Santorum won.
Santorum won.
Santorum won.
I don't know if I'm repeating that over and over to myself to make myself believe it, or in some sort of reverse-Wizard of Oz-type attempt to send myself to an alternative universe where it isn't true. Alas, I have no ruby slippers.
I've been going back and forth with people all day, trying to parse out whether this result is good for Romney, or Paul, or Obama, or none of the above. I'm really not sure. Colorado is the one that's really throwing me. Minnesota had crazy low turnout, Missouri didn't count, (except in the sense that spending $7 million of taxpayer money on a meaningless contest instead of schools or something else "counts"...) but Colorado. Colorado is supposed to be a reliable, bellweather-y type state, filled with Mormons. And Santorum got it. The other two I can justify as being good for Romney (breaking up the anti-Romney vote by drawing people away from Newt, making Romney look reasonable by comparison, etc.) but Mitt should have owned Colorado. He did actually spend some money there (though not as much as other places), Colorado is a bit more moderate and he was all over it in 2008. So this race just got interesting all over again.
So now on to the title of this post. Today in my Rivlin class, we talked about "core values" and polarization. First we made a list of core liberal vs. conservative values (with a sidebar for libertarians). In a class with 18 liberals and 1 conservative, this list was pretty amusing. I learned that apparently liberals are the ones who are for things like compassion, empathy, tolerance, and equality. And conservatives hate everyone and love the free market. Fortunately, although my professor is pretty far to the left, she makes a pointed effort to balance the discussion as much as possible. Even though one side is clearly wrong. She essentially made the case that most important policy issues involve a balancing of the two lists of values that we all hold dear (collective responsibility and personal responsibility; tolerance and justice for wrongdoing), rather than picking one side or the other.
But this is the problem I saw. One of the things on the list of "liberal" values was "Faith in experts/bureaucracy/government institutions", giving examples like the UN, climate change, czars etc. We talked about how liberals, even though they tend to favour personal freedom of choice for things like abortion and use of marijuana, also believe that it's right for the government to discourage overconsumption of sugar and cigarettes through heavy taxation and/or regulation. While these may seem in conflict, it is really a faith in experts and technocrats over individual choice if the evidence is strong enough. So then my professor said that she really believes that part of the way you solve gridlock and start working toward solution is to get everyone in the room to recognize and articulate the end goal, so that everyone can see we are working toward the same place, even if we want different roads to get there. The idea at that point is that you can get people to make a few compromises on the method because they are dedicated enough to achieving the overall mission.
In general, for most people, I buy this.
But.
If you have one side of the table holding lack of faith in experts and institutions as a core value, I just don't know how the discussion even gets started. For example, my mom and I watched this documentary called "Vaccine Wars" recently about the fight over mandated vaccines for children. In the interviews with the doctors and parents, it became clear they weren't even having the same discussion. The evidence is, quite simply, conclusive. If you accept a)the general rules of statistics (ie things like sample size (your 1/5/50 kids getting autism don't count as irrefutable evidence if there are tens of millions of kids with no symptoms and the other factors are fuzzy) and causal direction) and b) the expertise of institutions like the CDC and the NIH. Now once you accept the evidence...there isn't really an argument to be had. It's dangerous and stupid to not vaccinate your child. But if you don't accept things like huge studies with quality sample sizes and statistical controls as evidence, then there's really nothing to be done. It's unclear what would then count as evidence. And then...what? People on one side are wondering why we're even still having this argument (think climate change, regulating high fructose corn syrup, gun control), while the other side is demanding more "evidence" from institutions whose authority they are never going to accept anyway.
I'm getting frustrated just writing this.
Maybe this is why I work in education policy, where everything is fuzzy and nobody really knows if anything does or doesn't work for sure. Ah, the peace of uncertainty.
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