Teams, Cocoons, Politics

Ross, while commenting on Matt Yglesias’ departure from TheAtlantic.com, mentions in passing

a lot of the things I find unpleasant about my own side of the partisan divide these days – the team-player mentality, the tendency toward cocooning, the obsession with policing orthodoxy, etc.

In a way, it’s an easy critique to lob, but that’s a reflection of how ingrained the cocooning has become. But it’s funny: friends with widely-ranging and different political philosophies are accused of their own brand of insularity. It’s difficult to imagine how to eliminate the inside/outside dynamic even in a world of burst cocoons. And this is why ‘Washington’ and ‘coastal elites’ come in for the scorn and annoyance they attract — when they work together to do the good work of depoliticization, it looks like an inside job; but when they work against each other, in the spirit of politicization (behold the culture wars and academia), they are rightly derided for crude, self-congratulatory, anti-intellectual tribalism. Not that we should pity ‘the poor elites’, whoever we decide they are. But we should be clear on the ways in which the deck of public opinion is stacked against them. The main thrust of Ross’ critique is that partisan team-ism isn’t just an elite problem, and the hope behind it, which I share, is that people who share a political philosophy can manage to do so in a worthwhile and effective way without shacking up in a large and impenetrable cocoon, whether in DC or across the country. It strikes me that this boils down to a plea for political philosophy itself — a thing that’s neither pure partisan politics nor a pure hunt of the mind for truth.