On Flip-Flopping

Julian Baggini posted an interesting article on Comment is Free recently, in which he discusses the idea of ‘flip-flopping‘ – the term used to describe the sudden reversal by a politician of a previously held view or policy position, and made famous during the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election.

Baggini makes the unobjectionable but often overlooked point that making a political u-turn is actually more difficult, and usually more laudable than sticking dogmatically to one’s views in the face of conflicting evidence:

Where are the conviction politicians of today, people ask. I’ll tell you: in Zimbabwe, in Tehran, and in the White House. [...] courage of conviction is too often admired even when the convictions are hopelessly wrong.

[...]

The trouble with most people is not that they lack the courage to stick to their guns, but they don’t have the greater bravery to change course. Consistency is a good thing, but not when it is understood as simply refusing to change your mind. Indeed, one of the best reasons for changing your mind is precisely to become more consistent.

In many ways, I’m with him on this. It’s pretty clear that unwavering commitment to a particular idea or policy prescription is unwise, and often actually dangerous. If Mao Zedong had ‘flip-flopped’ on Lysenko’s theory of environmentally acquired inheritance, for example, the needless starvation of millions during the ‘Great Leap Forward’ could have been averted.

I also think that the ‘flip-flop’ as a political concept needs to be examined more critically. It has become a ‘frame’ for presenting a particular category of political behaviour – a bundle of simplistic negative connotations that can be attached to a person or action, ensuring that it will be interpreted negatively. These frames are common in American politics especially (see also: Michelle Obama as an ‘angry black woman‘), and generally serve only to elide complexity and prevent issues from being judged on a case-by-basis.

Like all stereotypes and simplifications the ‘flip-flopper’ frame contains a grain of truth, and Baggini touches on this in describing the three respects in which consistency is important in politics:

First, we need to know what values are guiding their decisions; no matter how good it is to reassess one’s values, we need to rely on those we elect to adhere to the ethos on which they were elected. Second, elections only make sense if people follow the bulk of the policies they were elected to implement, not just a general agenda. Third, changes of mind that occur because politicians didn’t think clearly the first time do not inspire confidence. Brown’s U-turn on the 10p tax was a classic example of a change of mind that, though welcome, betrayed poor judgment in the first place.

All of these are valid points, and in fact I’m in broad agreement with the bulk of this article. However, I think Baggini misses a crucial dimension of the issue, and his analysis suffers as a result. I’m talking about the sincerity, or lack of it, that underlies the u-turn. Clearly when it comes to a change of position, motives matter. If a politician says one thing to AIPAC, and then something completely contradictory to ISNA the following week, we would be naive to think that evidence and rationality accounted for any disparity between the two statements. Such cynical pandering certainly couldn’t be called courageous, other than, perhaps, in its audacity.

If this post is about anything (and I’m beginning to wonder), it’s a warning as to the danger of allowing the reductive tendencies of media representation to obscure the invariably complex reality of a given political situation. I’m pretty sure we deserve better than that.