Can love win?

There is a strong impulse on the Left now, which I certainly feel myself, to fight back against Trump with all we have. We hate what he’s doing. We feel that our most basic moral beliefs are being violated, the things we care about being destroyed; so we want to join together in battle to stop it. It’s a natural reaction, a human reaction, one that has been  nearly universal throughout history.

There’s also an opposing impulse exemplified by many people we admire: an impulse towards inclusion and openness and humility – towards love over hate, peace over war. We believe deeply in those virtues. But in order to fight effectively, we feel we have to deny them. We have to define some people as outside the boundaries, as evil. We have to close ourselves to the possibility that they could have some good in them. We have to stereotype them, see them as a faceless and unified enemy. Our assumption is: first we have to win, then we can love.

The problem that we too often forget is that the other side feels the same way. Partisans on the right now believe that we are evil. If you read both sides, you see identical language:  If they can get away with lying and and cheating and manipulating, then we have to start doing it too. 

This tit-for-tat spiral of mistrust and hatred can lead to no good end. No matter what our politics, it is vital that we end it. All will lose while it continues.

Is there an alternative to fighting? Can love win?

I was much moved some years ago by Bishop Tutu’s sermon in Trenton, New Jersey, on the theme: Everyone stands in God’s light. “Everyone,” he insisted: “Idi Amin – he stands in God’s light! Adolph Hitler! And …” (with a little smile - this was in 2006): “George Bush!” (There was nervous laughter in the largely African-American congregation.) “Everyone!” 

Today he would surely continue: “Donald Trump - he stands in God’s light!” And for committed partisans on the right, he would add: “Hillary Clinton, too! And Elizabeth Warren!”

This is strong medicine: it attacks our self-righteousness at the core, it undercuts our certainties. How can I choose, how can I act, how can I stand up for my beliefs, if I believe that God equally embraces Trump and Hillary, me and my most detested opponents? 

Of course, paradoxically, Tutu is also a fighter. He has fought a long battle against apartheid and racial oppression; he has also fought for homosexuals and for  other excluded groups. He is one of those rare souls who has sacrificed his own comfort and safety for a lifetime to battle oppression. And yet at the same time he is something far rarer: someone who insists on the essential dignity and worth of the oppressors. That is an extraordinary triumph of the spirit.

Extra-ordinary as this is, he shows us the way to salvation - secular as well as spiritual. As walking requires two legs, so human progress requires two impulses: including and excluding, fighting and reconciling. Neither alone can work.

If you merely fight for what you believe, you may lose. And what if you win? You will have made deeper enemies of your enemies. They may never forgive you. They will continue to fight you by whatever means they have – open or hidden. They  will resist every move you make. If you suppress them sufficiently they may go underground for generations, centuries, millennia. The fire will continue to smoulder, like Serbs and Croats since the 10th century, Muslims and Christians from the time of the Crusades – until a little stirring leads to an explosion of hate. Fighting strengthens its own antithesis and undermines its own intentions.

But not fighting is  not an alternative. If you merely love, then not only will you lose, giving oppressors a clear field to exert their will; you will also sacrifice your own dignity, which depends centrally on the willingness to to take a stand for what you believe in.

So now what?

There’s a tactical argument for love. Democrats are torn now (February 2019) between candidates who would fire up the base for a fight – Warren and Sanders – and ones who would reach out more to undecided voters – Biden, Buttigieg. The first pair might add votes from some passionate Democrats who would not turn out for the latter, while the second pair might add votes from the 15% or so who say that they have not yet made up their minds. Which is more likely to win? Highly seasoned political professionals differ, but odds are that reaching out does better than consolidating the base. The Democratic campaign of 2018, following a reaching-out strategy, was highly successful; Jeremy Corbyn’s narrowly ideological 2019 campaign in England was catastrophic. So hardheaded realism suggests that simple fighting is not the best approach.

