The illusory pragmatism of the ‘pick-a-side’ crowd

In times of political polarization, it is hard not to pick a side. When someone defends judging a person or group independently, that is, according to how they should act, instead of how they fare compared to “the other side”, they will often be called ‘naïve’ or ‘utopian’. Sometimes, it will be claimed - but rarely meant - that being impartial will cause great harm or be even worse than openly being on the other side.

“Not picking a side” does not mean to both-sides everything. Surely some groups or persons can behave consistently better than others, so generally preferring them is acceptable and welcome. “Picking a side” here means downplaying flaws on your side and exaggerating their qualities, while doing the reverse for the other side, either in an unconcious but often in a deliberate way. Being impartial, on the other hand, means trying to base the evaluation of a proposal, stated value, or track record, on their own merits, instead of on who the person or party is issuing it. Being impartial, in turn, does not mean you cannot trust some people or groups more than others. But if your stance is based on trust rather than the evaluation of the merit, you should be transparent about it instead of rationalizing the defense of a position you did not you use your own reasoning to get to.

Suppose the government, lead by A, announces several spending cuts to balance the budget. Opposition party B accuses the government of unnecessarily slashing essential programs, in a move which will only make party A’s funders richer but will decrease economic growth so that even the fiscal benefits will not be realized. An impartial person would try to evaluate each claim on its own merits, read about the economics of spending cuts, dynamics of economic growth, and the specifics of the proposed measure. They might very well conclude that it is too difficult to make up their mind on their own. Ideally, the person would then try to look for opinions from trusted experts who have built a reputation of being impartial themselves, not someone who would alwasy argue in favor of what one of the parties is proposing. In a polarized environment, even that might be too hard. Each party might have their own “experts” associated with them. In this case, admitting we probably have no idea is the truthful strategy and the one with the best consequences, in general.

For any level of influence you have in society, it will almost always be the case that you will have greater influence for promoting impartiality than you will have for helping “your side” win. This seems wrong to most people. Violations of impartiality abound, while it is obvious that some side always wins. That is all true, but it doesn’t make picking a side more effective than promoting impartiality.

How much does your position matter? If you are a regular citizen, it matters very, very little either way. As the advocates of picking a side make sure we all know, it doesn’t matter if you hold public figures to high standards; refuse to vote for anyone who does not meet them; vehemently condemn transgressions from wherever they come: it will change nothing. One of the leading candidates will still get elected; they will still act in ways you disapprove of; biased newspapers will still get subscriptions; etc. The advocates will then add: if one is worse than the other, shouldn’t we prefer the lesser evil? And if so, shouldn’t we work for the lesser evil to prevail?

We should definitely prefer the lesser evil, but it doesn’t follow we should work for it. Because just like when we are promoting impartiality, our actions also matter very, very little when we are trying to change the outcome of an election. The chances our vote will decide the election are close to nil; same with our posts. The type of stance taken by each regular citizen only makes a significant difference for the citizens themselves and for the people who interact with them – their family, friends, colleagues. And in this environment, being impartial is clearly superior to picking a side.

I concede that being a staunch supporter of a side can create some feeling of community with fellow partisans. The downsides, however, are much greater, and there are other perfectly good ways to create community.

In a polarized environment, we pick a side not because we believe it is highly virtuous, but because the other side is perceived as incredibly flawed. The thing is, even though we know we may not be on board with the most extreme views associated with our side, we tend to think everyone on the other side shares the extreme views associated with it. Further, we tend to incorporate as our own fundamental values positions we hold merely because the people in our tribe hold. All this tends to distance us from interactions we could greatly benefit from. Currently, we see political polarization affecting the quality even of family ties, which are the strongest bonds people have and the ones most independent of like-mindedness. When you’re impartial, however, and particularly when you show you don’t have any high praise for some politician your counterpart despise, people won’t perceive you as a threat and hence will be perfectly capable of engaging with you. Yes, despite the claims that you are naïve or warnings that you are “causing great harm”, nobody (or almost) will fight with you if you don’t pick a side. To be sure, it is not always the case that the best strategy, from a self-interest point of view, is being impartial. If the polarization is so extreme as to represent a personal risk, then surely it is pragmatic to pick a side. But in current polarized democracies, this personal risk is greatly exaggerated.

