Forever seeking Archimedean levers for prying the world in directions they prefer, progressives say they embrace high-speed rail for many reasons—to improve the climate, increase competitiveness, enhance national security, reduce congestion, and rationalize land use. The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.
To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make.
Though obnoxiously written, Will’s article gets at the great philosophical schism of our time, of the modern era, perhaps in all of human history: man vs.
A slightly more useful tool than trains for thinking about that difference, I think, is from this summary of a report, “Thoughts and Feeling About Health Differences Across Populations in the United States,” which appears as Appendix A in this document. Through interviews with Congressional staffers and health policy folks affiliated with one party or the other, the authors attempted to identify the prevalent frames that shaped the thinking of partisans on the social determinants of health.
The conclusion was that Democrats understand health and the social factors influencing it in terms of a system:
Broadly, the system-deep metaphor refers to the unification and organization of separate entities into a whole. The unity of a system means that the parts are interdependent; these connected parts often operate in a predictable and recurrent pattern with certain results.
For Democrats in particular, the system frame operates on two levels. First, American society as a whole is a complex system that unifies all citizens. As such, all individuals, from the poorest person in the Bronx to the wealthiest person in Manhattan, are interdependent, even if this is not readily apparent. [...]
The second level on which the deep metaphor system operates is that Democrats view poor levels of health as emerging from a complex and interrelated system of social, cultural, economic, and biological factors.
Republicans, on the other hand, conceptualize these factors in terms of a journey:
Where system forms the fundamental lens through which Democrats view society and health, the deep metaphor journey is the predominant frame through which Republicans view American society and health issues. Broadly, journey often frames our discussion of life itself. Journeys can be fraught with challenge or can be smooth sailing; they can be direct or divergent. Some journeys are unpredictable, where others focus on a series of steps that, if followed, will take you to a predetermined place or goal.
The type of journey that a group describes can yield much insight into how they view a given topic. For Republicans, American society as a whole is on a long, unpredictable health journey through time. They use metaphors of winding paths and stress the importance of adaptability in the face of an unknown future direction. [...]
Much as they see America and health care as a whole on a journey through time, Republicans see individuals as on their own health journeys. Echoing the common theme of “individual responsibility,” Republicans view poor health as arising from bad choices along one’s path and the inability to overcome obstacles to health that one encounters along the way.
I can certainly understand that; I'm partial to path metaphors myself. But extrapolating this out a bit beyond health issues, it's an apt way to think about the philosophical gulf between the left and right.
The right sneers that the liberals are "collectivists" because the left tends to think systemically and conceptualizes the individual as being embedded in a broader structure, a structure that inexorably binds the fates of all those who share it. Liberal thought thus often focuses on how to improve various systems. The world is a project, one in which mandatory busing is a plausible mechanism for overcoming centuries of pervasive racism and segregation; publicly-supported low-income nutrition and early education programs coupled with a strong public school system and diversified, subsidized post-secondary education is key to building the well-functioning workforce of tomorrow; and one in which a comprehensive law with multi-faceted moving parts working in concert is a conceivable avenue toward higher quality, lower cost health care.
The left, on the other hand, marvels at the right's uncompromising understanding of liberty and individualism. To the right, "society" as an emergent structure with a meaning and existence independent of the myriad interactions between individuals is a fiction--or at least an unsubstantiated myth. Thus the supremacy of markets is beyond doubt, as they are the embodiment of the journey concept. They revolve around individuals acting in accordance with personal preferences; even the hint of some sort of centralized component, such as the fact that federal legislation is compelling the creation of new health insurance markets as we speak, will raise suspicion among the right.
Crude caricatures through these may be, we can see them playing out even now. The liberal's systems-eye view of power differentials between workers and corporations or, yes, even governments lends itself to an affinity for organization: collective bargaining provides the counterweight in the system that's needed to ensure fair remuneration for labor. The conservative's journey frame reassures him that the determination or negotiation of wages and benefits is a part of the personal journey, to be based on the individual's merits. The phrase "collective bargaining" is enough to give him chills.
And so I find that, despite my initial revulsion at Will's column, it has a certain element of truth to it. Trains are invariably part of a system; something's got to keep them running on time. Cars, on the other hand, are closer to the conservative's individualistic journey metaphor. Of course, I don't think liberals inherently dislike cars. But notice that the pretexts for high-speed rail that Will dismisses as flimsy--combating climate change, bolstering national security, reducing congestion, and rationalizing land use--all imply pursuing rail as part of a collective solution to a collective problem. Each of those issues is a problem to be addressed by tinkering with systems, not by us taking it on individual-by-individual, one at a time, like villains in a Jackie Chan movie. But more narrowly, transit itself is an issue of systems: we're talking about the connections that network our cities, the fabric that binds out society. Roads are part of that same system, of course, but alone in his car and choosing his favorite radio station, the conservative can forget that his journey is only possible because it's embedded in a broader structure (dare I say system yet again?) of crisscrossing, well-defined roads. But no one would accuse cars of being part of a coherent system for collectively achieving a goal.
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