IN American political discourse, the statement “there are good people on both sides” has turned into a pejorative.

It all began when out-going President Donald Trump was asked about his opinion of a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. Refusing to condemn the rally outright, he replied that he thought there were “very fine people on both sides”.

More recently, after pro-Trump protestors stormed the Capitol building, the American Political Science Association incurred the wrath of its members when its statement claimed “both sides” need to do better. They have since apologised for it.

To put it simply, for many people the “on both sides” argument is perceived as a kind of meek centrism, or worse, a rhetorical cop-out when confronted with a detestable scenario with clear culpable parties.

However, if we take the statement as it is and assume the two sides refer to the broad “liberal” and “conservative” camps we tend to group people in, that “there are good people on both sides” is, generally speaking, an empirical fact.

It is also a necessary fact for democracy to function. If good people only exist on one side of the political divide, then elections can no longer be justified as the room for error is gone. What you need then is a revolution.

Malaysian edition

Unlike in the US, the “on both sides” argument usually carries a more positive message in Malaysia. We have our “sides” too, thanks to our first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system that divides alliances into two sides, however unstable these sides may be.

The argument reminds us to separate our politics from our judgement of the character of others. It reminds us that the obnoxious politicians on one “side” does not define the segment of the population that is associated with him/her. It also invokes this often-romanticised idea of the “silent majority”, whose perceived noble quality rises as trust in politicians drops.

We receive the “on both sides” argument positively because we are more used to the flip side of the argument: there are no good people on the other side. It reflects the kind of exclusivist ethno-religious politics we, unfortunately, have gotten used to.

After all, an unshakable scepticism towards “the other side”; the fundamental denial of the humanity of “others”, is basically how racism and religious bigotry operate.

As much as the “good people on both sides” argument can serve as a reminder for us to unplug from the toxicity of the online environment and try to interact with others on a more empathetic basis, leaning too much on it can also turn it into a bumper sticker with no analytical or strategic value.

3 problems 

There are also three fundamental problems I see with basing one’s politics in finding “good” people.

First, recognising there are good people on one side does not account for the actions of that political faction or tribe. If we think in terms of representative democracy that works through political parties with people only exercise their right to choose every few years, surely the “goodness” of the voter cannot be correlated directly with the “goodness” of their voting choice.

In this context, the insistence that there are “good people on both sides” usually implies the harm politics done to people (usually at the marginal ends of either side) is merely collateral damage at best, and necessary casualty at worst.

Second, centring politics on sorting the demos (the people) into “good” and “bad” camps can easily turn politics into an existential battle of good vs evil. This links our survival or our soul to this one vote, which is an absurd proposition under most circumstances. Worse, in framing politics as such, we often negate the issues that are actually existential to human civilisation, such as climate change.

Third, obsessing over “good” people politics is unproductive as neither of its permutations is desirable. Too eager to find “good” people, one’s politics turns into a form of pretend-centrism that has no centre of gravity, no real political commitment, and may see no problem in engaging patently “bad” actors.

Too eager to find “bad” people, one can easily fall into the pitfalls of what some people call ”cancel culture”. Whereas cancelling might be necessary as a strategy to deal with bad actors, as a modus operandi it is simply too unforgiving and unimaginative to constitute a successful political movement.

Beyond good and evil

As a result of this obsession over good and evil, liberal political discourses are often consumed by this one hypothetical question: should we engage a racist or a Neo-Nazi? But why should we give that kind of legitimacy to a neo-Nazi in the first place?

The only reason the question is framed as such is because we have laid the foundations of our politics on a place of goodness, which is how identity politics operate. After all, the identity we choose is what we think is good.

That is why instead of being descriptive standalones, identity categories are always held in oppositional binaries (liberal v conservatives; believers v unbelievers; racists v anti-racists).

The fundamental incompatibility between politics and “goodness” is not that politics has to be unethical. That is not my argument. The problem is that “good” functions as a logo of permanence (someone labelled as “good” is presumed to be always so until he/she is not) but politics is by nature a fluid enterprise.

In other words, the more we surrender our politics to a language of good and evil, the more our political divides will be fixed at these polarising poles we are so familiar with.

But if we can shift the focus of our politics from finding good people to building “sides”, then we can ask a radically different set of questions altogether because building political “sides” goes beyond moral judgment as it includes strategic judgment too. It involves short, medium, and long-term planning and not just guilty/not guilty pronouncements.

Dropping the good and evil framing, we can also look over our own shoulders with more sobriety without that ”saving Malaysia” sense of destiny. It’s never strategically helpful for political players to be embroiled in such Messianic thinking as it clouds their judgment; nor is it performatively helpful to their audience in an age of political cynicism.

Therefore, instead of obsessing over the hypothetical neo-Nazi, we can then ask questions, such as what people can I bring to my side to marginalise the far-right? What alliances can I build to lobby for far-reaching institutional and socioeconomic reforms to stem the rise of the far-right?

In doing so, hopefully we can make politics less angry and more interesting, imaginative, and innovative. – January 19, 2021.

* A Forensic Science-Asian Studies hybrid, Nicholas Chan is interested in how authority is shaped, exercised, and more importantly, resisted in Southeast Asia.