I got something wrong on the written part of the Pennsylvania driver’s license test. They never told me what it was. “Nine-out-of-10: Pass,” they said, and that was good enough to get my Jersey license transferred over.
On one level, it doesn’t matter that I didn’t get a perfect score — you only need a 7 out of 10 to pass. But it’s still a bit unnerving if you think about it. There was something I didn’t know about driving, and that I still don’t know. Granted, there were some trivial and inconsequential questions on that test, and it’s not a big deal if you get one or two of those wrong. But the test also included a few things that were fundamentally important. There are questions on there that you shouldn’t be allowed to get wrong, and wrong answers that should disqualify you from driving.
Consider, for example, one of the questions I know I got right: “What does a red traffic light mean?” It’s possible to get that wrong and not be corrected. It’s possible to get that wrong and still pass the test. You can answer, “Red lights mean go” and still be given a driver’s license — without anyone ever correcting your misapprehension before you drive away.
This probably explains a lot. When you see some joker* doing something hare-brained behind the wheel, that’s probably one of those passed-with-a-7-out-of-10 people right there.
The point here, though, is that not every question is equally important. Some carry more weight than others. Priority means more than percentages. Some questions can be tallied among the general mass of questions that produce a final score. But other questions are fundamentally important and the wrong answer on those questions should be, all by themselves, disqualifying.
This is a problem with our politics, and with the way we talk about and think about our politics. We see this in those little online quizzes that attempt to tell you which candidate for office is “best” for you. They go by percentages, but have no way of accounting for priorities. Thus, for example, it may ask for your opinions about 50 different topics and then tell you, based on your responses, that the candidate for the Hey Everybody, Let’s Nuke Canada Party is your ideal match — agreeing with you on 98 percent of all topics, everything except his signature plan to nuke Canada.
That result is misleading or, at best, meaningless, because it doesn’t account for the fact that this guy is the nothing-matters-except-nuking-Canada guy. If you agree with him about everything else, but disagree with him about that, then you don’t really agree with him at all. The fact that you may also share his offhand sentiments regarding support for regional carbon-credit marketplaces, or that he has a surprisingly nuanced plan for universal pre-K, is irrelevant. In considering that candidate only one thing matters — your “2-percent” disagreement on the merits of nuking Canada.
Lawrence Lessig is apparently a reasonably bright guy, but he made himself appear obtuse last year by approaching politics the same way that those misleading quizzes do. He tried to run for president as a single-issue candidate focused entirely on campaign finance reforms. He expected to get somewhere with that because he could cite polling data showing that a large majority of voters said they agreed with his position on that issue. And that’s true — most people, when asked about the kind of reforms Lessig advocated, will nod and say, “Oh, yes. Sounds good.” But most people, when not asked, probably don’t think about it most of the time. Voters ignored Lessig because while they may have tepidly agreed with his policy, they very much disagreed with his priorities. His campaign took one issue and made it Issue No. 1, relegating everything else to the back burner. Most voters, by contrast, consider several issues to be their top priorities — and Lessig’s issue wasn’t one of them.
Priority matters and priorities matter. Some questions are more important than others.
I’ll never know which question I got wrong on that driver’s license test. It may have been the confusingly worded one about headlight use, or maybe the one asking you to calculate safe following distance by counting telephone poles (because keeping your eyes focused on the side of the road while doing arithmetic conversions in your head makes you a safer driver). But I know I got the one about red and green traffic lights correct, and I know that one was more important. Those questions all count the same on PennDOT’s scoring system, but I don’t think they should. I think that question should be a deal-breaker.
Some political questions, too, should be deal-breakers. Some questions, and some priorities, should be disqualifying in and of themselves.
Consider, for example, the candidacy of Donald Trump. Trump wants to eliminate the estate tax. I strongly disagree with that. This disagreement counts, for me, as a check in the “against” column if I want to make a pro-and-con list about potentially supporting Trump, or if I want to follow the example of those quizzes and voting guides that tally my percentage of agreement. But while both Trump and I disagree about this issue of policy — and while that disagreement is indicative of other, broader values and judgments more generally — this is not the No. 1 issue for either of us. Not even a Top 5 issue, really.
Tax policy is not near the top of Donald Trump’s list of policy priorities because he doesn’t have such a list. Trump is not a list-of-issues kind of guy. He’s more like Lawrence Lessig. But where Lessig tried to be a single issue candidate, Trump is a single idea candidate.
That single idea is all that matters to him. To the extent that Trump has policy priorities or positions on issues, it’s all in service of that single idea. When it comes to anything else — anything not directly related to that one, clarifying idea — then his answers and policies are unfixed and unformed, constantly changing in tone and substance. That’s because doesn’t really care about anything else — just his one big idea.
Trump’s single-idea candidacy has electrified millions of voters who enthusiastically support that idea — and millions more who reject it. But at the same time it has confused and confounded many pundits, journalists, and ordinary voters who are still trying to fit this election into the frame and templates through which they have viewed every previous presidential contest in their lifetime.
Some of these confused voters are trying to fit this election into the framework of those online quizzes or of those “voter’s guides” that get distributed every four years by various groups. They’re still trying to make their checklists of policy positions, comparing the candidates side-by-side and scoring the outcome like PennDOT’s written test. That approach helped them understand the contest between Obama and Romney, or between Bush and Kerry, or between Reagan and Mondale, but it doesn’t work at all for a single-idea candidate like Donald Trump.
Other confused voters are trying to make this election fit into the basic partisan framework of our two-party system. They’re trying to view it as a simple contest between Ds and Rs. But that, too, is misleading, and irrelevant.
Even more confused are those who are, themselves, single-issue voters. These poor folks are struggling to figure out where Donald Trump stands in regard to their signature concerns. But if their single-issue concerns don’t align with Trump’s single idea, then this becomes pointless and impossible. At any given moment, he may or may not be saying what they want to hear, but that hardly matters because he’s not committed to such statements — he’s not committed to anything except his one idea.
So set aside all those candidate quizzes, all those voter’s guides and percentage-scoring tests, and whatever single-issue litmus tests you may have used to understand previous elections. They won’t help you this year. This election isn’t about any of that. It’s about one idea.
If you support that idea, then you support Donald Trump. And if you support Donald Trump, then you are supporting that idea — and that is all you are supporting, the only thing.
This is clarifying. It’s a binary choice like the traffic lights pictured above. Red or green. Yes or no.
– – – – – – – – – – – –
* I can never shake my Mom’s taxonomy for other drivers. Aggressive drivers or anyone going faster than she would have liked were “jokers.” Those driving too slowly were “timid souls.” As in, “Oh my, this joker wants me to speed up but I can’t get around the timid soul in front of us.” This has served me well as a tonic against road rage, and it has provided me with a helpfully G-rated vocabulary whenever I’ve had to ferry around a car filled with young children.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In