There’s also a longer-term strategic argument. If the Democrats win the election, Left partisans will feel energized and inspired, will feel good about themselves, and will push strongly for expansion of liberal policies. But there will be a strong impulse on the right to fight back. They will feel that their most basic moral beliefs are being violated, the things they cared about being destroyed. They will fight with whatever means they have – open or hidden – and resist every move we make. We will be further infuriated by the conservative resistance. There will be a continuation of the polarization and paralysis that have  marked the last few decades. The vicious circle will deepen.

The hope now lies in this: that there is actually much that the American citizenry can agree on. There are many policies with support from large percentages of the population, but that can’t get done because of the current spiral of mistrust. Polls indicate that 83% of the public - including 70% of conservatives - agree that “We need to invest more in the development of renewable energy sources like solar and wind.“(2) 75% favor higher taxes for the ultrawealthy.(3) Over 70% support a voluntary Medicare buy-in for all.(4) Similar majorities say the government should be involved in ensuring a basic income for those 65 and older (71 percent), and helping people get out of poverty (67 percent).(5) On guns, immigration, even abortion there is similar near-consensual support for significant policy advances.

Yet these consensual policies that are languishing because neither side wants to give the other a victory. Because both sides are intent on winning, neither can actually make progress. Every move spurs a counter-move; every change in administration strives to undo what the previous one did.

That’s where love comes in. If we turn up  the volume of our impulse to generosity and inclusion – if we see Republicans as standing with us in God’s light – we can find vital areas of progress that all of us believe are right and good. We can start to move. And it becomes far more likely that having started we will find more directions for walking together. 

Concretely, I’m talking about developing citizen conversations in which Republicans and Democrats explore issues together and search for those areas of shared belief. This would defang the most committed partisans who now dominate the political scene because they are energized to come out in primaries and by-elections; it would give a voice to the large majorities who agree on many issues. We know this can work from many examples at local  scales. Now it is urgent – very difficult, but urgent – to reinvigorate citizen politics through deep engagement at the national level.

This is not a call for moderation, or even civility; it’s not about compromising or being nice. We must always be true to who we are and what we believe. Rather, I’m proposing a search for real agreements: areas in which those whom we now see as enemies share our beliefs. There are a lot more of those than we think. But only love – openness, humility, inclusion – can find them; and thus, in the end, only love can win.

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1. In the 2016 election, the Democrats aimed their appeal at the “median voter” while the Republicans aimed to activate their base. In that case, at least, the former strategy did better. See Hemphill, Libby, and Matthew A. Shapiro. 2018. “Appealing to the Base or to the Moveable Middle? Incumbents’ Partisan Messaging Before the 2016 US Congressional Elections.”

2. State of the Center survey, 2014, Q50

3. Fox News and Politico polls are in this same range: see https://politi.co/2qhEApc

4. http://act.boldprogressives.org/survey/pci_bigideas_poll_results/

5. Pew, 2017: http://bit.ly/350rzzL

Towards a Progressive frame

Progressivism as a framework for political action is quite new and immature. It is time for it to grow up, and quickly.

The Progressivism I mean here is the strand on the Left that focuses on gender and race inequities rather than class. This is a shift: the liberalism of the Democratic party was forged to a large extent by class divides, with a strong foundation in the labor movement. The progressive wing is often in tension with that tradition and represents a major cultural development.

The basic impulse at its core is a feeling that it is good to widen the scope of inclusion, to engage with people who are different. That’s a very radical idea. Human civilizations for almost all of their ten thousand years or so have survived by demanding that members abide by a code of right and wrong based on shared traditions; outsiders could join, at best, only if they were willing to learn the code. Progressives passionately reject that idea: they feel that any such society suppresses creativity and individuality and perpetuates injustices of power and privilege.

The notion that blacks, and muslims, and women, and gays, and all the varieties of gender identity should be fully included in society – that they should feel comfortable in expressing their distinct identities – is  a powerful wizardry, with the hope and promise of transforming society from its age-old hierarchy of privilege into an equal community of respectful interaction.

