I’ve been writing about how the neighborhood mailing list exemplifies damaging (and proto-demagogic, if not actively demagogic) ways that Americans think about policy deliberation.
This one is about bike lanes. Our neighborhood happens to be a great place for biking, and, so, many people come to the neighborhood to bike. Some of those cyclists are total jerks. Some cyclists run stop signs, get really aggressive in intersections with pedestrians, have lights so bright they could trigger a migraine, and some have no lights at all; a surprising number shout at people at the off-leash dog park for having dogs off leash.
Yet, many cyclists argue that cycling is a public good. And that’s an argument with legs.
There’s a lot of research to show that electric cars aren’t actually all that green, nor are hybrids. They’re probably better than many cars, but, really, the greenest method of transportation is walking, biking, or bussing. Biking as a method of commuting is great for the environment. So, if there is one group that can claim the public good, it would be people who bike to work.
Most of them are not, at that moment, cycling to work, and I have no idea how many of them finish their route around the neighborhood and then get in a car and drive to work. And running or walking to work is just as good for the environment as cycling, so this doesn’t end the debate. And there is a debate.
My neighborhood has been debating a change to the bike lanes, and far too much of the argument has been about whether cyclists are good. That’s transmogrifying the vexed issues of how to encourage cycling rather than driving, reduce cycling/vehicle and cycling/pedestrian accidents, and deal with the pox of scooters into the irrelevant question of whether cyclists or non-cyclists are better people.
The question of whether our neighborhood should have bike lanes isn’t about whether cyclists are better people than non-cyclists, but about whether they have the right not to be killed.
Austin has decided to try to reduce vehicle/pedestrian and vehicle/cyclist fatalities to zero. That should be a shared goal for everyone in Austin. It isn’t a goal, however, for people who realize that making Austin a safer place for cyclists will mildly inconvenience us. The most sensible policy in terms of reducing vehicle/cyclist accidents would be one that would reduce the ability of people in my neighborhood to park on the street, including me and my husband.
The rational decision for the community as a whole will make parking in front of our house more limited. I’m very grumpy that the right decision isn’t the best decision for me personally—I’m not a cyclist, and I can get very grumpy about them. As I said above, a lot of them are total jerks.
But policies issues are never actually about which group is better. Policy issues are about policies.
The City of Austin had hearings about the issue of planning of bike lanes. And various people argued in favor of policies that are demonstrably successful in terms of reducing car/cyclist (and car/pedestrian) fatal accidents.
And my neighborhood mailing list had people flinging themselves around about how there were a lot of people at the hearings who were cyclists. And they didn’t argue that the cyclists’ data was wrong, or that their argument was irrational. In fact, they didn’t engage in rational policy argumentation to refute the cyclists’ cases at all. Instead, they argued that the cyclists had all gone to the meeting and thereby overwhelmed the views of regular people. (I’m not citing or linking because these are neighbors.) They said, in other words, it was Big Bike.
This is the classic—and profoundly anti-democratic—way to describe political disagreements. I’m a scholar of how communities make bad policy decisions, and so I know that, when people are facing a decision in which members of that community have legitimately different positions, the first impulse is to deny that disagreement is legitimate on the basis of the identities of the people making the argument. The people who disagree are part of a special interest conspiracy (Big Bike), stupid, prejudiced, misinformed.
The irony is that: if you think that your political position is obviously right, if you think that you and only people who think like you are right (whether it’s about Trump, the damming and flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, this change to teaching evaluations, bike lanes in my neighborhood, the need for the wall), you subvert democracy.
Democracy is about a world in which people argue together knowing that it isn’t a question about the right answer but about the policy that best seems to answer the needs we all present in the context of the information we now have. Democracy is a world of understanding that our world is more than my world.
Demagoguery is a world in which people whine that the policy doesn’t personally solve their specific issues.
People who whine that two or three times a year they have to be mildly inconvenienced, that the city doesn’t treat graffiti as a sign of our being on the edge of West Side Story levels of gang warfare (although, to be blunt, I would love to participate in any walking down the street with some kind of “Jets” song), that bagged poop in your trash is a crime against God and Nature and specifically prohibited by Leviticus, that the only reason we have argumentatively defensible bike lanes is that Big Bike flooded the hearing—they’re all demagogues. We’re all demagogues.
If you say that Bernie was obviously the right choice, and Hillary was a shill promoted by neo-liberals, if you say that Hillary was obviously the right choice, and Sanders supporters were dupes of Russia, if you say that Trump was obviously the right choice because Hillary’s corruption and unsafe email practices show she shouldn’t be President…. if you say that our vexed and uncertain world of an array of political options is really a world of the right answer (yours) and dumbass/evil/corrupt answers, you’re a demagogue.
You can, and should, be passionate about politics, and even passionate about the policy you’re advocating. But being passionate about your policy should mean that you’re passionate that it is the best policy among many, and that you passionately believe it can meet the standards of policy argumentation. Being passionate about solving a problem should mean that you’re so passionate about solving the problem that you’re willing to admit your plan is wrong. You should be so passionate about solving the problem that you treat in- v. out- group loyalty issues as distractions.
I don’t care whether you’re arguing that Trump is obviously right in everything, libs are obviously wrong in everything, GOPpers are obviously wrong in everything, Dems are obviously wrong not to support this candidate, or any other claim that frames vexed and nuanced and complicated issues as things in which there is an obvious right answer, your boss is a fool for not doing the right thing, your spouse is an idiot for not agreeing with you. You’re engaged in demagoguery. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. But you aren’t oriented toward a reasonable discussion of your policy options.
My neighborhood is not threatened by Big Bike.
A lot of cyclists in my neighborhood really are aggressive jerks. But a lot of them aren’t. And here is the most important point: they aren’t a they. They’re an us: a lot of them are neighbors. The people arguing for bike lanes are not an Other imposing their special interest on us; they are our neighbors, they are people who disagree with us.