Policy Disconnected From Principles

It takes Ross Douthat a while to build up to his point in his latest column in the New York Times but he does ultimately and I found it interesting:

Early in the pandemic a political observer might have assumed that facing a mortal threat — one that emerged in China, no less — conservatives would embrace restrictions and quarantines the way they embraced the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 expansions of federal power, while liberals and the left would accuse the right of giving up too much liberty for the sake of safety.

Something like this divide existed very early on, with conservatives like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas expressing alarm about the outbreak while liberals decried the potential racism of a “Wuhan virus” panic. But by late spring of 2020, the entire dynamic was reversed: Liberals supported tough government interventions to fight the virus, the right was full of fierce libertarians, and so it has mostly remained.

You can blame Donald Trump’s early insouciance for establishing this pattern, or the way that Covid hit blue metropoles hardest early while taking much longer to take root in rural regions. But it’s also useful to do in-group/out-group analysis, which suggests that conservatives were more willing to support limitations on liberty that fell on foreigners and international travelers — to them, out-groups — but balked at restrictions that seemed to fall most heavily on their own in-groups, from the owners of shuttered businesses to the pastors of closed churches to the parents of small children deprived of school.

For many liberals, it was the opposite. Early on the idea of a travel ban or quarantine rule looked authoritarian and bigoted because it seemed likely to punish their own constituencies, especially immigrant communities in big cities. But the restrictions that were imposed from March onward were developed within one of liberalism’s inmost in-groups — the expert class, the public-health bureaucracy — and geared in different ways to the needs of other liberal constituencies: The professional class could adapt to virtual work, the teachers’ unions could mostly keep their paychecks without risking their health, and the youthful antiracism activists of spring and summer 2020 were conveniently deemed to be exempt from the rules that forbade other kinds of gatherings.

This same pattern shows up in the debate over vaccine mandates. The mainstream right clearly found it easier to be uncomplicatedly pro-vaccine when anti-vax sentiment was coded as something for crunchy “Left Coast” parents, as opposed to conservatives skeptical of the public-health bureaucracy and sharing Facebook posts on ivermectin.

Where does that leave us?

• Politics is based on interest not principles.
• A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
• Changing your mind when your team’s stakes change can be a path “to stronger principle, greater charity, or both”.

That last is pretty Hegelian and it’s hard to see how it can happen when changing your mind as new facts emerge is seen as weakness or, worse, apostasy.

How can we improve the odds of the latter actually taking place? It isn’t guaranteed. A change of positions as your team’s stakes change can also lead to a complete abandoning of principle and charity. I think there needs to be more space for diversity of opinion than is presently tolerated which is darned hard to do in the era of social media when extreme views that adhere to the ideological orthodoxy are rewarded and all other views are punished. Or can barely be heard through the din.