Edit: reading the original post, I believe I mischaracterized it. However, I do think my post does speak to a lot of the kinds of comments i saw in that post.

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It’s weird for me to defend being unnuanced, as I like to get lost in the details of a lot of political theory and political-economy.

However, I’ll play the devil’s advocate here because I think there is value in rejecting nuance sometimes.

The post I’m replying to asks us to look beyond polarization, beyond the binary political narratives, and dig into the weeds of policies and such.

I’m all for moving beyond the Dems vs Reps framing of things, however, I’ve noticed many commentators appealing to nuance to revert back to partisan (as in party) politics.

Appealing to “nuance” often is a small-c conservative maneuver. It tells us the system is too complex; the laws are too intricate; everything is too fragile.

It is an appeal for a kind of Burkean-like conservatism - that of incremental change at the margins, at best.

Bigger ideas are automatically dismissed as unfeasible or too fantastic. And there is little to not meaningful debate about how to conform reality to our ideas, but it’s instead channeled to how to conform our critical faculties to already existing reality.

In other words, it turns us all into uncreative and incredibly dull people. It is fatalistic - assuming things are as they are and could not have been otherwise. It takes contingent social facts and “naturalizes” them - pretending they’re immutable laws of physics. And thus it encourages us to abdicate our civic responsibilities to so-called “technocrats” who presumably are experts of the system, and for the system, allowing only them to navigate the myriad “complexities” at the margins. It encourages passivity if taken to an extreme.