Critical Choice

This year I will be voting for Democrats across the board. It won’t be because I agree with all their positions, because I don’t. I will be voting for Democrats because I believe that the Democrats have the most realistic view of the problems facing the world and are more likely to take constructive action to deal with them.

I didn’t always feel this way. In fact, for the first 22 of my 30 years of voting I was an unquestioning Republican, aligned with the conservative philosophy that government’s proper role in society is to provide greater freedom to individuals and private organizations; rather than restricting their behavior, taking their money, and dictating their values.

The first hint that my political understanding was flawed – like a brick across the head -came from the nomination of George W. Bush in 2000. As I imagine many remaining Republicans now feel about John McCain’s nomination of Sarah Palin (who is much like Bush), I couldn’t believe that rational people who cared about the country could choose someone so ill-informed, inconsistent, and childish (without any of a child’s saving curiosity) to potentially lead us all. There had to be something wrong with my assumptions about the process used by the people who made the decision.

Challenging and correcting assumptions is something I’m very adept at (though I too have my bind spots; clearly politics was one of them). My success has come from identifying the fundamental relationships that connect the facts and then testing them. In this case, I discovered that I and my party had an inaccurate understanding of “values” (they are what we collectively agree are important, rather than something intrinsic to the world) did not grasp or respect the interdependency of everyone on each other, and tended to simplify human nature to the point of being a useless and dangerous caricature (people are not good or evil, though their actions may be as defined by their society’s values).

This, along with study of a broad spectrum of issues, led to my own philosophy. Government is a group within a society, whose function is to develop and maintain the resources, infrastructure, and social cohesion necessary to ensure the long-term survival of the society. Members of the society support these vital activities in part by following laws and providing material assistance (typically through taxes, people pay for what they use).

The requirement for “social cohesion” is met in a practical sense by the rules, shared values, and common knowledge that conservatives misinterpret as an arbitrary and unnecessary restriction of freedom and dictation of values. “Freedom” is not the ability to do whatever we want to do with minimal interference by others (also defined as “personal responsibility” by those who don’t want responsibility for what happens to anyone except themselves). Freedom is the right of all individuals to be represented in the decisions that society makes about itself through the agency of government.

Long-term survival of society tends to be at odds with the increased power of individuals when resources are noticeably limited. It’s obvious to me after considerable research that most of the world’s most daunting problems, from climate change to war and economic recession, are a consequence of our accelerated depletion of natural resources including (but not limited to) oil, precious metals, fresh water, and other species. Dealing with this situation will require the acquisition of new resources and reduction of waste, with the latter facilitated by the former if we switch to entirely renewable and recyclable resources. Physical and cultural infrastructure supporting perhaps a whole new economy will be needed. In the mean time, remaining resources will have to be rationed, which will necessitate further restriction of behavior. All of these actions duly fall to government – and given the scale of the problem – all governments.

In the unavoidably growing tension between government and the private sector, whose purpose is to enhance the satisfaction of individuals by using what the society collectively owns (and is managed by government), government will need to prevail until the problem is solved. Individuals and businesses can help in a multitude of ways, enabling people to use the remaining resources more efficiently and bringing the new resources into use as quickly as possible. As the growing “green” industry has demonstrated, business is already ahead of the government in several respects, but capitalism’s propensity for unsustainable exponential growth must be tamed so that we can all live within our common means.

The rational elements of our political discourse mirror the tug-of-war between the future of society and the power of the individual, represented by the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively. Although most Democrats seem just as committed to unfettered growth as Republicans, their philosophical focus on the importance of society has given them a clearer view of the need for radical change in our economy and government’s legitimate role in enabling it. They are also more likely to change their behavior to further the common good. For these reasons, I believe that they are the best choice for leadership in this critical election season.