That Which Makes Me Liberal

(9/3/09) - I tend not to put a whole lot of stock in broad categories applied to schools of thought or groups of people.  This is especially true when it comes to political ideologies.  It probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to those of you who have ever read this blog or talked with me about politics in person, but if forced I’d put myself in the “Liberal” category of American political thought.  How liberal has always depended on who I’m around, ranging from incrementalist moderate to flaming commie motherfucker.

Its only been recently, however, that I’ve began to decide what core part of my political thinking me makes me a liberal.  The thing that I think makes me a liberal is that my position is almost always opposed to the entrenched interests that are trying to leverage their power to maintain their dominance.  I am a tremendous fan of meritocracy and relatively equal opportunity.  Thus, if a policy or idea promotes opportunity or general welfare and causes entrenched interests to dig in against it, I’m more than likely on the side of opportunity and general welfare.

I first started to become conscious of this bias while watching The Wire.  The show covers dozens of topics, but one of the main overarching themes is institutions and how they shape the people who participate in them.  These institutions provide incentives to individuals (such as political power, income, or the ability to pursue an obsession such as busting the bad guy), and in return the individuals have lots of reasons to defend the entrenched interests of their institutions.  Its not that all institutions are bad, but this helped me think about their limits and how difficult it is to change them.

The second thing that really brought home how for me is Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers.  Nothing Gladwell said was groundbreaking, but it really brought into focus how institutional structures push certain individuals to the top and keep on pushing them, while making life much harder than needs be for others.  In the first chapter, he looks at the Canadian youth hockey league and how its institutional rules effect which of its players go on to play in professional leagues.  The youth hockey is divided by year, where players who were born in a single calendar year play with each other all the way from pre-school to the end of high school.  As they progress, the better players are funneled into more intense programs.  What Gladwell found is that a hugely disproportionate number of hockey players who make the pros were born in the first three months of the year.  This is because those kids tend to be a lot bigger when they are young (as kids born in January are nearly a year older than those born in December), and hence get more play time, and as a result get funneled into the more advanced tiers.  Gladwell found this same pattern in other hockey leagues, the MLB, in school test scores, and more. 

Even relatively “random” rules have a huge effect on people’s lives.  As a liberal, I don’t like this.  And it gets even worse when institutional rules are malicious. 

Finally, if you’ve been following the government’s reaction to the Banking crisis (Durbin: “Bankers frankly own the place”) or the debate over health care, you can see plenty of other examples of this. 

What do you think?  What are some of the defining axioms of your political views?