But this progressive ideology is also very one-dimensional and incomplete. It rejects wholesale the order of the past and demands a radical break. Since straight white males have been the highest-status group in the past, it would strip them of legitimacy. Anything the marginalized groups say carries the truth of oppression. Those of higher status can only keep out of the way, show respect, “check their privilege,” in order to create room for the marginalized to develop their power and pride.

Like all developing ideologies, this runs into all kinds of problems in practice – and not just because of resistance from the straight white males. It leads into mazes in trying to define right and wrong. Most obvious are the various tensions among the many marginalized social-identity groups. What do we as progressives make of the frequent homophobia among black men? Or the common norms of treatment of women in Muslim cultures that seem to us demeaning? Does the feminist critique of toxic masculinity extend to black men as well as white ones?

These kinds of questions, in my experience, make progressives – especially the white male subset – extremely uncomfortable. No one wants to talk about them. We feel there are traps wherever we turn – someone will be mad, or hurt; someone will guilt-trip us. And these problems have grown only more difficult as the moral claim of the status-oppressed has been raised by increasing numbers of groups, such as multiplying sexual identities.

Then there is the problem about where to draw the moral boundaries. Many of the issues raised by Black Lives Matter are uncontroversial: virtually, Right or Left, everyone thinks that police shootings of unarmed black children are wrong, and most accept that there is good reason for a sense of outrage. But Black Lives Matter has also focused on much more contested and dubious issues. When a few activists argued that a painting of Emmett Till’s coffin should be removed from an exhibit and destroyed, merely because it was painted by a white woman, I and many of my friends felt this was going too far. When #MeToo went after Aziz Ansari for being sexually pushy with a woman who had pursued him and gone back to his apartment with him, the Left was similarly divided. Those more to the Right, meanwhile, may be horrified by police shootings of unarmed people and by Harvey Weinstein'a predatory sexuality -- but they think that the frenzy over cases like Ansari are ludicrous. It undermines their support for the broader issues.

We progressives have not yet worked these things through. I find it heartening that there has been real debate among progressives on the Ansari case, but all too often those who disagree with the more extreme claims of the activists are silent because they cannot articulate a clear view that challenges the moral claims of marginalized people without disrespecting them.

Finally, there are problems and injustices that are about issues other than status inequality and marginalization. The narrow progressive ideology has trouble dealing with them -- especially with the issue of class. Economic inequality is unquestionably a major threat to our future. But the problem is that many straight white males are also poor. They are at the bottom of society; they feel excluded from opportunities; some 40% of them have spent time in jail; they feel deeply uncomfortable in elite settings of universities and the halls of power. Yet in the progressive ideology, they are defined as the oppressor. Somehow, they are blamed for racism far more than liberal rich whites – even though the rich whites I know live in almost exclusively white neighborhoods and send their children to heavily white schools. All of this blurs the problem of economic inequality when seen through a progressive lens. As ideologies tend to do, this has begun to provoke schisms within the left: Bernie, who represents the older form of liberalism, is seen by many Progressives as insufficiently “woke”.

Or climate change. One can see a racial dimension in the climate issue, but it is surely not mainly about that. We all suffer from it, all our children will suffer more. If any issue should be able to draw together peoples and nations, this is it. But emphasizing the racial dimension undermines this unity and weakens the movement.

In other words, the simplicity of the progressive ideology – the ideology of turning the status hierarchy on its head, so the last become first – makes many moral judgments all but impossible, blinds us to many important issues, and fragments what should be a dominant movement. The moral certitude of this view makes it effective in mobilizing passions, but ineffective for building sustained action.

We need a more complex frame. Such frames develop through practice and reflection – through patient debate and dialogue about experience. The process requires more humility than we progressives typically show. We do not know all the answers. We are very uncertain about what the good society might look like in many aspects. And we have no idea how to get from here to our goal of a fully inclusive society. We are divided among ourselves, and we often drive away potential allies – those who may be on the same road but not at the same point. Like many radical movements of the past, we are too often stuck on ideals; we fail to incorporate the demands of practice into a complete framework of progressive thought.

