Foreign Policy's blog ran a great piece last year describing policy as "The Opposite of Thinking." The author's point is that the purpose of policy is to do all of the difficult thinking about policy in advance, such that the people tasked with carrying it out don't make rushed decisions. Or, for that matter, any decisions.
Your pie maker has been chewing on this idea for a while, and recently came to see it in terms of the "Interests vs. Values" theme of this blog. Policy is derived from perceived interests of the polity, a set of rules believed to advance the prosperity, power and identity of the decision makers. Values are rules that help define the identity and meaning of prosperity of the decision makers and shape how they view the use of power.
Because of their connection to identity, values are difficult to discuss and largely impossible to change through dialogue. However, people of conflicting values can often find common interests, and the US system of government assumes that we will make policy based on that common ground. The prescribed path, in other words, is to go from values to interests to policy.
However, this idea breaks down when a policy becomes a value unto itself. If "Lower Taxes" or "Universal Health Insurance" or any policy position replaces the value which lead to the interest from which the policy was derived, discussion is over, the interest involved will be compromised and the original values ill served.
1 comment:
And that is what ideology does: it takes values, identifies policies meant to advance those values in all cases, and then covers them with the glitter of orthodoxy.
Political parties tend to divide along certain fault lines: geography, class, or ideology. In a system like the US, where only two parties can serve in government on the national scale to any effect, it is not practical to build a party around geography or class as such a party would be too limited to gain the representation necessary to contend for dominance.
Hence, both parties are ideological in nature and become more so as their positions at the top of the pile become established. The "Big Tent" may have let many viewpoints in, but once inside the members become a captive audience for ideological propaganda and over time become increasingly homogeneous in their values and outlooks.
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