Politics is Not a Dirty Word

What Dave Roberts said. You do hear with a frightening frequency people with green sympathies, up to and including Al Gore, suggest that global warming shouldn't be a "political issue." Drained of senseless rhetoric this seems to reduce to the view that "everyone ought to agree with my favored policies." And, of course, I think everyone really should agree with my favored policies. But, in practice, they don't. And so: Politics.

This is the world, and anyone who aspires to radically alter America's energy use patterns needs to learn to live with it. Achieving the goals requires lots of political change.

Meanwhile, both whatever degree of climate change can't be prevented and whatever prevention measures we adopt will all have different kinds of costs and benefits. Different policies will allocate these costs to different people. The mechanism by which we decide what to do is called "politics" and it exists so that individuals and organizations with somewhat divergent interests and ideas can make collective decisions about how to tackle common problems. The rhetoric of anti-politics isn't just an analytic mistake, it's part of the problem. A public that doesn't believe divergent interests can be reconciled and common solutions devised for common problems -- a public that doesn't believe in politics -- is going to be a public that doesn't believe there's anything that can or should be done to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Comments

The use of "politics" as a dirty word by many a green to me implies that they are searching for a social change rather than something from the government. Remember the old mantra "reduce, reuse, recycle"? It wasn't "give tax credits to low carbon emissions cars and power plants". So I agree that some of the folly of America's environmental policy comes from the green's sentiment on politics. I think it really comes from the attitude that it will require great social action and social change; a change in people's attitudes rather than a government policy or - gasp - revamping the infrastructure.

Posted by freddiemac | November 30, 2007 5:51 PM

To be fair, I think there's a different way of rephrasing "Issue A shouldn't be a political issue" apart from "Everybody should just agree with me on Issue A." I would interpret it more favorably as "Achieving Issue A should take precedence over political advantage." So in other words, if the Democrats are able to pass major climate change legislation (cap-and-trade or whatever), then they should do it EVEN IF it will hurt them politically. The best example that leaps to mind is the Civil Rights Act, which was worth doing even though it hurt the Democrats politically for a while.

Posted by OhioBoy | November 30, 2007 6:16 PM

Yes, because if people would just "change attitudes" no government or political action would be needed. Except human beings CREATED governments and politics. There's no dichotomy there. Do you think Al Gore is too stupid to know that? There is no one solution. Carbon reduction may work, it may not. Nothing new. If what I've read about what Gore said and what I've seen of his presentations is this isn't about political "whose thing is bigger". It's about the survival of the human race as a whole. I'm not saying I'm right. What I'm saying is it's "sound bite deja vu" . That one remark defines his whole philosophy entire? I think not.

Posted by candymarl | November 30, 2007 6:19 PM

American politics is like a bad thermostat; it does not react smoothly to real-world events. Things have to be seriously overheated or frozen to trigger emergency-mode, the only circumstance in which Americans can think straight.

The triple whammy of resource depletion, climate change, and financial collapse is going to hit America like a baseball bat, probably next year, and we will get to see pragmatism revived.

The bedraggled troupe of charlatans, religious quacks and political bag men who make up the current American political scene will fade into oblivion, as will their journalistic enablers. People like Joe Klein and Fred Hiatt will vanish into the richly deserved oblivion that awaits them, and a new generation of reality-centered journalists will replace them.

Posted by HH | November 30, 2007 6:20 PM

hmmm, I always understood Al Gore to mean that the actual existence of climate change, and the consequences thereof, were not a political issue. I never understood him to particularly mean that the policies needed shouldn't be hashed out politically, but rather that certain baseline adjustments needed to be made (e.g., reduce overall carbon emissions by X), regardless of how those adjustments are made (increased fuel efficiency in cars, reduce coal plants, etc.), or the means of accomplishing those measures (tax incentives to raise fuel efficiency, investing in alternative energy sources).

Otherwise I totally agree with your analysis.

Posted by michael | November 30, 2007 6:22 PM

Bravo. I also attribute much of the sheer malevolence and corruption of the hard-core religious hard-core Republicans (read that carefully: I mean GWB, not Norquist or Huckabee) as a consequence of believing that politics is inherently dirty as contrasted with the glory of the religious world they inhabit. This is a cousin to Krugman et. al. arguing that Republican elected officials do a bad job because they believe to govern is to do bad. Some of them have the additional drive that politics is the dirty job they do as part of doing God's Work.

Posted by Sam Penrose | November 30, 2007 6:26 PM

Why would politics be involved with global warming?

After all, it only has to do with regulations and standards which may affect immense and powerful global corporations.

And it only has to do with vast amounts of investments which have to be paid for by someone, and that could either be really rich corporations and investors or schmucks like you & me.

And it only has to do with billions, hundreds of billions, maybe even trillions of dollars of new investments, and surely no one would want to compete over that.

No, there's no reason why politics and power would come in to play over global warming.