A small group of young people I know have formed a group to discuss the discomforts and dilemmas of the Left. They call themselves “Apostates” – meaning that they don’t subscribe to orthodoxies. They share the basic impulse of inclusion, but they reject the constrictions of ideological purity. They begin by airing views that are unpopular: some are gun owners, some find the aspects of Black Lives Matter movement are wrong, some think “political correctness” is a real phenomenon that suppresses free speech. Some are, believe it or not, progressive Republicans – that’s actually still a thing. They create, to use a current term, a safe space to voice and debate these unorthodoxies.

The left needs many Apostates, and many serious internal discussions. We should discuss difficult cases, like Ansari or transgender bathrooms or gun regulation. We should bring in potential allies – people who share our inclusive impulse, who do not seek to return to an imagined past of homogeneous and stable communities with blacks and women who knew their place. We should try to understand their hesitations; we should see what practices help gain their support, while being humble enough to accept that we might change our own minds occasionally.

If we do that, I think we will find that the vast majority of Americans share our basic impulse to broaden inclusion. And in time, we can build a frame for progressivism that is complex enough, broad enough, and practical enough for a new society.

Where the Right is not wrong, part 5: Tradition

Conservatism reminds us progressives of an important thing that we often lose sight of: the value of tradition.

Progressives tend to focus on the injustices involved in traditions. When we look at the tradition of marriage - a flash point in the culture wars - we see subordination of women to men in terms of careers and family decision-making. In race relations we see the shadow of the long history of slavery. In religious traditions we see suppression of other religions and frequent holy violence. In our own nation’s past we see blood, the conquests and slaughters of other peoples. The progressive impulse is critical of these subordinations, exclusions, and conquests. It  seeks to move towards more complete inclusion and more equal involvement of all. 

If we are honest with ourselves, however, we have to admit our own attachment to traditions. We feel the heart-warmth of affirming who we are, of bringing together people who share our sense of things. Those are the safe spaces that provide stability in a world that sometimes seem overwhelming. They give us foundations to work from, reinforcing beliefs that we don’t have to question every minute. We want, at least some of the time, to be around people who are like us, who have the same kind of background, so we don’t have to explain everything or fight over the value of everything. We want, in other words, people who share our traditions.

We progressives also fall easily into into the negatives we criticize in others. We strengthen the comforting bonds of friendship  and family by sharing in-jokes and making fun of outsiders. We put up barriers to entry because certain people – certain types of people – would destroy the warmth and the easy camaraderie of the group. We tend to exclude and make fun of Republicans, for example. If a conservative entered the group it would make everyone uncomfortable; conversations would be strained and self-censored. We exclude people of lower educational levels – not deliberately, but in practice – and those from backgrounds so different that they wouldn’t get our jokes and references. We don’t like to recognize how often liberal and progressive communities fall into the “not in my backyard” attitude – whether it’s fighting proposals for nearby low-income housing or mental-health centers, or protesting a fancy new house seen as out of keeping with the neighborhood.

Traditions are not just abstract values or rituals: they are ways of life, backed by shared beliefs about right and wrong. They work because everyone knows them and knows how they are supposed to fit in. Traditions create comfortable relations. When they break down – (there’s a lot of research about this) it causes intense personal anxiety and social disorder. No  one knows how they’re supposed to behave. People interpret the same event differently. There are constant misunderstandings of meaning and motive. Conflict escalates. And that, to a large extent, describes our current state of polarization.

Conservatives see the restoration of shared tradition as the main solution to our current dysfunction. They want to affirm the importance of being American, of our founding values. They don’t necessarily agree among themselves on what the core traditions are: some emphasize Christianity, others not; some are more Hamiltonian, others more Jeffersonian; some, but not all, focus on “Western culture”. But despite these differences, the essential conservative way of healing our body politic is to find traditions we can agree on and take pride in.

The progressives’ emphasis is on changing traditions to remedy their injustices. But conservatives are right that abandoning tradition leads to personal and societal chaos. We need traditions – a way we do things, backed by what we believe – and we also need a way to improve them. So far the primary way humans have resolved that tension is through extremely disruptive cycles of revolution, and reaction. To  get to a better society we need to bring together respect for tradition with dialogue about how to change it.

