So, in one thread we have Arlen Specter likely to get hit hard from the left and right for differing reasons, and in other we have was Dave believe was a carefully-parsed response to the question of legalizing cannabis.

This got me thinking about a question that's the central point of this thread--to what extent is it OK to sacrifice your ideology in the name of political gain?

Take Barry Goldwater, for example. He's one of the most ideologically sound people I've ever read about, but on a national level, he was a political disaster. Or how about the reverse--would Obama have ever made it in Illinois without appeasing the corn lobby by supporting ethanol?

Interesting to think about....

Do you mean morally speaking? I guess it depends on the individual.

Generally this is the intersection between ideology and ambition.


My premise is that

The ambitious person will forsake thier ideology when it is convenient or necessary for them to do so in order to meet a specific goal.

It is a very interesting topic.

At the same time it depends on how rational the person is as well. In some cases ideology does not suit the task at hand such as the Obama example that Ceebs notes in the other thread. The ideology of the other politician is that "if we give things to people they will be less willing to do things for themselves." That could be true in some cases but it's certainly not in the case of a starving 5 year old whose parents have failed them and in the case of the breakfast program at least there is a chance the nourished child might be able to focus on studies and be able to break that cycle eventually. In any world you can't just cling to ideology because ideologies are theorums. They exist in a perfect world so any rational person will have to learn to compromise their ideology to fit thier reality in the moment while still working to create whatever ideal world they seek.

I'm kinda disappointed this didn't get more posts. Good reply though, Electro.

If I was you, I'd start sending people on vacation. Nobody will ever ignore your threads again Nick. It's Nick right?

there certainly comes a point where refusing to compromise becomes a self-defeating indulgence. as a staunch libertarian, i would gladly compromise certain principles if it meant being able to implement a healthy majority of other (key) principles.

Are you in it to win the battle or the war? If it's the battle you care about then you hold to your ideology. If it's the war you care about then you always take a long term view and you do make sacrifices.

I think people almost always stick to ideology for the sake of political gain. It's called demagoguery. Good governance requires the putting aside of ideology. I thought this post by Ryan Avent would fit in well here:

An Existential Crisis for Libertarianism

Brad Plumer has the story of an all too typical sequence of events. Cato seeks to put together a list of academics who challenge the scientific consensus on climate change. A bunch of respected climate scientists point out that the papers Cato cites actually support the scientific consensus. And someone from Cato responds to the challenge by, well, not responding to it.

This is a serious problem for libertarians. Climate science has followed a path very similar to many other sciences over the past few decades. An interesting hypothesis touched off a great deal of research which led to a growing consensus on the validity of the hypothesis — that in fact, it was consistent with the available data. But scientific progress in other fields didn’t, by and large, generate some rather significant policy implications (the minimalist one of which, for climate change, is that something should be done, even if that something is simply preparing for the effects of warming). And so libertarian think tanks haven’t devoted themselves to trying to undermine the science in those fields, while libertarians have gone to war against the field of climate science. They made this choice not because they dislike the process of scientific inquiry, but because they dislike the policy implications of a specific scientific conclusion.

That is to say, confronted by a problem demanding solutions inimical to libertarian beliefs, libertarians were faced with the choice of reneging on their beliefs or turning their back on science. Tellingly, they chose the latter. One might think that’s a rather drastic decision, given the role scientific endeavors have played in delivering the material prosperity so dear to the hearts of the libertarian world, and one would be right.

A belief system that cannot grapple with the fundamental reality of a situation is, quite simply, not a belief system worth having. If I were a part of a movement that demanded I not get out of the way of oncoming cars, and that challenged the conclusion of the fields of physics and biology that an impact between the car and my person would leave my person badly damaged, I would begin to suspect that this movement was maybe full of crazy people with very bad ideas. I suspect most people, and perhaps nearly all people would arrive at this conclusion. And if that movement couldn’t come up with a better way to approach the problem of the oncoming car, well, it would eventually find itself abandoned, destroyed by the insistent encroachment of reality.

http://www.ryanavent.com/blog/?p=1950

Aren't most scientists publically funded?

Wouldn't that bring in a considerable degree of possible conflicts of interest as to a scientific consensus if politicians are staking thier political careers on climatology?

It's fairly similar to "scientific" studies by the government on the effects of marijuana. If no one else is allowed to do research there can't be much debate

If you're using the verbage "climate change" everyone would have to agree with that verbage as the earths temperture has been shown to fluctuate over the years. How much humans effect the temperature/weather/polar ice caps is up for debate. Anyone telling you otherwise has thier own agenda.

I'm not sure how libertarian ideals are conflicted by science... any rational person can look at pollution see the effects and decide if technologies exist to do things cleaner more efficiently and better for the environment that's not a bad thing.

The sticking point here would be to what degree we want the police power of government to step in and force it's hand under penalty of death.

Sorry off Topic.

There's a big difference between scientific discovery and application thereof. But we might be getting off topic.

may be relevant:

has anyone ever read either of obama's books? i listened to a few chapters of "audacity of hope" on audiobook and now i want to read it.

After a certain point ideological purity becomes vanity. We don't live in a world of ideological abstractions. Politics is messy and inconvient and full of people we don't like and disagree with and are dumb and stupid and get in the way of us instituting sensible liberal/conservative/socialist/libertarian policies that we just KNOW are correct. This is unfortunate, but it is reality.

If you want to take responsibility for the world around you a certian degree of compromise and 'politics' is necessary. The key is learning at what point you need to take a principled stand, since compromise is also easy and seductive (Hilary Clinton lost me becuase I don't think she can find that moment. I think Obama can)

This is also, in important ways, the tragedy of leadership. Machiavelli is really insightful on this, although he overstates his case a bit. the reason politics is amoral (not immoral) is that the standards we use to determine what is right and wrong in our private life are simply not applicable in public life, where what matters less is our individual confrontation with the world than the fact that we are confronting it on behalf of the people we wish to lead, and what is materially better for them has to trump keeping our own hands clean.


FDR's response to Walter White (head of the NAACP during the depression) about why he can't come out and throw political support behind the lynching bill at the time gets to this.

I did not choose the tools with which I must work. Southerners, by reason of the seniority rule in Congress, are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep American from collapsing. I just can’t take the risk

We can blame FDR if we want for not taking that stand on lynching and call him a hypocrite for not standing up for his beliefs, but this is a moral, not a political judgement. The political judgement (did he do the right thing as a leader) needs to use different criteria--did he correctly read the situation correctly, and were the costs of not signing the bill greater than the costs of signing it.