I don’t read the Weekly Standard much but in this article in it Ike Brannon touches on something very important. Very, very few policies that get enacted into law are actually the best way to accomplish any objective. Take flood policy, for example:
For instance, they observed, the best policy regarding floods would be to simply disallow all construction in a floodplain, or at least forswear any public financial assistance to people who do build there and subsequently have property damaged by a flood.
which the observant reader would notice resembles what I’ve pointed out on the subject. However, it runs afoul of politics:
However, such a promise cannot be kept: the political pressures to help victims will be too great to resist. What’s more, people recognize that reality, so they fail to heed the government warnings and build in the floodplains anyway, which in turn forces the government’s hand by putting it in a situation where it finds itself obligated to provide assistance after a flood.
Oddly, there are no corresponding political pressures not to have victims. The real victors are land developers.
He’s not quite on such solid ground in discussing immigration policy:
The optimal immigration strategy would be to have no illegal immigrants. Jeff Sessions would achieve that by making massive new investments in border enforcement until it is nearly impossible to enter illegally. My way would be to let every immigrant who arrives in the U.S. receive permission to work.
Is that really the objective of immigration policy? And why doesn’t the actual policy respond to the political pressures that flood policy does? There is a consensus that total immigration (legal and illegal) should be at or below its present level. There is no consensus that it should be at or above its present level. And yet that’s where the policy sits.
I think the answer is that there’s good money to be made from bad policy.
It would be nice if we actually were arriving at second best policies or responding to consensus. What actually seems to be happening is that we’re arriving at the least unacceptable policy that generates the most power, influence, and money for those who support it. We’re optimizing the wrong things.
I don’t think we even HAVE an immigration policy. If Trump was elected for any policy he put forward, it was the Wall. But he doesn’t have the authority to build it, despite his mandate, as a nation, we can’t make up our minds about immigration. We’re compassionate for those who make the dangerous journey across the southwest desert or the days long ride sealed in back of an airless truck and survive, but for the desperate poor left behind in El Salvador, we have no compassion. Why,? Jeff Sessions knows why. We are not rational, only emotional.
BTW, I had to look it up, Puerto Ricans ARE American citizens and relocate here if they wish. Population 3.5 million. No, they won’t all come, but many will.
You need centrists to come up with the second best strategies. Or better yet, they could even come up with the very best strategies by evaluating the ideas of each side dispassionately.
We have no more centrists. The center did not hold.
I’m not really a centrist. I have extreme distrust of political parties and politicians. I’m probably best described as “eclectic”. Those on the right tend to think of me as a leftist and those on the left as a right-winger. How one reacts to my views is sort of a litmus test.
The middle ground between those who want open borders to implement their style of compassion, who believe that borders are immoral, or just want to disrupt American society on the one hand and those who want open borders to lower the price of labor on the other is to have open borders. Although those are frequently presented as contrasting views the real contrast is between both of those groups and most Americans who don’t want open borders.
To head off the obvious retorts, if you can’t think of any individual or group you’d exclude from permanent residence in the United States, you support open borders.
My definition of centrist is a pragmatic person without strong political ideological leanings. Seems to fit you, from what I read here.
I agree with your framing of the immigration issue. Neither party has been in favor of the policies that most voters want, but the GOP paid lip service to it for a couple of decades. It became obvious that it was hollow rhetoric and Trump exploited that opening. Meanwhile the Democrats have peeled some people off by framing it as an issue of racial sensitivity. All that has done is increased polarity so that nothing gets done.
Back to the centrist definition…I recall a lot of discussion on this back in the “aughts” and people would quibble over whether “moderate” or “centrist” was more fitting. I don’t see much reason to prefer one over the other, and I don’t think it has to do with occupying the exact center of the ideological spectrum (just holding some middle ground, whether center right or center left or even averaging out different positions on different issues.)
To me it’s about the ability to see room for compromises and form bridges between people of opposing views. Which is why pragmatism figures into my definition- centrist/moderates are results oriented.
My first encounter with the term “centrist” was in the context of the phrase “Nixonian centrist”. A “Nixonian centrist” was someone who identified the middle position between two extremes and assumed that, whatever it was. That’s certainly not me.
“Moderate” isn’t a position on the political spectrum. It’s an affect, a style.
I’ve been described as a pragmatist but pragmatism has gotten sort of a bad name lately.