Here’s some questions of taste: Do you like smoking? Do you smoke yourself? Does it bother you when others do it? Do you like bicycling? Or do you wish all those hippies on bikes would get out of the road?

Now here are two questions of politics: Should we ban smoking, even in private restaurants and bars? Should we build more bike lanes?

It’s quite obvious that if we tallied up answers to the first set of questions and compared them to the second, we’d find a high degree of overlap. People who like smoking will oppose smoking bans. People who can’t stand bicycling will vote against bike lanes and other “pedestrian-friendly” policies.

These relationships extend throughout the political sphere. Foodies want to prohibit soda machines and force inner-city grocery stores to carry more vegetables. Urban-living aficionados want to build rail lines and end subsidies that make living in suburbia cheaper. Music-lovers want funding for public school music programs, while artists think kids should spend more time in school painting.

Many, if not most, political disagreements are not, in fact, the result of differing ideologies or interpretations of the facts. Instead, they are matters of personal preferences masquerading as policy issues. They are questions of taste thrust into the realm of the political.

This “politics of taste” can be found everywhere, even though advocates of it rarely admit that’s what they’re doing. The foodie doesn’t push for fresh vegetables by saying, “I like the taste of vegetables and so think everyone should eat more of them.” Instead, he offers policy arguments about nutrition or sustainability. Most importantly, politics-of-tasters discount the extent to which tastes genuinely differ.

Stripped of specifics, the basic politics of taste argument looks like this:

Some people say they prefer Y over X. I am smart and well-informed and free from nefarious influence, and I prefer X over Y. Thus all people who are smart and well-informed and free from nefarious influence will also prefer X over Y. Therefore, anyone who chooses Y must be stupid, ignorant, or under the influence of nefarious agents. In other words, anyone who would choose Y isn’t in the proper mental state to make good choices. Given all that, I should use the political process to choose for them, giving them X, even though they (say they) prefer Y.

Notice the use of “choose” instead of “prefer” in the sentence about other people. That’s important. Key to the politics of taste is the idea that other people really prefer the same things I prefer. However, for reasons having to do with ignorance or immorality or indoctrination, they are lead to choose that which they don’t prefer.

But what if the political process–an election, say–results in Y winning out over X? What if democracy leads to policies that run counter to my (enlightened, informed, obviously-correct) tastes? Well, then there must be something wrong with the process. It wasn’t truly democratic. Too much money in politics, the influence of labor unions, fear of reprisal by bosses or family members, or “false consciousness” have lead everyone who voted for Y to vote against their genuine interests. Obviously, the only thing to do is to fix those systemic errors in the political system and assure that, in the future, the obviously-better X wins out over the obviously-inferior Y.

The politics of taste coupled with politics as moral posturing is the chief cause of the unproductiveness of much political debate. If we want fecund debate, we need to understand the best arguments for opposing views and critically evaluate our own positions.

But when politics are really a matter of personal tastes and when we invest our political views with undue moral weight, we end up with little reason to understand the arguments of others or to doubt our own political stance.