Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Signing a truce with starvation and disease.
I’d like to try highlighting one small reason our political discourse so often feels frustratingly fruitless.
Our dominant political factions represent opposed paradigms of government, and the arguments one side finds compelling simply cannot and will not move the other. In order to make an argument that is compelling to the other side of a conversation, one must understand what matters to them. Unfortunately, we tend to simply repeat ad nauseam arguments that address questions that matter to us, rather than consider the questions motivating our interlocutors. This is a kind of fallacy of irrelevance—one that’s often hard to see, because the premises are relevant to us and therefore salient.
Group L sees government as an expedient means of accomplishing good things, so its most important question is, “Is this thing beneficial?” When this group argues for or against government action, it means that the action is either good or bad. If something is good and not within government’s purview, then government’s purview should be extended to include it.
Group R sees government as a dangerous means of accomplishing necessary things, so its most important question is, “Who or what should do this thing?” When this group argues for or against government action, it argues that the action is or is not within government’s purview. If something is good and not within government’s purview, responsibility to do it should be left to the people.
On R’s view of the social contract, government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, constituting a fiduciary relationship and obligation. Government fulfills its fiduciary duty to the extent that it uses the resources it extracts to serve the interest of the citizenry, and it betrays that duty to the extent that it uses those resources to serve the interests of anyone else. To R, justification for a government action consists in its benefit to the citizenry. Thus, if L were to attempt to justify a government program by reference to the good it does for people in foreign nations, R would find that argument not merely unconvincing but completely perverse. L’s argument amounts to demonstrating that the program would be a violation of the government’s role as fiduciary. If, however, the program does have domestic benefits, then those are what L should marshal as evidence.
In this case, that’s exactly how USAID was sold in the first place. Its nominal goal was to bolster national security by means of foreign assistance programs, on the understanding that nations receiving aid would be more economically stable and less likely to serve as vectors for Soviet influence or action. Benefits to foreign peoples function as the cost we pay to benefit ourselves, and the government is acting within the proper boundaries of its power. As long as the benefits we receive outweigh the costs we pay, that is.
On the L view, sufficient justification for maintaining USAID is found on the grounds that it does good in the world. Saying, “Health programs like those credited with helping end polio and smallpox epidemics and an acclaimed HIV/AIDS program that saved more than 20 million lives in Africa already have stopped. So have monitoring and deployments of rapid-response teams for contagious diseases such as an Ebola outbreak in Uganda,” is sufficient. We can accomplish this and other goods through government action, and therefore we should continue to do so.
On the R view, however, it is simply impossible to justify USAID’s existence by reference to foreign benefit. Even a literally infinite list of laudable accomplishments would fail to make even the first step toward justification. It is entirely reasonable for someone who subscribes to something like R’s view to ask whether the original justification for USAID still holds and whether a similar case can still be made for it.
Of course, dichotomous (and brief) analyses always trade in simplification, and while they’re useful abstractions for capturing broad tendencies, L and R don’t describe everyone, as real political attitudes are messier and more complex. People on the political Left do care about governmental overreach and consent, and people on the Right do make utilitarian arguments about government action. The R perspective might not even account for the majority of those who support dissolving USAID, as many on the Right would say that government should have no role in charity at all, regardless of how it might benefit the nation. The L perspective, likewise, doesn’t represent the entirety of the Left, many of whom also argue for moral, constitutional, and institutional constraints on government action. In fact, if you’d asked me thirty years ago, I might have said that the fiduciary view of the social contract was core to both Republicans and Democrats.
As I said, it’s a simplification.