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.

The return of the repressed: how liberals helped create the Trump movement

I'm reviving here a post I wrote in early 2012 - to suggest that the roots of the Trump phenomenon are deep, that liberals profoundly misunderstood them -- and that still misunderstand them. We're not going to fix this without dealing with these feelings.

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Liberals do themselves and the nation a grave disservice by dismissing the views of the Tea Party.

Speaking as a mostly-proud liberal myself – sympathetic to unions, redistribution, and other conservative bugbears – I am horrified by many aspects of the Tea Party ideology. They frequently seem, from my perspective, to avoid rational, evidence-based thought, as when denying that failure to lift the debt ceiling would be harmful, or (in many cases) denying the dangers of climate change. I am also convinced that some aspects of Tea Party activity are not genuine, that they sometimes supported and influenced by wealthy “special interests” who hide their activities or disingenuously cloak self-serving proposals in public-spirited rhetoric.

However: It is quite clear that there are a great many self-identified Tea Party supporters who are entirely genuine and public-spirited. Some of them may be uninformed, but many are clearly not: in fact an important characteristic of the Tea Party is that it is built on many local self-study groups that carefully read the Constitution and various difficult theoretical works by Hayek and others, and apply them to current events. Conservatism in general has arguably a more consistent intellectual framework than liberalism. Most polls indicate that Tea Party supporters are, if anything, somewhat better educated than average.

So when my liberal colleagues dismiss Tea Party conservatives as stupid and ignorant, it makes my blood boil. One of the very few core principles of progressive liberalism, in my view, is that one should always strive to understand those with whom one disagrees. That does not mean one must come to consensus with them, or to compromise, or even in all cases to tolerate them; but arrogant dismissal violates everything we stand for. Conservatism, as its name implies, seeks to protect existing goods, so it can afford to draw up defenses around its ideas; liberalism at its core seeks improvement and development, so must always make the effort to seek understanding. This is the act that opens the mind and makes possible new ideas and new relations.

When I consider individual ideas associated with the Tea Party (recognizing, of course, that it has no single dogma), I am often baffled – I can’t make sense of them. How can they blame Obama for a Federal debt that was created mostly by Bush, and where were they in the Bush years? How can they oppose closing tax loopholes for the rich, while simultaneously expressing strong antipathy for Wall Street and the banks? And so on.

But like an Impressionist painting, it makes better sense if one takes a few steps backward. The core animating feeling of the Tea Party, rather clearly, is that things have gone wrong and are getting worse. The reasonable conclusion is that the people in charge can no longer be trusted. That means first of all government: it has failed to spur economic growth or improve the lot of most people, while running up mind-boggling levels of debt. Even most liberals would agree with the basic sense that government has lost its grip on the situation.

It gets worse. The government has been for the last fifty years a hectoring moralist telling most people, especially most conservatives, that they are bad because they hold traditional views of relationships. Powerful leaders, mostly holding political offices, have told them that their “old” ways of doing things are not only impractical but unjust. It has told them that they must change deeply ingrained relations and ways of thinking, must accept all kinds of unfamiliar people into their daily lives, must accept an upset of traditional patterns of family and neighborhood in the interests of an abstract sense of justice.

There are few things that make human beings madder than being blamed. If I bump into someone on the sidewalk and they say “excuse me,” I am not angry; I reciprocate and move on, no matter whose fault it was. But if they say, “Why don’t you look where you’re going?”, I instantly become less reasonable – I get my back up, even if it was my fault; I nurse the grievance. On a big and long scale, this is what much of the country, indeed much of the world, has been feeling for at least a half century: they have been told they are to blame for long-standing injustices and that they must apologize and make amends. It’s enough to make anyone furious.

