Opinion | No Labels is selling 'common sense' politics. Don't buy it.

My fellow Americans, I rise in opposition to common sense.

This might not be a popular position. After all, who could oppose common sense, that eternal guide to wisdom and birthright of every one of us, no matter how high or low our station? Were not Americans’ hearts stirred to revolution by Thomas Paine in a pamphlet titled with those noble words?

The trouble today is that when you hear someone make an appeal to common sense, as countless politicians in both parties do, there is a good chance they’re leading you down a path in which reality is denied and solutions have little or nothing behind them.

So it is with the centrist group No Labels, which has been threatening to mount a presidential bid that many fear would make a Donald Trump victory more likely. Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), scourge of his party, is joining No Labels for a “Common Sense” town hall this week, planned in timing and location — New Hampshire, site of the first presidential primary — to garner maximum news coverage.

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If the title weren’t enough to convince you of all the common sense to come, everyone involved is saying the phrase again and again. During a brief interview with CNN, Manchin managed to repeat it five times.

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Yet it’s almost impossible to discern what this “common sense” consists of. The “Our Ideas” section of the No Labels website contains no actual ideas. This is characteristic of almost all such centrist, nonpartisan efforts: They talk a lot about getting past the partisan squabbling in Washington to find real solutions, but it’s hard to pin them down on what they want to do.

That’s clearly intentional. Once you start taking positions, people might disagree with you, which these groups are keen to avoid.

The conceit of “common sense” is that there are simple policy solutions to complex problems just waiting to be implemented if partisans in Washington could get past the things that preoccupy them. But that ignores a fundamental truth of policy battles: They’re usually built on deeply held values that are in conflict. Republicans want to restrict abortion access, for example, and Democrats want to expand it. There is no “common sense” solution to that question that everyone will agree on.

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“The narrative of common sense,” Johns Hopkins political scientist Steven Teles told me, “imagines a politics that can somehow get away from conflicts,” despite the fact that politics “is organized conflict.”

To those who don’t have firm partisan loyalties, it makes sense that politics looks like a bunch of bickering. “Partisanship is, for a lot of people, mostly symbolic and not always practical. So it feels right to say we should cut through that and get to the solutions,” said Georgetown political scientist Hans Noel. But if you actually try to do that “in a good-faith way,” Noel argued, you quickly come to places where people have very different goals and values.

Claiming that those differences can be easily transcended misleads voters about why things aren’t getting done. The reason isn’t an absence of “common sense”; it’s that the more consequential a policy is, the more likely it will affect powerful interests who want to maintain the status quo and will run up against competing segments of the parties.

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Navigating that political thicket to design policy that can pass Congress and be implemented is spectacularly difficult — much more so than holding some town halls and cutting gauzy 30-second ads that promise “common-sense solutions.”

So, if centrists such as No Labels get specific, they usually wind up offering small-scale policy ideas that might not offend too many people but won’t likely accomplish much either. “What is the big-scale policy intervention that they’re actually trying to advance?” Teles asked.

Yet such rhetoric is a mainstay in both parties. Democrats talk about “common-sense gun safety measures,” and Republicans claim common sense will solve the challenge of immigration, crime or just about everything.

Some issues do have solutions rooted in uncomplicated impulses, yet in those cases, politicians often don’t embrace them. It’s common sense to provide free lunch to every child in public school, yet rather than do that, we’ve set up a cumbersome system to evaluate parents’ incomes, collect payments and deal with “lunch debt” (an obscene phrase if ever there was one).

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But issues like that are the exception rather than the rule. Designing policies to deal with the most important issues is complicated. There is no “common sense” plug-and-play solution to health-care reform or inequality or climate change that everyone can agree on.

If you watch the “Common Sense” town hall, don’t fall for vague rhetoric suggesting that political conflicts are easy to solve, if only we could stop fighting and agree already. That’s not real politics at all. It’s a fantasy.

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