up by regulators, then things will go back to the way they were.

But it’s not going to happen. This is the world we’ve built. It reflects who we are, our hopes and fears, our biases and our values. There’s no business model, regulation, or filter waiting to be discovered that is going to save us. As the University of Ottawa law professor Craig Forcese wrote on Twitter recently, “The problem stems, not from the medium, but from ourselves.”

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And the ourselves who are most to blame for all of this are the partisans.

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Look, many of us have good acquaintances, friends even, who are partisans. But as anyone who spends time with enough of them knows, there is something fundamentally wrong with the partisan brain. Decent, smart, educated people who seem to have their feet firmly planted in the realm of reason and logic, cause and effect, inference and deduction, suddenly lose their minds when faced with an issue over which there is partisan advantage to be had, or when a threat to their tribe’s hold on power looms.

Arguing with them doesn’t work. Appealing to their sense of fairness or better judgment is no good. Partisans in the grip of partisanship can’t be reached, and won’t be helped — it’s like they are living in a different part of the galaxy where the familiar laws of reality don’t apply. They can only help themselves, and so in the interest of offering friendly but also urgently self-interested advice, here are three principles or guidelines partisans need to follow that will help guide them back to the comfortable gravity and welcoming atmosphere of Planet Sanity.

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1. “What if my opponent did that?”

When it came to raw partisanship and unvarnished control-freakery, Stephen Harper did a lot of things that made his opponents mental. So much so, that a strong case could be made that the overwhelming appeal of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in 2015 was that they promised to just stop doing these sorts of things.

Yet if after the Trudeau-led Liberals came to power you had kept a running tally of things the Trudeau government had done labeled “what if Stephen Harper did that?” you’d have a pretty lengthy thread by now. Because despite riding to power on a wave of good intentions, in a lot of ways — its control over Parliament, the lack of transparency and the abuse of process, the torquing of public policy and programmes for partisan advantage — this government is in many important respects no better than the one it replaced.

Former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper
Former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper Photo by Lyle Aspinall /Postmedia/File

Of course, they don’t see it that way. No one ever does, because people tend to interpret their own behaviour in light of what they see as their true motives. And because they see their motives as fundamentally good, the Liberals give themselves a pass for engaging in the behaviours for which they (and the press gallery) crucified Harper.

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But here’s the thing: Harper almost certainly interpreted his own behaviour in exactly the same way. He no doubt justified his own control freakery and partisan gamesmanship on the same grounds — that it was in the service of the public interest. To respond that no, what Harper was really doing was advancing partisan interests makes the fundamental partisan error: “What I do is in the public interest, what my opponent does is for partisan reasons.”

Looking at your own actions the way your opponent might see them is very difficult, but you have to try. What you see might surprise you.

2. The principle of charity

The requirement that you assume your political opponent has more or less the same goals that you have — namely, making the world a better place — is just a specific form of a more general injunction, which is that you should always begin with the assumption that your opponents are rational. That is, you should assume that their beliefs are for the most part true, and that their beliefs and desires are connected to each other and to reality in some plausible way.

This is what philosophers call the “principle of charity.” It comes in various versions of varying strength, but the core of it is a demand that we interpret someone’s statements and behaviour in the most rational way possible. That is, we should avoid attributing irrationality, delusion, or bad faith to someone when a coherent or rational interpretation can be had. That doesn’t mean there are no irrational or deluded people, nor does it mean that no one ever acts in bad faith. But as Joe Heath puts it in his book, Enlightenment 2.0, “If our understanding of the world depends crucially upon the claim that everyone else is an idiot, evil, on the take, or part of the conspiracy, then the problem almost certainly lies with our understanding and not with the world.”

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In short, before calling your opponent insane, a lunatic, a criminal, or a total moron, check to make sure you are giving the best possible interpretation of those views that maximizes their status as rational people.

Applying the principle of charity is a good way of doing this. But an even better approach is to try to pass the ideological Turing Test.

3. The ideological Turing Test

You remember the original Turing Test, in which the early computer scientist Alan Turing proposed to replace the ineffable question “can machines think?” with the behavioural question of whether a machine could interact with a human in a way that was indistinguishable from human to human interaction. As Turing saw it, if a human couldn’t tell the difference between talking to a human or talking to a machine, then there was no further question to be asked as to whether the machine was actually thinking.

The ideological Turing Test is the brainchild of the economist Bryan Caplan, and it is designed as a test to see whether a partisan truly understands the arguments of his or her opponent. The idea is that the partisan (say, a Liberal) is asked to answer questions or write an essay in which they are posing as their ideological opponent (say, a Conservative). If a neutral judge can’t tell the difference between the arguments of a true Conservative and those of the Liberal trying to “pass” as a Conservative, then we can conclude that the Liberal does genuinely comprehend the Conservative point of view.

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How many Liberals out there think they could seriously pass as Conservatives, and how many Conservatives could pass as Liberals? It’s not an idle question. Because if you can’t credibly represent your opponent’s views to a neutral observer, this means a few things. First, it is probably because you don’t actually understand those views. Second, this means you can’t have a proper argument with your opponent. Which suggests that you are probably not taking their ideas seriously, which means, finally, that what you’re doing is not debating them, or arguing, but performing.

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And maybe that’s the big problem — that everyone has stopped arguing with their opponents, and has decided to simply perform for their supporters.

The British journalist and essayist Walter Bagehot famously wrote that the best way of inculcating a sense of moderation in party politics is to lure intrinsically moderate and careful people into politics. Barring that, though, he thought it “the next best to contrive, that the leaders of the party, who have protested most in its behalf, shall be placed in the closest contact with the actual world. Our English system contains both contrivances: it makes party government permanent and possible in the sole way in which it can be so, by making it mild.”

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That is, Bagehot thought that parliamentary government was a useful machine for making the hot partisanship of politics mild. And yes, once upon a time our parliament may have been composed of moderate and careful men and women. But if it ever was, that is no longer the case. Moreover, it would appear that whatever contact our representatives have with the actual world, it is not rendering them sober in their interactions with their colleagues on the other side of the House of Commons.

As Bagehot saw, party government in a parliamentary system must be mild if it is to be possible at all. And our politics as it stands right now are undoubtedly milder than they are in the United States, though that is not saying much. And it probably has a lot to do with the fact that our political apparatus and partisan space is not completely divided into two opposing camps. It helps to have a multi-party system, and it helps to have a place like Quebec to mix things up.

But these are accidental virtues, and even if they serve as a bulwark against the good-versus-evil Manichaeism of Cass Sunstein’s America, it doesn’t mean our politics aren’t descending ever deeper into a style that we can call “performance partisanship.” If our representatives can’t see their way to helping themselves out of their partisan echo chambers, if they can’t put themselves in the other side’s shoes, if they can’t credibly interpret their opponents as rational people acting in good faith, then we will be not much better off than the Americans, defining ourselves not by what we believe in, but by who we despise.

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