Not being partisan is also good for you independently of your relationship with others. People who are highly involved in politics have poorer mental health and even general health. Ford et al. find that political news can increase stress significantly. Sadly, they fail to conclude that being involved in politics is negative overall because they think it is important for people to feel angry so that they do engage in politics.

In sum, if you are not an influential person, the greatest consequences of being partisan or not falls upon your own well-being and of your close ones, and being impartial is greatly superior.

Suppose, instead, that you do have some influence. Maybe you are a columnist in a big paper, a respected academic, or a revered writer. People listen to you, and maybe you can change some votes. But our premise - that people are asking you to “pick a side” - is that we are in a polarized environment. Then, by definition, most people will have made up their mind already about which party they prefer. What your support will do is close people’s minds to whatever you have to say, not only about party politics but everything else as well.

If, instead, you are perceived as objective - and being objective is the most reliable way to be perceived as such - you will maintain your influence, which may affect even the policies of the party you don’t prefer. I believe the only good reason there could possibly exist to become a staunch partisan is that you were convinced, after careful examination, that the policies your party favors are much superior to the policies favored by the other side and/or that your party has much more virtuous representatives. In that case, being impartial won’t hurt your case, on the contrary. As you receive evidence of each sides’ good or bad policies and behavior, you judge them one-by-one. If you are correct, “your” party will still come out looking much better. And your credibility is spared in the process.

If you become a staunch partisan to promote “the lesser evil”, however, you will run into severe risks. The first is that you miscalculate the “amount of evil” and end up vocally promoting the greater one, lending it your credibility in the process. The second is that people will use your clear partisanship when you are arguing for the “fake” reasons to support the lesser evil to undermine your true arguments for the lesser evil. The third is it helps normalize bad proposals and bad behavior. The “next evil” might become much greater and acceptable than it would have been.

Extreme partisanship - who benefits?

If promoting partisanhip is as bad as I claim, then why do we see so many people arguing otherwise? Notably, if I defend that strong parties are positive for democracies, why do those same parties argue so forcefully in favor of political partisan participation? I believe this is due to parties being caught in a prisoner’s dilemma with respect to partisanhip-promotion. I’ll use an analogy to explain.

Apple and Google are two of the leading technology companies in the world, and fierce competitors in several markets. These companies compete to increase their sales, very often at the expense of the other company. For that, they are constantly innovating and trying to make the experience of their users more enjoyable, reliable and easy. But improving their own products is not the only strategy on which Apple and Google rely to secure more sales. They also promote an emotional connection between their consumers and the brands. This means some people will prefer a product because it was designed by Apple (or Google).

Is it good for consumers that the companies exist and are “strong” (in the sense that they are able to effectively coordinate their workforce around their projects)? Sure. The scale of their projects require them to be very large endeavors. It is hard to imagine how someone could produce an iPhone if all the engineers were working independently on their projects. Their competition has been incentivizing an array of innovations in the past decades. Is it good for consumers to willingly embark on the brand loyalty project? Surely not. The more that sales are dependent on loyalty instead of product features, the less incentive the companies will have for innovating and delivering good products at reasonable prices.

Likewise, policymaking is a huge task. We need large organizations capable of proposing and implementing measures which will benefit society while maintaining a general level of acceptance among the population. But increasing partisanship will only be of interest to the beneficiary party, and some supporters directly linked to specific measures.

