RALEIGH – In debating issues from the Iraq War to local school construction, I think it is wise to choose the middle course.
No, I don’t mean a middle course on fighting anti-American thugs or housing students. I mean a middle course in the way we debate these issues. At one pole, you have the shrill, mindlessly partisan, intensely personal style of political invective that has unfortunately become ensconced in some of the broadcast media and blogosphere. At the other pole, you have the namby-pamby, shades of gray, can’t-we-all-just-get-along approach that attempts to define differences way in a seemingly endless stream of weasel words and psychobabble.
Neither serves the public interest. Neither keeps the public’s interest. The shrillness gets boring after a time, like watching the fourth or fifth season of a sitcom where the characters are all fixed in stone, the jokes are repetitive, and the put-downs obvious and absurd. And the namby-pamby is intentionally boring, right from the start, as a strategy to mute debate rather than air and resolve it.
Based on recent experience with two local citizen panels here in North Carolina, I submit that a middle course of spirited but respectful debate offers the best opportunities for progress. One of the panels was in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, where my colleague Lindalyn Kakadelis served on a committee chaired by former Gov. Jim Martin and charged with the task of formulating a response to last year’s defeat of a school-bond issue. The other panel was the Blue Ribbon Committee on the Future of Wake County, on which I served with 64 other individuals representing a variety of professional and political backgrounds.
The process in both instances may have appeared chaotic from the outside – possibly because each was a bit chaotic – but the experiences were, for the most part, useful. Leaders may have wanted the committees to cohere immediately and achieve premature consensus, but they had the wisdom not to try to force it when push came to shove. And while there were passionate debates and differences of opinion, in each case prompting a group of dissenters to express their alternative views in a joint statement, the discourse remained mostly civil and constructive, rather than devolving into calling names and questioning motives.
There are voices in Mecklenburg and Wake counties who express disappointment with the outcome of these committee deliberations. They wanted to see consensus. They wanted to see tough, contentious issues go away. Some wanted political cover for expensive projects and tax increases.
Such expectations were unrealistic. We don’t have differences of opinion about how much new schools should cost or how high local tax burdens should be because no one has ever thought to discuss them. These differences are real. They reflect not just different information – though that is an important consideration, and you can achieve some consensus through sharing better information – but also different preferences and principles.
In the Wake County case, there were at least two different ways that our Blue Ribbon Committee might have reached consensus in a report on county infrastructure needs and how to pay for them. One would have been to fashion a report that made no recommendations and took no positions, but simply laid out a range of alternatives, on the cost side and revenue side, with pros and cons and dollar amounts attached. Another would have been to set specific targets for cost containment and reallocating existing county and state dollars to address our need for schools, roads, and other projects. If serious efforts to reach these cost-side targets still fell short, then the report would have prioritized the revenue options needed to bridge the gap. I was part of a group that tried to make the second option happen, but the magnitude of the issues involved and time constraints conspired to make consensus problematic (you can read more of the details of our approach to Wake County’s facility needs here).
That’s okay. The Wake committee, like the Mecklenburg panel, still served the useful function of describing county challenges and serving as a forum for airing alternative policy responses. No appointed board of citizen volunteers can substitute for elected boards hashing things out and voters participating in bond campaigns and elections to make their preferences known. An advisory board can help set a tone, however, a middle course between bruising and snoozing.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.