The best way to approach politics

Courtesy of Steven Pinker's 2018 book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, page 366:

Reason tells us that political deliberation would be most fruitful if it treated governance more like scientific experimentation and less like an extreme-sports competition.

That's the takeaway, for those afflicted with tl;dr (too long; didn't read). However, that's the conclusion of a longer passage worth quoting for context and nuance:

The facts of human progress strike me as having been as unkind to right-wing libertarianism as to right-wing conservatism and left-wing Marxism. The totalitarian governments of the 20th century did not emerge from democratic welfare states sliding down a slippery slope, but were imposed by fanatical ideologues and gangs of thugs. And countries that combine free markets with more taxation, social spending, and regulation than the United States (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Western Europe) turn out to be not grim dystopias but rather pleasant places to live, and they trounce the United States in every measure of human flourishing, including crime, life expectancy, infant mortality, education, and happiness. As we saw, no developed country runs on right-wing libertarian principles, nor has any realistic vision of such a country ever been laid out.

It should not be surprising that the facts of human progress confound the major -isms. The ideologies are more than two centuries old and are based on mile-high visions such as whether humans are tragically flawed or infiniely malleable, and whether society is an organic whole or a collection of individuals. A real society comprises hundreds of millions of social beings, each with a trillion-synapse brain, who pursue their well-being while affecting the well-being of others in complex networks with massive positive and negative externalities, many of them historically unprecedented. it is bound to defy any simple narrative of what will happen under a given set of rules. A more rational approach to politics is to treat societies as ongoing experiments and open-mindedly learn the best practices, whichever part of the spectrum they come from. The empirical picture at present suggests that people flourish most in liberal democracies with a mixture of civic norms, guaranteed rights, market freedom, social spending, and judicious regulation. As Pat Paulsen noted, "If either the right wing or the left wing gained control of the country, it would fly around in circles."

It's not that Goldilocks is always right and that the truth always falls halfway between extremes. it's that current societies have winnowed out the worst blunders of the past, so if a society is functioning halfway decently — if the streets aren't running with blood, if obesity is a bigger problem than malnutrition, if the people who vote with their feet are clamoring to get in rather than racing for the exits — then its current institutions are probably a good starting point (itself a lesson we can take from Burkean conservatism). Reason tells us that political deliberation would be most fruitful if it treated governance more like scientific experimentation and less like an extreme-sports competition.

I get as exercised as anyone when my own political beliefs are on the losing end of political contests, including when the U.S. Supreme Court goes against my cherished hopes and dreams. Yet it's all too easy to forget why we get exercised — that is, angry, frustrated, despondent, etc. — which is to say, we forget what really matters: the actions we take, or don't, as a society.

We're stumbling through this life together. We ought to commit ourselves to figuring out the best ways to do that, irrespective of party. Politics ain't beanbag, as the old saying goes. Well, it ain't football or baseball or any other sport, either. It's an ongoing experiment. Let's treat it like one, with care and respect — and with the sobering knowledge that we won't have the luxury of maintaining the status quo sometimes.