Okay, so TFG was arraigned – for the fourth time – yesterday. This should not become normalized, but there’s not really much to say. He’s a criminal, everyone knows it (or should know it), but he will continue to be a chaos agent just as he has since he came down the escalator in 2015. He won’t change.
But that’s not what I’m going to talk about today. Instead, I’m going to draw back to the 30,000-foot level and take a look at the values that shape an individual’s political values. The cartoon at the top of this essay is similar to one I used while I was teaching High School Advanced Placement government. I used it to stimulate a discussion about how people make choices among policy options when demands are great and resources are limited.
I asked my students a simple question – “How Big is Your Boat?” After a bit, they got into it. In general, if your “boat” is the world, then you are worried about global poverty, human rights, famine, global warming, war, and so forth. You see the United States as so inextricably linked to what’s going on across the globe that you can’t ignore the needs of people who live far away and under circumstances that we can’t identify with.
Once they got that idea clearly in hand, it wasn’t hard to zoom in to other levels. If your “boat” is developed democracies, then you are concerned about the health of international trade and the relationship between superpowers. If your “boat” is the United States, you have some variant of an “America First” mindset, focusing on what’s good for the US and not very concerned about the rest of the world. These people want to defend the border and reduce funding for foreign aid and foreign military activity. They want to cut US aid to Ukraine and are mostly interested in building up America at home.
Zoom in even more, and you’ll find people who are mostly concerned about their state. Their “boat” is their state, and they don’t care if other states have policies different from their own state. These are the people who want to leave major policy decisions to “the states.” Gun Rights, abortion access, school curriculums, criminal justice programs, voting rights, and the like.
But you can zoom in even more. Some people’s “boat” is their community – defined in any number of ways. This could be defined by race, gender, income level, educational level, religious beliefs, and so forth. These people care most about what happens to the people with whom they share these identities. This often forms the basis of what is called “identity politics,” where elected officials are expected (or assign to themselves the role) to vote in favor of the interests of the people who share their identity.
Zoom in even further – and you find the people whose “boat” is no larger than their family. As long as they are comfortable and their families are thriving, they are not worried about anything else. So long as their kids are doing well in school, they don’t care about whether the schools are meeting the needs of any other children.
So – how big is your boat?
I'm just wired to think about bigger boats. Sometimes I get a lot of eyerolls. So whatever floats your...
Excellent!