The political appeal of a "hard" approach versus a "soft" one

Great Debates
1

Something that’s been stewing in my mind of late:

In politics, there is usually a “hard” solution and a “soft” solution for most problems. And generally the hard one holds much greater appeal. (“Hard” does not mean difficult, but rather, the more hard-edged, confrontational approach.)

Abortion: The hard approach is to ban abortions and penalize doctors who perform them, and perhaps the women who get them. The soft approach is to teach sex ed, make contraception widely available, etc. Although the soft approach may be more effective, the hard approach holds much more psychological appeal for pro-lifers because it has more ‘ooomph’ to it and is much more in-your-face - there is more psychological satisfaction in seeing pregnant women not being able to get abortions, than there is in such women never getting pregnant in the first place.

Criminal justice: The hard approach is lock the criminals up and throw away the key, let their prisonmates force them to pick up the soap in the shower, or better yet, just execute them outright. The soft approach is rehabilitation, the ‘Scandinavian approach,’ make prisons comfier and more psychologically healthy, try to improve people’s circumstances so that they don’t go into crime to begin with, etc. Although the soft approach may be more effective, the hard approach holds much more psychological appeal because it gives the gratification of “seeing the bad guy get his just deserts” and most people naturally love to see criminals suffer; natural justice-schadenfreude. As the saying goes, no politician ever got elected by saying, “Vote for me, I’ll be soft on crime.”

Illegal immigration: The hard approach is - build the wall, deport them, prevent them from coming in. The soft approach is, make legal immigration easier, improve the economic and other conditions in Mexico and elsewhere so that they are less likely to want to come to the US illegally, etc. Although the soft approach may be more effective, the hard approach holds much more psychological appeal because many people like the thought of others wanting to come into America illegally and not being able to; kind of like a rich guy in a poor neighborhood knowing that his neighbors want his stuff and can’t have it.

The list could go on and on, and this isn’t meant to be a 5-page essay. But in general, in politics, whichever approach is perceived as “hard” will often win the day (with its target audience) while whichever approach is perceived as “soft” will be rejected as too pansy.

(It needs to be noted that with some issues, the hard approach is the right one - you couldn’t stop Hitler and the Nazis with nice peace overtures; the only solution was a military one. But that is a different topic; this thread is only about the mental appeal, or lack thereof, of the two approaches.)

2

It’s about incentives and goals. The difficulty is that what actually works and what is claimed to work and admitted to have worked are three different things. Honesty in actual goals are another. People claim they want a more fair society but many of those who claim that behave in ways and set up systems in ways that are diametrically opposed to said claim.

Now, your implication is dark. It basically states that humans enjoy seeing and more importantly benefitting from stratification despite claims to the otherwise. Now if that’s true and that’s how we’re wired there is no escaping it.

3

Authoritarians and the appeal of the simple solution. Authoritarians are more concerned with the appearance of power and control than they are of any sort of actual solution, and authoritarians tend to be kind of intellectually devoid and lacking any sort of empathy and curiosity so they tend to believe that swift, decisive, simple solutions are possible and indeed the most productive way to proceed. Which, if you’re operating from a standpoint of “My personal needs and desires are the only ones that count and fuck the rest of y’all” makes perfect sense.

4

I’m not sure I’d put it that way, but rather, that - as SmartAleq pointed out - the “hard” approach to a problem is usually a lot simpler and intuitive than the “soft” one. Terrorists? Bomb 'em. Your kids want to dye their hair pink? Forbid it. People want to drink alcohol? 1920s Prohibition. Pornography? Ban it.

The problem with the simple intuitive approach, though, is that it can be wrong, just like how natural instinct in a stalled plane is to pull the nose up, or facing an oil fire, is to pour water on it, but that just worsens it.

5

Let’s look at terrorism as a good example. If we consider that terrorists are acting rationally but from a different set of moral axioms and that those moral axioms are drastically different from the set that the terrorists consider enemies than those two sets of moral axioms are mutually exclusive. One set has to be eliminated or subjugated. That is one reason why religious wars are so dreadful.

How do you use reason to reason away axiomatic beliefs?

6

I suggest that the reason is because too few people are willing/able to spend the time/brainpower to understand the effectiveness of the soft approach. The masses will generally go with the hard approach for all their pet issues.

7

I think the issue is more complicated and depends on specific circumstances.

I wasn’t around for Prohibition. I don’t know if a more “moderate” approach would have been listened to. My understanding is that alcoholism was rampant at that time. You can read bios, and it just seemed a large number of people had problems with it. Industrial production of liquor likely played a factor. So maybe the alarms needed to be sounded.

Prohibition was not popular and was rolled back. Certain locales liked it and kept it on for decades after. AA was also developed which is an individual focused, more moderate approach. So the more moderate approach prevailed over time. But then there is DWI, where I don’t feel inclined to be very tolerant. That should go down to zero. No real reason to be moderate there.

Is MeToo moderate? Doesn’t really seem like it.

With abortion, I honestly think most of its companions (opposition to sex ed and birth control) have withered away, with the decline in impact of churches. Fewer people go or belong, and unwed births continue to rise. That battle has been covertly ceded already.

“Tough on crime” hasn’t been revisited for decades, it’s true. Willie Horton saw to that. It’s a difficult issue for a pol to work around given the optics. Will that ever change?

The high prison population and its cost doesn’t seem to be much of a mover. Maybe some movement on getting the non violent drug offenders out. Crime is well down from decades ago. But people don’t want violent crime at all. No one’s going to say “Whew, the murder rate’s one third of what it was, we can start paroling more people.” In fact, people may still be fearful, because it’s something that would disrupt their safe lifestyle. Someone who doesn’t have a safe lifestyle, with murder more of a commonplace thing, may actually be less reactive, since they’re more numb to it and figure nothing can be done.

