Five things we agree on

As I’ve looked at the polls, including my own; as I’ve talked to people across the political spectrum; as I’ve read the news from various angles: I’ve come to the conclusion that for all our disagreements, we largely agree on five things. There are always a few outliers, of course; but each of these gets agreement from around three-fourths of the electorate. That should be enough to hold us together.

1. Diversity is a good thing

Diversity has become a polarizing issue; but on a closer look, there has been a huge and nearly-consensual move towards greater inclusion. The disagreements are only at the edges.

As a country today, we appreciate differences of culture and ethnicity. We think they should be celebrated. We know that it’s often difficult: diversity leads to misunderstandings, conflicts, hurt feelings. But very widely we feel this enriches us. 75% agree that “People from other places and cultures help us to grow, we should learn from them.”

This is a huge shift in the last fifty or sixty years. Just for example: Between 1958 and 1999, the percentage who said they could vote for “a generally well-qualified man for president who happened to be Black” went from 38% to 95%. In the South, it went from 13% to the same 95%. We actually elected a Black as President, twice – which would have been so far beyond thinkable a half century ago that it only fringe lunatics might have believed it possible. In much of 1950s America discrimination was widespread, open, and often brutal; today open racism is consigned to the margins, and battles are increasingly fought over “unconscious” and “structural” bias.

When the pressures of diversity lead us to name-calling and blaming and insulting each other – that divides us. The left has a tendency to claim moral superiority in a way that infuriates and divides on something that should unite.

2. We love our country

“Unpatriotic” has become in a sense the Right’s epithet  of choice against the Left – the counter to charges of “racism” lobbed at them. Ann Coulter’s best-selling book has accused liberals of decades of “treason” and “treachery.” Again, the actual disagreements are only at the margins. Over 80% of Democrats say they were “extremely” or “very” proud to be Americans. Democrats I know are generally deeply offended at being called “unpatriotic,” to say nothing of “traitors.” They love their country, which is why they want to improve it.

Democrats are sometimes more willing than Republicans to voice criticisms of the U.S., and sometimes more open to learning from and admiring other nations. Neither of those indicates lack of patriotism. Republicans and populists, after all, are often viciously critical of their country over the last half century, or maybe century; and they admire foreign thinkers like Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, and Edmund Burke. Anyone not involved in a partisan fight will acknowledge you can criticize your country, as you can criticize your wife or children, while still loving them – in  fact, it can be a mark of true love.

3. The future is scary

We don’t fully admit this to ourselves, but there’s a very general feeling of anxiety about the future. The older folks fret and fume. According to their politics, they may focus their anxiety on different things: social media, terrorism, artificial intelligence, biological engineering,  environmental damage, the other party. But at bottom we all feel things are moving too fast and out of control. Many young people I’ve talked to about this just throw up their hands and say: We’re screwed, but what can you do? We react to that anxiety in different ways, but the underlying feeling is widely shared.

4. The government has lost touch with the people

Here’s a distressing statistic: three-fourths of the electorate believes that “most elected officials don’t care what people like me think.” In 1964, less than 30% Americans felt that government was run by a few big interests; in 2016 it was over ninety percent.

The collapse of trust in government began in the 60s, mostly among the the young and educated on the Left. Here they marched against Johnson and McNamara and the War; in Paris they marched against DeGaulle; and pretty much across Europe confidence in government started to collapse. Nowadays it’s been taken up by populists on the Right –generally less-educated, many working-class. They have knocked the survey numbers on trust in government down to the vanishing point.

5. Polarization sucks

Finally, we widely agree that the partisan battles of the last few decades are bad: exhausting, unpleasant, demoralizing. Over three-fourths are bothered by “politics being too divisive and there being a lack of respect for people who disagree with each other.” Many studies have shown a lack of ideological consistency among most voters; a 2018 study finds that over ⅔ of the population constitute an “exhausted majority”who do not fit well in either of the polarized camps.

