All the hemming and hawing going on up on the Hill is leading me back to something that’s been stirring at the back of my head for a while – this whole notion of splitting the difference, that the truth is somewhere in between, and that there’s some sort of “straight down the middle” position that is the ideal of everything.
Horseshit.
This is exactly the sort of lazy thinking that makes “moderate” the grand virtue of Imperial Washington. For people who don’t pay attention to actual politics, “moderate” is the supreme virtue – despite years of polling that shows almost all “moderates” or “independents” have a partisan preference and that those who don’t have a tangential level of political knowledge or awareness at best. And it’s a notion that has been exploited over and over with the phenomenon of the Overton Window – if you move the level of what is acceptable or conceivable far enough in one direction, you shift the midpoint in that direction as well, and drag the entire argument your way just by virtue of people’s willingness to split the difference.
A blogger from Kentucky nailed this years ago, with a hypothetical where he had a painful wart. Some pundit argued that the only solution was to cut the Wildcat’s arm off. The Wildcat responded that he wasn’t cutting his fucking arm off. Enter another (I think it was actually Joe Lieberman) who argued that in the interest of compromise, the Wildcat should cut off his arm at the elbow – and a chorus of pundits sang the virtue of sweet moderation and berated the Wildcat for not accepting such wisdom. In fact, after a little digging, here it is. Enjoy.
This idea of “split the difference” has been known to be idiotic ever since Solomon took a long look at the baby and went for the cleaver. Sometimes you just can’t split the difference. And even if you were to try it, it’s ridiculous to assume that the 50-yard-line is always the place to cut.
Formal logic has a name for this: the golden mean fallacy. Unfortunately, logic took a walk in our lives a long time ago.