Rose thou art sick - The Economist
The central thesis of the center-left has always been that government is the home for exactly those values that are not naturally served by markets, that two such kinds of values can and do exist, that it is legitimate to want for your country “soft” attributes like openness, fairness and civility alongside (and perhaps even at the partial expense of) “hard” attributes like economic growth and military power.
After the Thatcher/Reagan years, the Left followed up with Clinton and Blair, shifting to the center but also buying into the Right’s message that soft values betrayed and portended weakness. A decade and a half of “Left Lite” followed, with politicians hedging their positions, indeed hedging their compassion, in the language of wealth, security, competition among nations, and foreign intervention.
Hillary Clinton offers a unique opportunity to contrast the Left of her husband’s day with that of today. Back then, one hundred thousand police officers was an achievement of the Left, an attempt to say “we can do it too,” with nary a word about the millions that would subsequently be incarcerated. That Hillary has been advised to show more emotion and atone for those positions reflects the current inadequacy of policy-based electioneering in the absence of a convincing portrayal of one’s emotional connection to a system of values. We see an almost irrational commitment to a cause in Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren but can imagine no cause (save winning) for which Hillary would be so animated. Left Lite hurt no one more than the Left itself by sidelining the very values most apt for government concern and draining the emotion without which the Left cannot win.
The design of nations, and the debates over it we call politics, benefits from certain clinical or mechanical perspectives, but is not nearly adequately described by them. Just as “human factors engineering” designs teapots that are easier to hold for the elderly, so we must design nations for people–real people who are irrational, vulnerable, ensconced in bodies they neglect or ones that get sick for no reason at all, love their pets but despise their neighbors, borrow money to buy handbags, and blow their kids’ college fund in Vegas. Designing for people means considering all the ways people will break what you’ve built, or even the ways people themselves are broken. Yet after all their failings, if you don’t spend your days thinking of people–if you don’t care about them–your design will be to them at best irrelevant and at worst callously pernicious.
The Left wins when they reaffirm that we share values we do not need to justify in economic terms, and fulfilling those values is a worthy pursuit of a society and the daily work of a Statesman.