Either/or or Both/and?

Cynical Synapse has posted a reply to my recent post on the sources of Michigan's brief shutdown. I don't know how much more I want to say on this because it looks to me like we aren't too far apart on this issue, but I think some clarification is warranted.

Synapse argues the following:

The parties involved—the Democratic governor, Republican majority leader in the State Senate, and to a lesser degree the House speaker, a Democrat, want us to believe this was about the Democrats and Republicans standing up for philosophical differences in what government should be. The fact is, there's not that much difference between the two parties any more but the doublespeak they wrap their spin in.

On one level, this is certainly true. Both parties are interested in maintaining and increasing their own power at the expense of the other party. This was clearly an essential part of the dynamic which led to shutdown, and all involved deserve equal blame for using the pending shutdown to make a political power play, but to dismiss the philosophical differences between the parties is to dismiss the foundation of the power play by the two sides. Because our elected officials are held accountable publicly through the electoral process, their ability to gain and hold power is grounded in the perceived effectiveness of their policies, and because it is impossible to determine the effectiveness of a policy until after it has been allowed to play itself out, you need to have well-grounded principles underlying your policies in order to justify their implementation. These principles also come in handy after the fact if the policy is the result of a compromise. Any good results are due to the implementation of your principles, while bad results proceed from the implementation of your opponent's principles.

To make a long story short, self-interest dictates adherence to principle (or at least the appearance of it). But there's another side to the story because adherence to principle has to translate to real-world benefits for those impacted by policies implementing these principles. Thus, you want the policies you implement to benefit tangibly as many people as possible, because people vote based upon their own self-interest, and if adherence to your principles benefits them, they will vote for you and people of similar mind. Thus, if you adhere to certain principles, you believe that they are true, or at least more true than those of your opponents. From this, it follows that if your opponent's principles undermine your own, policies based on those policies will be bad policies because people will be worse off than they would have been if your principles had played a greater role in forming said policies.

But this can't be the end of it because if you simply cave into the other side, allowing them to have their way, in what sense can you be said to be standing for your principles? Simply casting a vote in silent protest is little more than lying down and letting yourself get run over by a stampede. If you're going to lose a political fight, you want to go down valiantly, inflicting as much damage as possible to your opponent to establish where you stand, why you stand there, and how committed you are to holding that ground. This way, when things go South, you can say that yours was and is the better way.

Ultimately, political aims are cyclical. You advance policies grounded in certain principles because you believe they will make people better off. You want to make them better off because they will then give you the power you seek. You then use this power to advance more policies you think will make people better off because they will reward you by either allowing you to maintain your power or giving you more.

In the end, you can't separate philosophy and politics in the political process because both are essential elements of the process. Sometimes one element is more clearly seen than the other, as in the budget fiasco, but while both parties were using the mess to try and gain political advantage (and share equal blame in this regard), the philosophical differences between the parties were and are real, not simply window-dressing, and because I think the Republicans were more right than the Democrats on how best to deal with the deficit, they are more blameworthy than the Republicans.