Here’s the prisoner’s dilemma: even for this select few true beneficiaries, it might not be worth it overall. I believe most people join political parties because they genuinely want to make a positive difference. Even if you are skeptical that “most people” do that, then you might at least agree that the people we would like to see joining political parties should have this quality. Efforts at partisanship promotion, then, are not even necessarily in the interest of the members of political parties. A large share of them (the best share) will feel the way a bright-eyed engineer who was just admitted to Apple or Google in the hopes of developing revolutionary technology feels when tasked with some brand loyalty project. Considering that these partisan benefits tend to get cancelled by the efforts of the other parties at promoting partisanship in their favor, then a population which is much more flexible around partisanship is better for all involved.

Hence my recommendation for your new year’s resolution: tone down your partisanship. The first step would be not to deliberately downplay the flaws on one side and exaggerate those on the other. Then try not to do it even on an unconscious level. Assume more good faith from others, recognize that even people who might have awful politics can still have many other qualities. If you have little influence, this will have no effect on the state of politics, but neither would any other strategy. Your life and the life of those close to you will likely improve a little, though. If you do have some influence, you just might nudge the political scene towards a better situation.

Wait, I thought this was a blog about parliamentarism…

The best solution for affective polarization is parliamentarism (or, on the flip side, presidentialism is awful also for polarization). If hyperpartisanship comes from the top, as I have argued, then changing the party incentives should change its prevalence, and does. As Mark Copelovitch likes to say, it’s all in Linz, the rest is commentary. Three of the problems with presidentialism identified by Linz - winner-take-all, fixed mandates, personalism - directly contribute for political actors to promote polarization.

Winner-take-all - A president single-handedly determines how the executive works. On the one hand, this means building coalitions is less important (particularly when parliamentarism is combined with proportional representation). Yes, there are coalitions in presidentialism too, but they are composed in an environment of much greater bargaining power from the president. On the other hand, the very fact that one winner will get so much power and all losers will consequently have so little power raises the stakes considerably. Both hands incentivize political agents to play hardball, exaggerating their own qualities and arguing their opponents will represent a complete disaster.

Fixed mandates - If a president wins the election, they will have much less reason to be preocuppied with the people aggrieved. Except for the use of the convoluted impeachment process, avoidable with minimal concessions, a president is all but guaranteed to maintain all the powers acquired on day one till the end of their mandate. There will be plenty of time to reward loyalists exhalting the president’s qualitities and warning of the terrible dangers of any other option until reelection. If there won’t be the chance for reelection, then…, problem solved.

Personalism - Presidentialism is particularly suscetible to character assassination (and real assassinations too, but that is another topic). If one successfully smears a member of a party in a parliamentary country, the party may simply dissociate from that person and maintain its reputation. The party might choose to act that way even if the smearing is baseless. It will be less likely to cooperate with those who did the smearing, however. If my presidential candidate is smeared, though, the penalty one needs to pay for switching candidates are enormous. Not only will it be hard to build a connection between a new candidate and the electorate, the whole party and coalition will suffer, since the project is so associated with the person of the candidate or president. Dissociating from a sitting president is inherently risky as well. One will get less visibility, fewer posiion, less influence. It makes a lot more sense to both stick with the leader of your party (even if the accusations are real), and promote a counter-offense, smearing the other side as well.

Promoting parliamentarism on the individual level

Establishing parliamentarism would be the best thing to cool things down, but that is not the main topic of this post. I have written about the best strategy available for people who are not influential, and for those who are. As it turns out, asserting your preference for parliamentarism and refusing to support any presidential candidate or elected president because of your principled parliamentarism is a very effective way to maintain good relations and dialogue with people of significantly different loyalties, as I have noticed. Also - and I say this without a hint of irony, even if you may doubt me - it even does pretty well at parties, being perceived as an eccentric and harmless position. For the truly influential, a parliamentary stance will help strengthen congresses versus presidents even if a full switch of form of government doesn’t immediately happen. If you won’t be a parliamentarist for idealist reasons, do it for pragmatic ones.

Happy new year.