We political scientists like to classify things. Put nice labels on it and shove it on the shelf where those things go – very scientific. Makes ’em easier to categorize so we can do statistics! Yeah, it annoys the heck out of the statisticians but what do they know? They were the ones that came up with the whole ‘stick everything in a category’ thing.
Add science to politics and sausage making – things no one really wants to know how they are made. I’d include tax law but everyone knows how its made – they wanna know how to unmake it.
So, on our ism shelf today we have globalism and isolationism. Sounds all neat and tidy and sciency, huh? It is, today. Tomorrow, who knows? The definitions are fluid – and half the time feel like they are made up on the fly. This is the most annoying part of political science. Other sciences get defined terms that stay that way. Not us. No one loves us poor poli sci geeks.
Okay, okay, besides the pity party, there is a point. The reason terms are so fluid is partially because they don’t exist discretely. Amazingly, there are pro-life Democrats (now that’s a group with every right to a pity party!) and anti-gun control Democrats! No, they didn’t just get lost – that would be the identifiers. No, they share all the other wacky Democrat values and inability to figure out what a woman is; they just differ on a select few issues.
No two human beings have the same fingerprints. I suspect the same is true for political views. The more you drill down to specifics, the more differences you find. This is not a bad thing. If we all think exactly alike, the lemmings will laugh at us as we run off the cliff because no one says stop. It’s also part and parcel of how we figure out the big stuff – we test our ideas against each other. This works.
As long as we only let grown ups in the room.
But even when we all show up in our big girl skirts – you boys can wear the pants – we still wanna nice neat package. We want the ism shelf to be in order. And that’s where the fun starts.
None of those cute terms we name things with are discrete. Just like people can hold differing views they also hold them in differing degrees. The result is our nice neat shelf looks like a hurricane hit it. The isms bleed into each other like drippy paint cans.
Politics lives on a spectrum. We can define all we like but we will still end up with both pink and mauve and that funky color in between. All our nice neatly stacked isms are running together like watercolors in a downpour.
This is why no one sane becomes a political scientist. It’s also why we get into so many silly tiffs.
You’re not REALLY a conservative because you support X. You’re not REALLY a liberal because you support Y.
Besides being a logical fallacy when we take it too far, it’s just dumb. The fact that someone doesn’t accept the party line might really be an indication that they don’t truly share the views of that party (these are identifiers – they think they belong despite not agreeing on any of the main platform planks) but it could also just be that they differ only on this one point. No soup for you!
So, the question becomes is this point defining of the ism? If so, we can exclude them. If not, they get to play. The next question is is this the only point of difference? If they agree on most points, they can stay. But if not, they belong in the next bucket down.
Told you no one wants to know how the science part gets done. It’s messy.
Why does it matter? Well, it turns out that what is a massive pain in the backside for statisticians and political scientists is an awesome perk for political groups, including nation-states. We don’t have to go all or nothing. There’s a perfect shade in this mess somewhere and we just have to find it.
But it’s gonna mess up our nice neat shelf.