Posted by El Cid | November 30, 2007 6:26 PM

FWIW, my interpretation of Gore's saying climate change isn't a political issue was that the public debate about whether or not humans are driving climate change shouldn't be a political one. What the public response to the reality of climate change is of course is a policy issue, and politics and policy are naturally intertwined.

Posted by Jeff S. | November 30, 2007 6:29 PM

Many Democrats and liberals, especially academics of the administrative-liberal type, have this same contempt for politics. It goes along with elitism -- even though high turnout helps Democrats and hurts Republicans, on the internet you'll constantly hear Democrats talk about how stupid non-voters or blue-collar voters are and how "I think that the Democrats are better off without voters like that".

I have noticed this especially at Brad DeLong's site. Economists are especially bad in this regard, I think, and many in that field really think that Krugman is demeaning himself and destroying his reputation by playing what has to be regarded as a heroic political role.

Oddly, right-wing economists (especially libertarians) are quite willing to jump into the fray; it seems to be the administrative liberal economists who disdain that. This is true enough that the average non-economists thinks that economists as a group are much more rightwing than they really are.

Posted by John Emerson | November 30, 2007 7:35 PM

This all makes sense, but will make no difference. In America, politics is practiced by disdaining it.

As a candidate you run against congress, as an officeholder you seek bipartisan consensus, and as an elder statesmen you castigate the ideologically committed on both sides. It's a cultural thing.

Posted by southpaw | November 30, 2007 7:47 PM

Geez, Matt. Don't be such a prig. You're letting your disdain for environmentalists push you into an extreme and fussy reading of a fairly effective piece of political rhetoric.

The point is just this: Many people have in the past regarded the climate change issue as a fundamentally ideological one, pitting tree-hugging, anti-growth, back to nature Luddites against modernist lovers of growth-driven industrial progress, a debate rooted mainly in speculative fancies and irreconcilable conflicts of fundamental values, rather than simply practical and empirically resolvable disagreements over matters affecting consensus values.

But the basic facts of climate change now rest on a reasonably well-established body of scientific fact, and most any reasonable person can recognize the risks posed by climate change - risks that are real whether you prefer a much greener world or just want to preserve the world we more or less have and avoid mountains of future costs and dislocations. You don't have to have markedly "green sympathies" to recognize the potential costs of climate change and the desirability of doing something about them before they arise.

Nobody is saying that addressing the climate change issue isn't going to require the mechanisms of politics, or even that one's political ideology won't play an important role in how one thinks climate change should be addressed. But it would be good to get people to get over the crude ideological stereotypes about the nature of the climate change debate and recognize the substantial common core of widely accepted values and the practical basis for a broad consensus approach.

Posted by Dan Kervick | November 30, 2007 8:14 PM

I agree with Micheal. Gore is merely stating that what is established science,(the fact of global warming), should not be distorted in the arena of public discourse by those with conflict of interest. What we choose do about it is rightfully the topic of political discussion.

Posted by Bill Hennessey | November 30, 2007 8:51 PM

I'm all for disdaining the disdainful of politics. But there is a relevant sense in which the political valence of environmental issues did not always reflect the left/right division it has today. Nixon, for instance, presided over the first Earth Day and substantive improvements to the clean air and clean water acts.

It seems unlikely that we will return to such a cross cutting green alliance, but it this may be possible in the UK and in certain issue areas like federal land use (hunters and sierra club types v. mining companies) in the west. Something to think about.

Posted by the blackbird is involved | November 30, 2007 8:58 PM

Matt, I agree with you in a vacuum, but Gore only says that since science indicates that our planet is in serious danger, the will to save it is a moral rather than political issue.

Similarly, when he says "The debate is over on global warming," he is talking about the science and not the politics. Gore of all people understands that pseudo-scientific arguments are entirely political; and I'm quite sure he understands that policy by definition gets assembled within and comes out of the political process.

Posted by Mike H | November 30, 2007 9:50 PM

"This is the world, and anyone who aspires to radically alter America's energy use patterns needs to learn to live with it. Achieving the goals requires lots of political change."

Well, attitude change certainly, without which political change won't happen.

Polls show Americans "concerned" about global warming, but I always ask myself how many of the concerned are driving 6,000lb SUVs to pick up a 5lb bags of groceries. It's easy to be "concerned" when concern is predicated on the assumption that it's somebody else's job to do the heavy lifting required to solve the problem.

Posted by kafka | November 30, 2007 10:26 PM

I think everyone really should agree with my favored policies. But, in practice, they don't. And so: Politics.

Yes, but that's not what Al Gore is saying.

Favoring Kyoto is a political issue. Believing in global warming is not. That's like saying we should disagree about whether it's raining outside.

The politics comes in when you're arguing about solutions. If you refuse to even see the problem before your very eyes - well that's something else entirely.

