"Don't Ask Me About My Politics" Is How Bankrupt Systems Defend Themselves

How can you tell that political ideology has become like religion? Watch how each defends itself. The defences are identical, and the identity is not a coincidence.

The Religious Version

Religions say: my beliefs are private, and you are not to ask about them.

Notice where this posture appears. It is not adopted uniformly — it is adopted precisely where the belief cannot be defended. Nobody says "don't ask me" about a claim they can support. The move is a way of avoiding an argument rather than losing one, and declaring the matter private is how the avoidance is made respectable.

The Political Version

The same thing happens with politics, and in the United States it is common enough to be a social norm: political opinions are private, and asking about them is rude.

But this contradicts the entire theory of the system.

Representative government is supposed to work by argument. Positions are advanced, examined, defended, and revised in public, and the resulting settlement is legitimate because it survived that process. That is the story the system tells about itself, and it is the source of whatever authority it claims.

Now ask how any of that works if you may not ask people what they think, and nobody volunteers a position. You cannot have the debate the system's legitimacy rests on. The mechanism that was supposed to justify the outcome has been quietly disconnected, and everybody involved is being polite about it.

That is another nail in the theoretical justification for how we govern ourselves.

The Frequency Is the Measurement

Here is the useful part, because it gives you a diagnostic.

The more often the adherents of a position retreat to "don't ask me," the more bankrupt the position is. This works as a general measure. It applies to religions, to political parties, to corporate values statements, and to any body of belief that has adherents.

A position that can be defended gets defended, because defending it is enjoyable and advantageous. A position that cannot gets wrapped in a privacy norm, and the norm is enforced socially rather than argued for.

Why It Is So Common in American Politics

The specific case is worth explaining, because the diagnostic points somewhere.

The two parties are so bland — American coffee, no taste — and so rarely committed to anything specific that the differences between them are mild and uninteresting. It is genuinely hard to defend either against the other, because both are unserious in the same ways.

So people adopt the defence. And the unspoken completion of "don't ask me about my politics" is: because I have no way to defend them, and I do not really know why I am one rather than the other.

That is not a failure of the individuals. It is what happens when a system offers two packages, assembled by other people, differing mainly in branding — and then asks citizens to identify with one of them. The privacy norm is a rational response to being handed an indefensible position and told it is your identity.