When we belittle the significance of the other guy's issue... [View all]

[cthulu2016]

There are all sorts of issues that are not decisive in making a presidential general election vote. The simple fact of Supreme Court appointments, by itself, makes it almost impossible for a Democratic presidential candidate to not be worth voting for, no matter how defective a candidate might be in general.

When, however, someone criticizes a presidential candidate over a particular issue it is sometimes said that they need to shape up and fall line because their issue is politically inconvenient and not very important.

Well yeah... as covered in the first paragraph here, nobody's issue is very important. Even jobs and the economy isn't very important, if one insists on defining the word "important" to mean "a reason to vote for Mitt Romney."

But when one gets into the pragmatic "stakes are high, your issue isn't as important as the big political picture" mode he or she should recognize that had he or she been on DU 0.0 back in the 1950s they would have been saying exactly the same thing about civil rights, and women's rights. (And DU 0.0 would have permited it, too, as a very mainstream view within the party.)

They might claim they wouldn't, but that's ridiculous. They would have. Issues that we today take for granted as epic moral issues (women's rights, monority rights) used to occupy precisely the same political space as troublesome political issues of today (gay rights, war, drugs) and were thought of and discussed in PRECISELY THE SAME WAY.

It is fine to rail against the whiners who think their pet issue means something as long as one has the intellectual honesty to recognize that he or she, given his or her intellectual and emotional approach to politics and the world, would have once been among the same pragmatic bloc who said exactly the same thing civil rights or women's rights or decriminalization of sodomy or Vietnam or some other issue that was once inconvenient in the big political picture.

And that's a fact.

I am not saying that self-congratulatoryily ruthless pragmatism is necessarily wrong. I am merely saying that every belligerent pragmatist of today would have, in fact, been equally belligerent about things we have come to view as core moral principles and his words back in the day would be regarded, from today's perspective, as something shocking.

To think otherwise is to fool ones self.