Duncan posts again on our elite's fetish for policy over politics. My take on this phenomenon - call it, for lack of a better term, the Rodney King ("Can't we all just get along?") phenomenon - is rooted in a sincere, but ultimately misguided belief that there is one right answer for our social ills, and an efficient, non-adversarial approach to solving them is the best solution.
That's completely and utterly wrong.
We in the west are inheritors of a philosophical tradition that insists that, for every question asked, there is only one answer that is correct. Whether that question is, "What is the sum of two and two?" or, "What is the best allocation of our public resources for the greatest good?", there is only one correct answer. By making these questions similar both in effect and affect, we are making the huge error that all questions are the same. Yet, a mathematical question concerns a very limited set of criteria, while a question concerned with politics is far more broad, and there is no set of criteria to which one can point a priori to determine how one arrives at an answer.
This problem was sketched out long ago, in Jacques Ellul's classic The Technological Society, and been addressed time and again by many other social and cultural historians and critics. Whether in the watered-down approach of a social commentator like David Broder, or a far more sophisticated approach such as Alan Bloom, there is this belief that the acceptance of difference on a social, cultural, and political level is an error because it ignores the singularity of Truth.
This is why, to those who have faith in democracy and the democratic process, our elites too often sound anti-democratic. Democratic politics, as the creature has evolved in America, are a messy business precisely because the notion that the search for "solutions" involves a rational discussion leading to a single, "correct" conclusion is erroneous. While there are, indeed, guidelines and general principles, for example, in economics, that are helpful for arriving at a policy that best serves the public good, they are hardly determinative.
It would be nice if there were a right answer to what ails us. It would be nice if interested parties could sit down and hash out together, with an eye on both a method and desired result that was acceptable to everyone, how best to solve our social ills. They can't and won't because such a procedure is anathema to democracy.
