Of Course Gangs Can Come Together More Easily Than the Parties

So I was just watching tonight's Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore and the panel (Dana Perino, Lewis Black, and some I think comedian that I didn't recognizing) were talking about a number of things but one of them was the truce between the different Baltimore gangs. And the way they were talking about this was, like, isn't it absurd how these gangs can come together but the Democrats and Republicans can't. And I was just thinking about how fundamentally wrong an understanding of politics such talk reveals. Because, like, of course! Lewis Black was saying something about how, like, these gangs, they want to kill each other, literally kill each other, and the Democrats and Republicans are just talking ideology, or whatever. But that's the thing: wanting to kill one another is way less insoluble a conflict than genuine ideological disagreement. The Crypts and the Bloods or whatever don't have any very serious disagreements about what the world should be like, except that one of them thinks the Crypts should be in power and the other think the Bloods should. They're just rivals, each striving for the same position and hence coming into (violent) conflict with one another. Democrats and Republicans, on the other hand, have the genuine moral belief that the things the other side wants to do with power, should they achieve it, would be terrible things that would make the world a much worse place. And so the truth is that it's a hell of a lot easier to compromise over an actual blood feud (or whatever exactly the divisions between gangs are) than over an ideological disagreement, especially when there's some sense of a common higher good that comes along. Like, all the different gangs are made up of people with a fairly similar political worldview, viz. the basically liberal view of race in America, and so when the city they've been fighting over suddenly gets caught up in this broader battle about race in America, well, suddenly their little struggle for power doesn't seem so important anymore, and they'll all agree on this. The Crypts think it's more important to work toward racial peace and justice than to fight for control of Baltimore, and the Bloods don't respond by being like, "oh hey, that's an opening for us to take over Baltimore!", they respond by joining in! But Democrats and Republicans cannot do this, because they do not agree about fundamental moral principles. Like, what could conceivably come along that was at such a higher level and involved issues where there isn't partisan disagreement? If, I dunno, aliens appeared and tried to invade us? Yeah, that might create partisan unity, on the issue of, let's not get conquered by aliens. That's pretty much the closest analogy to what's going on in Baltimore. And the thing is, this is not a problem. This is the nature of ideological politics, which is way better and more sensible than non-ideological politics given that, y'know, politics is important and people have different fundamental beliefs and hence if politics isn't the forum in which for those beliefs to clash something weird and probably terrible is going on (e.g., massive disenfranchisement of the underclasses or whatever). Politics where the only thing at stake is which faction gets to enjoy being in power, we've seen that. That was the Gilded Age. They call it that for a reason: it was terrible. Its politics, in particular, was terrible. Going back to that would be terrible. Now, maybe it would be nice if our society didn't feature such stark divisions along fundamental moral lines, if there were more broad consensus and solidarity about basic values and political cleavages were just about implementing those values. But why should we expect to see that? I would expect/hope that it's easier to get consensus about empirical questions, i.e., about what policies will effectuate which values, than on the values questions themselves, especially if we're stipulating the lack of the kind of major values divides that can produce divisions in empirical beliefs through motivated reasoning. Also there's always gonna be a tendency for the politics in any given place to "zoom in" on however much fundamental disagreement there is in a given society, I think. (E.g., there stop being overtly pro-slavery people, but even though the spectrum on racial issues gets narrower after that it doesn't get less contentious because the position of, say, no slavery but yes segregation stops getting coded as moderate and maybe an ally of the egalitarians and starts being coded, properly, as The Enemy, and of course people with that position suddenly start coding the egalitarians as The Enemy in return.)

Basically, politics is all about fundamental moral divisions, and those divisions are categorically less easy to overcome than a simple "we want to kill each other" sort of feud. That's natural, and anyone who doesn't instinctively see the obviousness of the Bloods and the Crypts being more reconcilable than the Democrats and the Republicans doesn't understand politics.