All Or Nothing

Why We're Stuck, Part 1

You may have read last week that Kraft Heinz, one of the largest packaged food producers, announced that they would eliminate certain artificial dyes from all their food products within the next few years. Robert Kennedy has been advocating this step as part of his Make America Healthy Again campaign.

The New York Times has a regular feature called the Sunday Debate, with two writers taking opposing positions on a specific question. Last Sunday’s question was: will Kraft Heinz’s step make food healthier? The food scientist and university professor who argued “no” made a long, impassioned plea that our society do more to make nutritious foods accessible and affordable.

We’d all agree that making nutritious food more accessible and affordable is good. And I think we’d agree that removing food dyes from Froot Loops (as they’ve already done in Canada) won’t alone make it a healthy choice. But the professor didn’t address the question, whether eliminating these artificial food dyes was a positive step. The implication of her stance is: if you haven’t solved the whole problem, you haven’t solved any of it.

I find this reasoning more and more often in public debates about issues of the day.

Sometimes people argue this way to score political points. Each party has come to reflexively oppose the other party’s actions, even when they align with their own previously held beliefs. As a recent example, in response to the Trump administration’s tariff proposals, several prominent politicians who have spent their careers propping up trade barriers are now endorsing free trade.

But I think the problem goes deeper. Politics has always been centered on means rather than ends; a field where we debate different methods to achieve commonly held goals, or to solve commonly recognized problems. Even when we differ on the specific goals, we generally agree on the values that the goals are intended to reflect. Political questions are pragmatic – what will be fairest, or most helpful, or most likely to work? But absolutism on both sides of the political divide has turned the choice of solutions into a moral issue. It is not enough to disagree with a solution; more and more often, we also impugn the motives or the character of those who disagree. In truth, no political solution is perfect; all involve trade-offs, and usually both sides have valid points to make about the trade-offs of different alternatives. But when every disagreement is painted as a battle between right and wrong, we are essentially saying that there is no room for intelligent, well-meaning people to disagree. You are either right and good, or you are both wrong and evil.

A corollary to this principle is that supporting an incomplete solution to a problem makes you complicit in evil. Compromise, once an essential feature of democratic governance, is now unthinkable for many.

Photo by Aubrey Odom on Unsplash

It’s actually rare that intelligent people agree on everything. If they are forced to pretend that they do or be banned from public life, most people will pretend. We are all quick to detect insincerity – it’s one of the most basic survival skills. And so, in an environment where many people are mouthing opinions they don’t believe, cynicism understandably prevails.

I serve on the board of directors for a cultural institution that has been grappling with diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. As our working group studied the issue, one of the things we found was widespread dissatisfaction at comparable institutions that had already adopted these policies. Those who had pressed for these policies were angry because nothing changed after they were adopted. But many of those who voted to adopt them didn’t actually believe in the value or validity of the goals they were professing; they felt coerced into silence, realizing they would be condemned if they raised questions. When the time came to implement the changes that the new policies required, they sat on their hands.

A crucial strength of democratic systems has always been this: when a decision is reached, it is implemented with energy, because a broad swath of the community has a stake in it. They are moving forward because they want to, not because they are compelled to, as in an autocratic system. Autocrats can make decisions faster; there are times when pundits look admiringly at the way centralized decision-making operates, and they question whether slow-moving, contentious democratic systems can still compete.

Democracies can compete, but only when they harness democratic energies. When we attempt to force absolutist politics through democratic institutions – when we attempt to win votes by coercion rather than persuasion – we end up with the worst features of both systems. We have a system that both moves slowly and lacks energy. The potential power of consensus is short-circuited. Differences are suppressed instead of resolved, and there is an undercurrent of resentment and opposition rather than broad support.

Each new presidential administration over the past 20 years has channeled its belief in the rightness of its objectives and the righteousness of its ideals to force through sweeping change. Each time, the party has lost power quickly, because sweeping change almost always produces bad outcomes. Why do I assert this so confidently? That’s our topic next week.