On the Subject of Illegitimate or Wrong

So it seems that a group calling itself No Labels had a convention today where people like Michael Bloomberg and Evan Bayh spoke about how bad partisanship is. The idea is that we should put aside our labels and come together to find solutions for America. To which my answer is... what the hell do you think we're trying to do?!?!! We liberals are not not trying to find solutions to America's problems. The difference between a liberal and a centrist is either disagreement about what the problems are or about how they ought to be solved. Probably there are substantive value/goal/priority disagreements involved. You disagree with us. But that doesn't mean we aren't making a good-faith effort to make the world better as we see it. Yes, to the extent that there are policies that advance the goals/values/priorities of everyone involved, or a substantial majority, or whatever, we should do them, but there is no particular law that says there has to be. There are plenty of areas where in all honesty what the liberal-most 40% of the country thinks is good is something the conservative-most 40% of the country thinks is horrible, and vice-versa, not because we are devoted to slavish partisanship and antagonism but because we disagree. Moreover, it is inevitable in a free society that there will be things people disagree about, and they will become the battleground for political conflict; those things everyone agrees about will simply be a part of the underlying consensus.

So yeah, y'all disagree somewhat with me, or with Bernie Sanders, and we probably all disagree with Jim DeMint. But in general the presumption should be that people are genuinely trying to advance their own view of good and that they disagree about what is good, not that everyone can agree about what is good but some of us (i.e. the partisans) are just bickering and stopping good from being done.

ADDENDUM: It occurs to me that I think a lot of centrists think we ideologues/partisans are being ideological and partisan for the sake of being ideological or partisan. We aren't. I don't think conservatives/Republicans are this, either, except for the limited sense in which Congressional Republicans right now are making a concerted effort simply to make Obama fail, which involves blanket obstruction regardless of the merits of the policy. In general, though, we are all ideological or partisan because that's what we believe. As I argued in a previous post, the people who are most likely to form their opinions out of a desire to come down in a particular spot on the political spectrum are the a priori centrists.