8

Hard approaches are a lot easier to understand, and can often be stated much more simply. And people are extremely bad at envisioning the second and third-order effects of a policy, so they tend to stop analyzing at the end of the sentence.

Another example of a hard vs soft policy (that gives some balance politically, since all the examples in the OP are examples of hard policies favored by the right), is the $15 Minimum Wage. There are many possible policies that might improve the lot of low-income workers, but a hard “You must pay $15 an hour” policy is very simple to state and many people analyze it by comparing their current hourly wage to $15. Soft policies that might actually better target the problem without the potential labor market distortions that a minimum wage (may) cause are a lot harder to wrap your head around, and so they have much lower levels of support.

9

A big driver of Prohibition was not so much the alcohol itself, but the impoverishment and domestic violence it caused and worsened. Women got on board with it because alcoholism was not nearly as big a problem amongst women (who weren’t allowed in bars anyway) but husbands drinking up their paychecks on a Friday night then coming home drunk and beating their wives and kids was a very big problem indeed. So a better read of the room would have disclosed that nobody was all that worried about alcohol per se, but the side effects and domestic problems it caused were of great concern.

10

Many good comments so far. Here’s another:

In many cases the “hard” approach addresses the current immediate problem, whereas the “soft” approach amounts to intervening upstream with the expectation that over the years the benefits will trickle forward, spread out, and grow in volume.

E.g. Harsh sentencing and abusive policing gets criminals off the street today. Giving everyone a decent education and stopping child abuse will produce a better generation of adults containing far fewer criminals starting in about 20 years.

Keeping up the belief in the soft policy for the 15 years while the results are incubating and there’s little to show for it yet is a tough sell to both citizens with minute-long attention spans and to politicians up for election every 2, 4, or 6 years.

11

It seems to me that the main difference depends on whose ox is being gored, regardless of whether the it’s the liberals or conservatives wanting to take the hard or soft approach.

Crack cocaine causing issues with those Black people over there? Lock them all up. Opioids are causing a problem in my own family? Let’s try rehab first.

I’m only making $7 an hour? Raise the minimum wage to $15. I’m currently making $16 and the minimum wage just went from $7 to $15? Hold on, now I’m a near minimum wage worker all of a sudden, maybe we should look at that more closely.

Me too was mentioned. A young woman who is not in a position of power to be doing the harassing and is not likely to be one of the accused? Believe them all. A middle aged white man in upper management? Hold on, we should take things on a case by case basis.

12

For populist politicians, the idea of the hard approach is very attractive - it gives the electorate the imprssion of decisiveness and does not encourage questions, it also means that things can be set in motion within a single electoral term.

That is not to say hard approaches are not useful - but for most social issues they are largely inneffective.

I think the essential difference is short-termism, hard solutions appear to be quick ones - although they generally bring lots of unexpected problems. Soft solutions take time, cross electoral cycle boundaries which in turn is likely to cross over political philosophies when adminstrations swing from one party to the other.

Take an issue of regeneration - for any run down area there are loads of issues that run into each other, and they feed into each other. We can all see the problems right now - but it took years for those to happen, and in some cases such as former industrial towns it may require literally a depopulation to achieve a sustainable situation - I doubt the electorate would go along with that, instead a nice little support bill goes down far better and is likely to buy votes.

Our society took generations to develop, our attitudes take just as long - a great example is that of prohibition - the soft solution is to generate social support using education, consent, pricing and taxation but instead a decision was taken to impose using the blunt tool of laws and enforcement as the ‘hard’ solution.

Conversely we can look at smoking, that took decades, a few generations really and it will take decades more to pretty much eradicate. This wasn;t impoised with a hard solution, instead it was soft solution using education, price, social pressure and changes to the law in relation to advertising and civil compensation claims.

The problem here is that the whole thing was pretty much not planned from the beginning, the policy developed in a largely haphazard way with many changes and diversions, with only the end goal remaining constant - it was pretty messy and I doubt that any political party can lay claim to being the main architects.

Many social issues are like that, they are process and target led, not policy led - policy tends to work like milestones to give a general direction of travel.

Now its worth putting Joe/Joanna Public into the equation and try to convince them - some definate looking statements or a messy looking process with no end date and no definate identifiable stages to measure progress - easy to see why they would go for the hard solution, even if it isn’t the most effective one.

13

What does that mean and how is it relevant?

14

The only one that really needs to be “eliminated or subjugated” is the idea that only one way of living / believing can be allowed; which is unfortunately often found on more than one side (there are rarely only two) of situations in which terrorism is occuring.

The problem isn’t with people thinking ‘Those others are dead wrong about everything that matters!’ The problem is with their then proceeding to try to make them dead over it.

Getting across to enough people to make it work that other people may be Wrong About Essential Beliefs but nevertheless instead of trying to kill each other you should get together and, say, organize a farmers’ market, or a country, is complicated, timeconsuming, continually at risk of falling apart, and possible. Eliminating or subjugating the different axioms people believe in sounds simpler; but generally turns out in practice to be dangerous, timeconsuming, damaging to all sides, and impossible.

15

Did I miss any explanation for this remark?

16

The OP listed issues that are more likely to appeal to people on the right side of the spectrum. MeToo appeals more to people on the left side of the spectrum. I bring it up to point out that both ends of the spectrum can find political appeal in hard approaches.

17

Why do you classify MeToo as a “hard” approach? And how is it relevant to politics/elections?