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Reasonable People Can Differ?Not with me they can't.

By Michael Kinsley
Posted Friday, Dec. 22, 2000, at 3:00 AM ET

It is often said that reasonable people can differ, but I've never entirely agreed with that. And yet never before have I felt more strongly that I was surrounded by unreasonable people than during the five weeks after Nov. 7. Or at least never before since I was a teen-ager.

The Recount may not have been a bigger national obsession than other total-immersion controversies that have become a regular part of our culture in recent years. (We never even came up with a good name for it. "Recount" is exactly what it wasn't.) But for me, at least, it posed the question, "How can reasonable people believe that?" more vividly than any previous contender.

Let's run through the list. Elián González? Question doesn't arise; reasonable people not apparent on other side. Monica? A stew of ambivalence; possibility of reason on the other side all too apparent. O.J.? Nobody reasonable could believe him, and nobody did. Clarence Thomas? Turned on a narrow factual uncertainty; strong beliefs on both sides unreasonable. Bork? Although bitter, a rather high-minded scholarly debate, as these things go. Iran-Contra? What was that all about again?

Even in theory, the notion that reasonable people can differ is a bit lame. On matters you're confident you are right about, it is surely bewildering how others can differ. The temptation is to assume they must be stupid or dishonest, and that is often true. But often it is patently not true. So you wonder: I am not gifted with superhuman vision. Why don't all reasonably intelligent and honest people see things the way I do?

They could of course be blinded by prejudice or predisposition. I think this is often the case, especially about politics. Intelligence and honesty are sometimes no match for comfortable habits of thought. Everyone cannot be expected to rethink his or her entire framework of beliefs every time a new issue comes along. It's possible, I charitably suppose, for even fair-minded people not to realize how wrong they are.

The distressing corollary of this generous thought is that I might be one of these misguided people. I don't think so—but then I wouldn't, would I? And it's also a puzzle what one should do about this possibility. On the one hand, it's important to keep the danger in mind, to take the competition out for a mental road test before you buy an opinion on some issue, and to trade it in at any time if you're persuaded it's a lemon. On the other hand, deriving your specific opinions from a framework of beliefs is a good thing, not a bad one, and excessive self-doubt can be paralyzing and even dishonest in its own way. If you can't decide, maybe you should try harder. And if you're sure you're right … well, you're sure you're right, aren't you?

In ordinary times, even the professional opinionizer learns to live with the mystery of how other people can be so wrong. But when so many other people, some of whose honesty you respect (James Baker not included, obviously), seem in all sincerity to believe the unbelievable, that induces epistemological vertigo.

It swept over me one day while watching Bill Bennett being interviewed on CNN. Bennett has, if no more, at least a commercial interest in his reputation for intellectual integrity. And he characteristically began by declaring that he was not in touch with the Bush campaign. "I don't have talking points." But he had independently come to the conclusions that a) Gore was trying to "change the rules" by asking for a manual recount; and b) manual recounts are a terrible idea "because of the uncertainty in counting by human hands, the subjectivity that's introduced." Asked about the Texas law, signed by Bush, authorizing manual recounts if the machine count is close, Bennett sneered, "I've heard a lot of things from lawyers in the last few weeks," but nothing so ridiculous as the idea that "the law in Texas governs what goes on in Florida."

A clever answer. But an honest answer? One distinctive feature of the Recount episode was the way disagreement on non-ideological issues such as this one split along party lines. (And on some ideological issues—such as states' rights—the parties flipped.) That makes both sides suspect, I suppose. However, either the world is not as I perceive it to be or reasonable people cannot seriously differ that a) manual recounts were uncontroversial standard operating procedure in Florida and elsewhere before Nov. 7; and b) the fact that Bush signed a manual recount law himself is at least relevant evidence that manual recounts can't be the obvious absurdity that Bennett was trying to paint them.

In my world, if you told a couple of reasonable people that there had been an election in Florida, it was very close, and one side wanted to recount certain counties but didn't oppose counting others, while the other side said that all manual recounts were out of the question, these two people could not honestly differ about which side deserved the epithet of trying to "change the rules." And even if you told them that the anti-recount side had a plausible technical legal case—involving various deadlines and the ruthless exercise of "discretion" by officials on their side of the case—these reasonable people would not have differed about which side was more entitled to feel self-righteous. The right to vote and have your vote count seems like an appropriate, or at least explainable, basis for passion. But where do you honestly get passionate intensity about defending the web of technicalities used to defeat that right?

I don't mean to rehash these old arguments. Quite the opposite: My point is that all this seems obvious to me beyond the need for argument. If it doesn't seem that way to you, one of us has a problem with reality. And both of us have a problem with this great national reconciliation everyone is so gung-ho about.

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Michael Kinsley is a columnist for Time and the founding editor of Slate.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:


Kinsley argues that reasonable people cannot differ on the recount mess. But what do you do when the margin of error is greater than the difference? Any recount, hand or manual, would not produce a definitive winner, so just how reasonable is Kinsley's opinion that hand recounts should have been the solution (See W. Saletan's excellent Frame Game elsewhere in Slate on this)? Apart from all the other issues (what chads to count, does the rule of law foreclose hand recounts, etc), this presents quite a sticky problem, no? Maybe reasonable people can differ on this issue?

--Chris Sadler

(To reply, click here.)


The whole episode was not a single debate, in which both sides laid out their positions as best they could for public assessment. Rather, it was a stormy month of shifting positions, escalating tactics and fraying tempers in which neither side won any awards for consistency or scrupulousness. Each new red line that was crossed prompted the other side to cross the same line in the other direction, and afterwards it mattered little who had gone first. Each new development required both sides to tack (sometimes 180 degrees) to adjust to the changed circumstances, inevitably generating torrents of hypocrisy in their respective wakes. If one wants to focus on one's opponents' share of it (as Michael Kinsley has been doing for several columns now), one can easily paint a pretty damning (if slanted) picture.

--Dan Simon

(To reply, click here.)


How is it possible for Bill Bennett to reconcile what seems to be an glaring inconsistency in his argument (the Texas/Florida thing)? How is he able (let us assume he is being honest) to believe that manual recounts are hopelessly subjective in Florida but just dandy in Texas? For one thing he is fixed on the conservative gestalt. For him there must be a larger threshold before he starts feeling some discomfort with his position and the Texas-is-one-thing-but-Florida-is-a-whole- different-thing does not reach that point. If he were to be confronted with the ostensive inconsistency (which he was not) he would have come up with some "explanation". Maybe something like: unlike Texas, Florida does not have uniform standards for counting ballots and besides Florida law gives the Secretary of State absolute discretion about when to certify ballots, etc. You see, to Bennett it is not an important datum that Texas has a manual recount law that contenances dimpled chads He is fixated on the whole gestalt: "Gore=liberal=bad", "Bush=conservative=good", as moronic as that might sound.

Because in politics much depends on what values you bring to the table and because (as Aristotle points out) some people simply lack the capacity to achieve a mature political outlook, and finally because politics like science has this "gestalt switch" aspect to it, you will find yourself looking at people like Bennett and seriously questioning their sincerity while he stares right back at you and seriously questions your sincerity. For all I know Bennett might think thusly if confronted with his inconsistency: "well I guess he's got a point there, however in the overall scheme of things I'm right and sometimes you have to crack some eggs to make an omelet."

--Andrew Straticzuk

(To reply, or to read a fuller version of this post, click here.)

(12/22)

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