Most Americans are ambivalent. They accept the good that has come of the push for human rights and diversity – as a nation we are on the whole far more accepting of Blacks and of women’s rights than we were fifty years ago; but that doesn’t mean that they don’t resent being pushed into it. And many are not at all convinced that they want further broadening of the community to include Muslims or homosexuals or other “outside” groups. Liberals see such attitudes as stupid and racist. And that contributes mightily to our national polarization.

Lessons from conversations with Trump supporters

I have been talking to Trump supporters whenever I could. It isn’t easy, since people generally shy away from talking about politics; also, polarization is so bad now that there there are no admitted Trumpists in my usual friend networks. So I’ve had to actively seek them out. Here are a few things I’ve learned.

The first thing is the very strong temptation to stereotype. Maybe that’s obvious, but I hadn’t felt it so strongly. Trumpists have an image of liberals  as self-centered, spendthrift, disloyal, heedlessly amoral; some of them also think we are power-mad and dangerously manipulative. After a bit of conversation they may become convinced that I personally am not like that, but that doesn’t stop them from continuing to use the stereotype. And I, meanwhile, have to fight my urge to assume that conservatives are narrow, intolerant, and ill-informed – despite the fact that the ones I am talking to usually don’t fit. Part of every conversation skates along the edge of this strange shadow world, where everything makes sense but nothing reflects what is going on in the real interaction.

Yet for all that, in my conversations I have found something that felt very strange and positive to me: there is a great deal of common ground around particular solutions, even when the ideological framework is highly polarized. When you focus on broad, ideologically charged issues like climate change and health care, you get stuck in well-worn grooves. I have often been drawn into trying to fight about facts, but when I do that the response is just to throw in another fact from another right-wing source. There’s no engagement.  

But when we start poking at actual solutions to actual problems, surprisingly often we find significant areas of agreement. On health care, for example, the conversation may start out about with attacks on Obamacare and inefficiency and crony capitalism vs letting people die and the suffering of those without insurance. But in one conversation someone suggested the Singapore healthcare system as a model; and by God, there seem to be some things there that we might all like. As we dig into the actual combination of structures and incentives, there is clearly a path for constructive discussion. Yet this doesn’t mean that the hurling of insults and grenade-facts stops; the two type of discussion continue at the same time.

Or on climate: you can go down endless rabbit-holes trying to knock down every denial theory. A Trumpist may raise “Climategate” – a set of emails by one set of researchers that appear to be  trying to shape the findings to alarmist ends. If you reply with a careful analysis of why the emails don’t actually say that, the conversation just veers off in a different direction to a different  claim of malicious science. But when you shift your focus to solutions, the idea of renewable energy draws a lot of support across the spectrum: it’s economically sensible, and it has a local rather than “big” feel. Here, too, we can find a path for a different and better kind of discussion.

On gun control, my conversations and polls indicate that there are several important issues on which there is wide agreement – including background checks at gun shows and banning “assault-style weapons.” Similarly, there are many points of broad consensus on immigration. For inequality, a Universal Basic Income has drawn interest from Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek as well as many on the Left.

Most people, aside from small batches of professional ideologues, have mixed views on issues. So there is surprising room for shared exploration; and that exploration can itself build a sense of trust that enables further progress.

Another point is that this has not been one-way: I have learned a good deal about the issues in these discussions. I knew almost nothing about guns, which is why gun owners don’t trust people like me; now I know at least a little more about the difficulties of defining assault rifles, the deep commitment of most gun owners to safety as well as to nature, and some techniques to reduce the danger of unwanted use. I learned about the Singapore health system, which was news to me even though health care a field I have studied. I have learned that the problem of “political correctness” is actually more serious than I had thought: there is now quite a lot of student support for restricting “undesirable” speech on campus, and a very strong feeling by rightists that they can’t speak their minds.

It’s possible to talk while ignoring the conspiracy theories and insults, resisting the temptation to answer in kind. If you do, it turns out there may be paths that can be walked together. So far the battle is still raging around us, and we’re just catching glimpses of those paths through the smoke. I don’t know whether we could in time just walk away from the trench warfare and the grenades, towards a future that can include the vast majority of Americans.