Our ability and easy willingness to place things, concepts, etc., into categories has its drawbacks, however. Often when an issue is complicated, the tendency to categorize and label it for easy sorting can be quite compulsive for many, even most, people. The problem with that is that categorizing often means oversimplification, if not outright misrepresentation. Politics is where categorizing runs amok, and groups of ideas, which seem to have nothing to do with each other when you consider them individually on their own merits, on disparate topics are lumped together en bloc as an indissoluble package. These blocs, these metasocial entities which are perhaps most concretely represented in the phenomenon of the political party, play off and against each other, and ultimately perpetuate each other’s existence. Actually, the fact that there always seem to be two political wings (even in a multiparty system, the spectrum ultimately resolves itself along a certain bipolar line) can be considered evidence that each perpetuates the other’s existence. Bipolarity implies a mutually dependent definition for each pole: it’s a fundamental relationship.

So if someone is self-aligned with one or the other political wing, they may have to battle private misgivings about certain positions that they may find themselves individually gravitating towards, but that the structure of political bipolarity has placed into the opposite camp. For instance, a “conservative” may have “liberal” feelings toward protecting the environment, but feels instinctively that such a view can only go hand-in-hand with abortion on demand, a confiscatory tax code, softness on crime, and pacifism. Similarly, a “liberal” may find himself with “conservative” sentiments about the unborn’s right to life, but feel somehow that to give play to that inclination must necessarily also include support for profligate military spending, cavalier exploitation of the environment, and execution of the mentally incompetent (when the natural outcome of reactionary, polarized political assessments is seen in stark relief, its sheer absurdity becomes apparent).

A crucial point needs to be made here: these “wings,” that everyone knows and hears about as “left” and “right,” are real. People often align themselves with one or the other and assess all views in a reactionary manner, as to whether said views are in keeping with their own “wing.” But these political wings are illogical; i.e., someone holding a set of views consistent with a single political platform will almost certainly be holding a set of views that can be shown to be contradictory when viewed individually on their own merits. I make this distinction about the simultaneous reality and yet illogic of political blocs, because when one aims to describe a certain view as being held because it is part of either a “right-wing” or “left-wing” ethos (which is a reasonable proposition), one almost invariably succeeds in painting oneself as a dyed-in-the-wool member of the opposite wing! One’s point of view is thereby discounted as being merely a product of the opposite political pole. This is one of the powerful ways that political wings perpetuate one other: the very basis of their existence is reactionary. Thus, any assessment, however relatively neutral, of a point of view as coming from a certain political slant, is, to the devotee of that political slant, indistinguishable from sweeping categorizations made by the opposite political wing! Thus, there is no effective criticism one can make to an entrenched “-winger,” and this is one of the ways that political polarity perpetuates its own existence.

If you look closely, a basic contradiction, a hypocrisy, can be discerned at the root of this kind of thought process. There is something in the labeling that, for instance, a “right-winger” will use in designating a point of view as “left-wing” that actually implicitly acknowledges the inherent illogic of blind political grouping. But they only do so out of their own blind political grouping! But again, one entrenched in this position cannot distinguish between a neutral recognition of political polarity and the expected ideological excoriation that would come from the opposite wing. The recursive levels of circularity, the manifest lack of critical thinking, that are part and parcel of this whole mentality, is really quite appalling.

Here’s a favorite example of the sheer vacuity of the purely political mindset. I once saw a bumper sticker that read “Vote Republican: It’s easier than thinking.” Now, what’s the implication here: that never voting for any Republican, as a rule, would be the natural outcome of “thinking"? That’s ridiculous; are we truly to believe that there is a single “stupid, evil, and wrong” party, any more than there is one single “brilliant, virtuous, and correct” party? Let’s assume that what the bumper sticker means is to criticize voting straight-ticket anything. Well, why Republican? Would voting straight-ticket Democrat be somehow better? If the bumper sticker means to criticize voting straight-ticket, why single out one party for criticism? The premise is self-contradictory. Whoever wrote that bumper sticker simply wasn’t thinking, anymore than anyone who would write one with the word “Democrat,” “Green,” or anything else, substituted for “Republican.”

Last updated: November 25, 2003; 4:18 pm CST