Posted by Jinchi | November 30, 2007 11:59 PM

American politics is like a bad thermostat; it does not react smoothly to real-world events. Things have to be seriously overheated or frozen to trigger emergency-mode, the only circumstance in which Americans can think straight.

This is very preceptive and is indeed a central theme of US history.

The triple whammy of resource depletion, climate change, and financial collapse is going to hit America like a baseball bat,

This may or may not be true, any one is likely, any combo is possible, but a triple convergence, much less so,

probably next year

This is the stupidest thing I have read all week. (strike that, I did read a transcript of part of the GOP youtube debate)

, and we will get to see pragmatism revived.
Well, if you believe the apocalypse will be *next year* the pragmatism will be bottled water, canned food, and ammo. Or was that what you were getting at?

Posted by Kolohe | December 1, 2007 12:16 AM

Let's start by getting something straight. When Al Gore says that "global warming should not be a political issue" he is saying that the continued attempts by Inhofe and others to make the question of climate change and the human contribution to it a political question is destructive.

It's like saying that using condoms increases the risk of pregnancy or that smoking isn't bad for you.

Gore is saying that global warming is real, and people who say it is not are engaging in political pettifoggery.

Otherwise, we've got the "greens" strawman.

I don't know anybody who thinks that there are simple green solutions, beyond the low hanging conservation fruit.

As we see in today's headlines, even that lowhangin fruit involves politics, as Dingle fights CAFE standard changes on behalf of shareholders in American automobile companies (and it's not even clear that they are correctly assessing their best interests).

Nobody denies there is politics involved in policy actions. But people do say that the idea that global warming is in doubt is purely political, and not of the constructive "Whose ox are we gonna gore" kind of discussion.

Posted by jayackroyd | December 1, 2007 10:07 AM

Kervick et al. have got it.

Yglesias does seem to have an anti-green chip on his shoulder, but I take that as a function of New York Cityness (some of my best friends .... yada yada yada) rather than true Gaea-hatred.

Posted by Ben Cronin | December 1, 2007 1:24 PM

Politics should be taken seriously. And respected. Not maligned. Our personal survival may not depend on it. The survival of humanity and the planet may not depend on it. But the survival of democracy most certainly does.

Posted by General Specific | December 1, 2007 2:00 PM

Partisan Issue? Usually they say it should not be a PARTISAN issue. As in one party blocking all attempts to do anything about the problem.

All social relations involve politics.

Posted by bakho | December 1, 2007 3:24 PM

There are two kinds of "politics".

This paragraph:

"Different policies will allocate these costs to different people. The mechanism by which we decide what to do is called "politics" and it exists so that individuals and organizations with somewhat divergent interests and ideas can make collective decisions about how to tackle common problems."

assumes that there is a problem that should be solved, and the cost of the solution has to be somehow distributed. However, for political reasons, conservatives denied that there exists a problem at all. That way liberals who believe what 99% scientists believe are cast in the role of folks who want to impose costs on society just because, being liberals, they love to find a new reason to tax people. Taxing gives them as much jollies as torture gives to upright patriots.

So should the underlying facts be a political issue? To the degree that raising the issue requires outright lying, it should not.

Posted by piotr | December 1, 2007 5:00 PM

There are a number of senses of the word political that would Al Gore's statement cogent, and there are some that render it senseless. The principle of charity suggests we should give Gore's words a sensible construction.

Of course if Gore is treated as saying that there will be no highly contested distribution of burdens and benefits in any successful grappling with global warming, that's senseless. That attitude only misleads Americans about the real upheaval that is required, which is unnacceptable and counterproductive. Although the station of all humanity is improved if we head off climate disaster, there's no avoiding the fact that there will be relative winners and losers in the short-term. And since the winners in our present status quo are obviously unwilling to voluntarily shoulder their share of burdens, politics must impose them.

However, I don't restrict Gore to that meaning. Sure, he's capitalizing on the rhetorical appeal of standing aloof from the filth -- his distance from electoral pressures rightly gives him more credibility, I think. But in substance, he is also saying that we ALL have a clear stake in stopping climate change regardless of socioeconomic station. It's not political in the sense that its not an essentially redistributive policy across economic lines (tax) or racial lines (civil rights, affirmative action, workplace equality). Those things are involved, but there is another Jeffersonian element of the unitary public good that makes it more momentous than a tug-of-war.

At the same time, calling the issue apolitical is an effective way to redraw the boundaries of discourse. If politics is our mechanism for resolving reasonable disagreement, then calling an issue apolitical is a way of signifying that reasonable disagreement is no longer possible.
One of Gore's great accomplishments has been to marginalize the denialist holdouts as uninformed louts, unscientific dogmatics, or corporate liars. It's a shift qualitatively similar to the universal denunciation of race apartheid. The holdouts are simply unreasonable, and we no longer need to engage them on the merits.

Posted by StJoe | December 2, 2007 3:57 PM