I don’t expect anyone to shut up...
And then we have a vote.
People can keep talking after the vote, but the rest of us are going to move on.
See, the interesting questions here get a little more meta. Because there
are voices that, chronically, get expected to shut up by this process. Not in the sense that someone can't show up and talk for three minutes about them, but in the sense that there's no connection between what they say and what actually happens. They are, metaphorically, talking into a dead microphone, and nobody with authority is listening.
"Build roads" is widely regarded as a politically neutral 'centrist' policy.
But when you look at, for example, urban freeway construction in the 1960s, it is
shockingly consistent that neighborhoods full of brown people, poor people, or brown poor people get torn down to build roads to service the large populations of mostly white middle- and upper-class suburban residents who, having moved out of the city center, now needed to commute back into the urban core to profit from its business and infrastructure without having to live there or pay property taxes to support it.
This is not a politically neutral process; there are definite winners and losers. But as you hopefully read me saying all this, you probably aren't thinking of what I'm saying as a "centrist" observation. If I were to complain about who won and who lost in that 'neutral' infrastructure-building program, and how it shaped our society to make it easier for certain winners to go on winning and more likely for certain losers to go on losing, I would sound like I was, oh, trying to tip the "centrist" consensus to the left.
...
As an exercise, I can do the same thing for right-wing politics.
When you look at, for example, school curriculum and organization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, it is
shockingly consistent that the default trend is for the beliefs of the most conservative parts of the older generation to keep losing. For instance:
1) Children are taught that slavery was one of the worst evils in American history and that its legacy continues to haunt us today, as opposed to being a perhaps regrettable but very much
forgettable episode with no significant consequences in the present.
2) Children were taught in succession not to mock the children of divorced women and unmarried parents, not to mock teen mothers, not to mock women who did masculine things such as wearing pants and demanding ever-increasing independence, not to mock people who felt love and desire for the same sex, and not to mock people who didn't conform to traditional expectations about gender in general.
3) Children are taught about, for example, the so-called 'Gilded Age' in terms that might make some of them question the general righteousness of the capitalist system and potentially lead them to believe that capitalism needs to be constrained.
4) Children are taught about, for example, the so-called 'Age of Colonialism' in terms that might make some of them question the general righteousness of their (white) ancestors. They might grow up believing that those ancestors did cruel or unjustified things in the process of taking control of much of the world, with various predictable consequences.
All this forms a reasonably consistent trend in American public education and how students are expected to act in it, even if the trend represents more of "movement in a direction" than "everyone reaches the extreme endpoint of this movement all at once."
This is not a politically neutral process; there are definite winners and losers. Some belief systems do not thrive and may not be able to survive in a society where children are consistently taught this way in an effective manner. A few generations of such education might lead to a future where almost no white children grow up to believe that most of the problems of nonwhites in society are caused by personal failings that are their sole responsibility. It might lead to almost no children of any color believing that people should be kept out of polite society if they do not obey traditional rules of how their gender is expected to act. It might lead to many children seeking to limit and restrain capitalism in various ways, supporting regulation, taxation of the wealthy, and so on.
...
[ack ick ptui, I feel dirty from writing some parts of that, personally, but I did it to make a point]
[GAH]
...
Anyway. The point is that this process, too,
does have winners and losers. And the people who stand to lose, well, they very often try to assemble their political clout and try to use it. Sometimes, to alter the schools in order to promote their worldview (e.g. Florida). Sometimes, to starve the public schools of funding and resources and weaken their ability to affect things, while building up a parallel network of private schools and alternative schooling that will let them teach their children as they please.
Because while in some abstract 'perfect centrist' sense, "education is good," there is a real debate in this country over what education is supposed to look like, what you are and aren't allowed to teach, and so on. And this debate constantly spills out into the broader question of shaping the infrastructure of education.
Should you have public education? Who gets more schools built faster? Should the money be diverted to private schools? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
...
This kind of thing is why I no longer really believe in "centrist governance." Government is not like an umpire calling balls and strikes, where there is a simple objective fact at stake (did the ball pass through the strike zone or not). Government is
policy-making, and policy-making by nature tends to have winners and losers, if only losers in the form of "people who didn't like that policy and didn't want the winners to win."
And which policies get represented as "neutral" or the product of a "centrist consensus" often has a lot to do with certain unspoken assumptions about who gets to be considered part of the consensus and who doesn't.