Let’s let the partisans rant. We need to get to work on making the future less threatening and building policies most can support. There is room for agreement on important issues if we can stop labeling and insulting each other.

Where the Right is not wrong, part 4: We don't know how to solve poverty

How can we reduce poverty? There are two main answers with strong moral foundations. The liberal one is, more or less: the government should provide aid to the poor. The conservative one is: communities should provide encourage the poor to take responsibility for themselves. For liberals, the conservative approach is cruel and heartless in the short run and completely ignores the power of systemic and structural forces that keep people in poverty despite their best efforts. For conservatives, the liberal approach encourages dependence and undermines self-respect.

What do the facts say? Well, it’s complicated. According to the official poverty statistics in the US, poverty fell from 22% to about 14% between 1964 and 1967 – that is, before Johnson’s ambitious Great Society legislation. As of 2014, it was still 14%. That doesn’t indicate success for the government programs. However, liberals point out that if you include the government subsidies that are not counted in the poverty rate – tax credits and noncash benefits – then the poverty rate has indeed dropped a lot since 1967, to below 5%. But, the Republicans reply, that just proves our point: a massive redistribution via government aid has only made people dependent on government – it hasn’t increased their own earned income.

Something is definitely wrong. We all know that there are large sections of the country that are desperately poor in both material and cultural terms – whether it’s the ghettos of Philadelphia or the mountains of Appalachia, both riddled with drug use and violence. There are even wider areas that have quietly lost hope. While it’s hard to prove, it seems to me that there are far more people now than fifty years ago who feel they will never make it, that the paths to financial comfort and self-respect are closed to them. Whatever we’ve been doing hasn’t worked.

The liberals would say: that’s because Republicans have been undermining our programs since the start; if we could really do what Denmark and Sweden have done, we wouldn’t have those problems. But Denmark and Sweden and Europe in general do have those problems, and they don’t know how to deal with them either.

In general, poverty and inequality are lower in Europe than in the US (though there are intense debates about how to measure these, the US comes off badly in most approaches.) But the trends are similar to ours: both poverty and inequality are rising everywhere. Europeans are concerned about ethnic and immigrant ghettos and pockets of severe poverty. So in 2010 the EU adopted the “Europe 2020” strategy, aiming lift 20 million people out of the risk of poverty and social exclusion within ten years. But it hasn’t worked: since 2010 poverty in the EU has increased.

While the New Deal model has lost ground here, the European welfare model has lost ground throughout Europe. Whatever is causing the rise in poverty, they haven’t got the answer.

Of course, there is no good evidence that the conservative answer works, either. Conservatives, in my experience, are often more active in local food banks and church charities than liberals: in that way they may do more visible good. But that doesn’t dent the larger problem. Relying on local communities and family networks, or on personal morality, can work occasionally, when the stars are aligned, but I have not seen a conservative model that shows it works for systemic change.

Liberals believe we have a moral obligation to reduce poverty. We feel morally superior when we embrace programs that we believe will work on a large scale. But we should be a little more humble. Actually, we should be a lot more humble. We do not know what works. The method that worked pretty well in the postwar period seems not to be working effectively now. We should be trying to figure that out.

Conservatives may have some good ideas for that. It seems very likely that building community will have to be part of the solution. Indeed, most liberals would agree: we have supported programs of community engagement and participation. It seems probable that the government-centered approach is too clumsy and bureaucratic for the complexity of current societies: there are just too many examples of programs that wrap people in red tape rather than helping them. As an administrator of an Obama-era program to help teachers in poor districts admits, “"We get focused on, you know, budgets and legislative requirements and things like this, and frankly, I think sometimes we forget who we ultimately work for."

So as a matter of fact, there is a great deal of overlap and agreement across the political spectrum. Everyone wants to develop local communities. No one wants to give all the power to a a central government bureaucracy. Everyone believes the goal should be to help people achieve independence and self-respect, not dependence on a dole. So the intense battles around this issue represent another case where ideological framings have unnecessarily blocked the search for solutions.