New Orleans Affirmative- 7ws strategy Page

K of Politics

 

The classic approach to politics is to rank priorities and measure the finite bowl of political capital. If Obama pushes hard on a green new deal, he likely won't have much left for universal health care. If he backs off of serious economic regulation, then he might get more support for social programs from Republicans.  Because gay civil rights struggles affect fewer individuals and relate to less quantifiable harms, it's hard to justify putting them at the top of the list.  The alternative is to reject the ranked priorities political model altogether.  There is little evidence that sway and support is finite in the American political system. Political capital relates to the actions of the leader, yes, but can be infinitely large or non-existent at any point in time. In some ways, the more you get done, the more the bowl of capital swells.  Ranking America's problems to conserve political influence is a narrow minded approach to solving this crisis. Putting banks at the top of the list avoids the plight of large employers (like car companies - as much as we love to hate their executives). Sending health care and other social programs to second or third place, leaves those immediately affected by the crisis with nothing to fall back on. Finally, ignoring the disenfranchisement of a segment of the population breeds discontent, encourages protest, boycotts (a definite harm in this economy) and violence. It divides families (especially those who are still unable to sponsor their partner into the United States), imposes higher tax burdens on gay couples, denies benefits to gay spouses in many employment situations and polarizes social conservatives and social liberals in a time when consensus is essential.

The second mode, the one that follows on the classical model, may be described very broadly as the mode of policy. Of course, politics and government have always involved some form of policy-making. Political decisions need strategies to carry them out, and strategies when discursively laid out tend to become policies. Still, the notion of 'policy' as we use it nowadays can be seen as a distinctive step in the evolution of the praxis of government and politics, indicating a specific form of relation between government and citizen. The decisive point here is the anticipation of the reaction of citizens as part of the political proposals themselves on the one hand, and the coordination of the proposals of different political institutions and branches on the other, in an attempt to implement a coordinated 'policy'. The idea of policy is thus intimately related with the rise of the welfare state and the ambition of government to intervene in social processes in order to promote social goals. 41. Citizens thus become 'involved' in politics to a greater extent than just by voting, or being a member of a political party. But they are not supposed to be somehow actively involved in the formation of policy; their involvement in this 'mode' or phase is restricted to being the passive object of evaluation. The formation of policy might thus be considered part of 'political science', in the sense of being a broad, systematic and integrated approach to social adaptation and change.16 42. We may connect 'policy' in this sense with well-known political projects in post-World War II Europe. In a general sense, this era was characterized by the rejection of 'wholesale', revolutionary solutions and by a broad acceptance of the idea of 'piecemeal social engineering'. Society should be adjusted, fine-tuned and serviced, as a work for experts, rather than thrown about by rough, revolutionary amateurism. More specifically, the Beveridge report and the Marshall plan were the first examples of strong social policy 'unleashed' on postwar Europe. In some important sense, political confrontation was exchanged for social peacekeeping. 43. The notion of 'the end of ideology' might be seen as simultaneously heralding the 'triumph of policy'. Many European leftwing intellectuals distrusted this development; they suspected that political science, as a way to stimulate the formation and implementation of 'social policy', was implicitly or explicitly sponsored by the Marshall plan - at least in an ideological sense. Still, it is fair to say that the large-scale introduction of social policies constituted an almost unprecedented expression of political optimism and enthusiasm. The new approach promised, perhaps for the first time in history, a 'humane' organisation of labor and of social life in general.