On the difference between balance and center in politics
Politics does not deal with balance but with emphasis and opposition. Almost no politicians running on the ticket should balance between value A and value B or balance between goal C and goal D - not even when both values or both goals are important to our lives. Most politicians will speak the rhetoric of "value A" in danger, all dealing only with value B or a neglected third goal, all dealing only with D. As stated, politics is the art of emphasis and contrast, and perhaps emphasis should be placed on the way of contrasting. This is also true when our need is to accurately balance two important aspects, not the opposite.
We must not confuse balance with the political center. How does the political center become so popular in Israel? Because it does not present itself through the idea of balance between poles, but rather through the idea of opposing the "insane" and "all Israeli" centers, as opposed to the extreme extremes, the delusional and the scurrilous, and the ultra-Orthodox and the Arabs. In other words, the political center also emphasizes an idea by contrasting with other ideas or groups, usually minorities.
A humanist balance between two important values or goals will not necessarily be popular or identified with the "general public", meaning that it will not necessarily be part of the political center, sometimes it will be identified with radicalism. Consider, for example, the idea of a state of all its citizens that preserves only the Law of Return as an exception because of the understandable fear of being a persecuted minority - in the light of Jewish history and the context of the often bad relations with minorities in the Middle East. Will be allocated to most of the political spectrum, including even among some members of Meretz, balanced with basic values that are important to human beings, but radical in relation to social norms in Israel.
The tragedy is that a human balance between fundamental values is critical. And often contradictory values seem to be important both to social life and to human beings - such as the tension created occasionally, between individual freedom and physical or social security. Going to one of the poles would be an anti-human step.
This aspect has always been important, but it has become even more important today - the days of the global and online era - where the power relations between groups and concepts are much more fluid, and therefore the need is not to emphasize one value that suffers from chronic inferiority but rather an accurate balance between values whose relative strength is volatile and fluid. For example, if in the 1940s the tension between universalism and liberalism for tribalism and ethnic nationalism was clear - Nazism and bad fascism, good liberalism (at least until the stage of post-Stalinist communism among the radical left in the West) And some universalistic openness may also be a heavy price in the form of strengthening global capitalism at the expense of destroying and trampling local communities and solidarity structures. But if this return to nationalism is also dark and out of the question of who is a humanitarian stage in the past. If so, a smart balance is needed. Here again we return to the problem that balance is an apolitical game.
The political center balances not between values that are important to the human animal, but between social concepts, common political concepts, or simply does not say anything and tries to be liked by superficial images. In fact, with full humanism at the forefront of our politics - that is, the person with all its complexity as a semi-social and semi-individual animal - then the balance is a radically radical direction, not a middle road.
The humanistic balance between values has no political representation today. It is also often not created to have a spring, from the negotiations between the various political actors. Politicians may sometimes create an actual balance, for example, in the laws and policies they legislate or spin, but they do not run for elections with an agenda of balance and thus are not guaranteed to be attentive and committed to the idea of balance rather than between fundamental values. And political constraints. Therefore, in the current era, the politicization of the idea of balancing is a critical task.
The next thing in politics will be to think about how to turn this idea from apolitical to political - how to contrast it with a counter-idea, perhaps one-dimensional.
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