Ben Sasse, Nut picking, and Political discourse tips
Excellent Ross Douthat interview with former Senator and terminal cancer patient Ben Sasse. Transcript here. Interesting throughout.
Sasse was always a misfit in the contemporary Senate, and that comes across well in the interview. He self-admittedly wasn't a great politician. Too much idealism and shame to take the hardcore partisan path; not enough charisma or natural talent to transcend it. Hard to accomplish a lot stuck in that spot. If there's a tragedy here, it's that he comes off as fairly normal, in a way most Senators and former Senators do not.
This exchange caught my ear:
There’s a ton of incentive for both political addicts on the right to find some nut job on the left who did or said something crazy — “They’re all going to grab our guns” — or there’s some nut job on the left who says everybody on the right wants to do this horrible thing to you because they found some idiot on Twitter or on a podcast who said that thing. The problem with that kind of nut picking is it doesn’t ever solve a problem.
Nut picking is one of the most useful concepts to understand and avoid in your approach to modern politics and political discourse. Coined by Kevin Drum, it's a variant on the straw-man argument, borrowing the language of cherry picking; you go find insane statements made by people on the fringe of a group you dislike, and you use that to discredit the larger set of positions held by less-fringe members of the group. Just assert the lunatic position is the group position.
It might be the most common form of partisan argumentation that exists online right now. Just point to some random clown on Twitter wishing Trump was killed by his assassin, and claim that's the position of all Democrats. Or some other random clown saying women who get abortions should be publicly executed, and call it GOP policy. State legislators are a gold mine for this; somebody, somewhere introduces an insane bill. Just call it national party policy.
You should pride yourself on your ability to avoid falling into this behavior. It's corrosive, on both the individual and the discourse community. It's endemic on social media, but I also see it all the time in group chats, barroom debates, and casual political conversations among friends and family. I suppose there's nothing inherently wrong with ego-stroking and in-group signaling at the expense of productive political discussion, but that's all nut picking amounts to. It's tribal politics, disguised as policy debate.
The opposite of nut picking, of course, is steelmanning. This is the practice of identifying (or building) the strongest case for your opponent, and then responding to that. Just do it. Your opponents may be be bad-faith actors who nut pick and lie and don't listen, but steelmanning their arguments is nevertheless an unambiguous good. It hones your own arguments, it opens the possibility that you may (gasp!) change your opinion, and it frees you to consider nuances. In my view, if you can't name the three best arguments of people who disagree with you, you aren't really thinking about public policy. You're just campaigning.
None of this makes any sense, of course, unless you know why you are having a political discussion. But I can tell you this: it's incredibly unlikely that you are attempting, in any way, to actually move public opinion for the purposes of winning an election or shifting public policy. If you do have that goal in whatever situation you are in, there might be benefits to nut picking or other partisan electoral rhetorical strategies.
But repeating nut picking party talking points that you don't even actually believe to your friend at the coffee shop might literally be the worst form of political hackery that exists. It's like toeing the party for the sake of toeing the party line in a private conversation at a card table in your basement? What are you even doing?
My working hypothesis is that most people just want social validation for their beliefs or their partisan allegiance. Which is fine. But if you are actually interested in discussion public policy, you should commit yourself to the scout mindset: your job is to gather information and reassess your priors. That places convincing other people far down the list, and it removes entirely the utility of nut picking.