In the wake of the results of the recent midterm elections, it comes as no surprise that my predictions were wrong, since nearly all predictions end up as such. Perhaps what is more surprising though is how little certain issues seemed to affect people’s decision on voting.
It seems to me that voting is now entirely focused on values, not policies. To clarify what I mean by this, a value position is a sort of moral or theological claim about what ought to be codified into law. Most of the cultural issues that people are cognizant of seem to be of more interest and drive voters more than issues of practical importance, such as the economy. While this is somewhat contrarian to the old adage that the economy is one of the key driving forces behind voting, I think that voting has become about political revenge.
It seems to be that voting is more about hurting the other side, as well as inhibiting their entire agenda, other than finding compromises or solutions to issues that affect the country as a whole. Instead, countless hours of political ads and debate time are spent on issues that fundamentally are unresolvable. So many of the cultural issues are often the result of different theological understandings, and are therefore almost impossible to resolve without significant force and pressure.
For example, the abortion debate will never be adequately solved, and both sides don’t seem to realize that the current status quo may be the only viable compromise. Abortion is now a states issue, which makes it possible for people to vote for this policy with their feet. Yet both sides want their perspective to be the nationwide policy. There is this failure to realize that if there was to be any compromise between the two sides of this cultural issue, this is what it would look like. However, moral issues like this tend to only be viewable in absolutes because of the implications should the other side claim victory.
More generally, by having these moral issues be the focus of most public debates, this prevents any practical politics from being discussed in a productive manner. This, ultimately, I think will continue to make the wound that is cultural polarization only fester even more so than what it already has. Increasingly, there appears to be fewer and fewer options for calm resolutions to this conflict, and it would not surprise me in the least to see continued escalation.
What this escalation will amount to is hard to tell. Continuing the earlier thread of ‘revenge’ politics, it wouldn’t surprise me to see more military-esque conflict between the two cultural factions of the US. This, combined with the economic hardships that are certain to happen because of the focus on said issues, I think, only spells disaster.
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