Winning is not enough

As a liberal, I am deeply upset by the direction of the country. But I don't think beating Trump will save us. I believe deeply that we have to do something harder: to build understanding across the political divide.

But I’m not getting much traction. Almost everyone on both sides believes it’s more important to win. They all think their view of the world is right, and that the future depends on their triumph.

I’m saying that victory, by itself, won’t do it. We need to demand more of ourselves.

I am personally offended by Trump actions almost every day, and I feel he is extremely dangerous for our future. I think he has to be stopped; it’s an emergency. He is destroying the foundations of our democracy, and indeed of the international world order that has slowly increased prosperity and safety for everyone for decades.

And yet, if all we do is to stop him, 40% of the country will be enraged and will battle back with every weapon they can find. In this kind of polarized environment, the rules of civilization no longer restrain people. Though I feel that the situation is so bad that we have to stop Trump almost no matter what it takes, the other side -- the solid 40% of Trump supporters -- feels just as passionate. This is how conflict spirals out of control.

Western democracies, after a long period of general accord on the principles of Keynesianism and the welfare state, have profoundly split. The populist wave, which has gained significant strength across the board, rejects the advances of the postwar period, is hostile to multiculturalism and globalization, and has little faith in existing governments. Populists feel they have ignored and marginalized for too long, and they are full of passionate intensity in their search for power.

Since these nations are, after all, democracies, we cannot ignore this backlash; nor should we. We liberals have not done the work of understanding the sources of the discontent. We are too quick to accept facile explanations that demean the populists and deny their legitimacy as citizens: we call them ignorant, racist, “deplorable.” They feel, with much justification, that if they lose this battle we will simply sweep them aside. They will fight with fury to prevent that, and they will continue the war even if they lose a battle.

It’s worth looking at history for lessons. Here’s one instructive contrast: After World War I the victorious Allies punished Germany and treated it with contempt; it rose rapidly from a crushing defeat to launch another wave of destruction. After World War II, by contrast, we helped Germany to rebuild, and major efforts were made to bring it back into the large European community; it soon became a major force for progress and liberalism.

Or we can look at our own Civil War: when the Union won, Abraham Lincoln pleaded for reconciliation in his Second Inaugural address: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.” His assassination, however, unleashed a vengeful torrent of victors against victim – with the result that much of the South remains to this day alienated, hostile to the dominant liberal order.

We have to win, but we have to win in a way that promotes reconciliation. We have to call, as Lincoln did, on “the better angels of our nature” even in the midst of a battle that may determine the fate of the earth. We need to listen to our enemies, to understand their grievances, and to include them in building our common future. It demands hard work instead of facile triumph. But if that’s asking too much from us, we may not get a chance to build at all.

A theory of polarization: four frames

A brief statement of my theory of political polarization - supported by my recent survey. It does a good job of identifying the basic differences between Republicans and Democrats.
Four basic “frames”, or ways of seeing the social world, have emerged in the West over the last few hundred years. Each has a different focus:

• Tradition: emphasizes shared traditions and beliefs, focusing heavily on churches.
• Freedom: emphasizes individual liberty and responsibility, focusing on free markets.
• System: sees society as a system of large institutions – corporations, unions, and government, guaranteeing stability and fairness.
• Diversity: seeks full inclusion and interaction among different cultures.

These four frames capture key electoral divisions and show up strongly in my survey data. Tradition is the orientation of religious and culturally conservative Republicans, and Freedom that of more libertarian Republicans. On the Democratic side, System is the frame of “old” liberals who support the welfare state and unions, while Diversity is the more “progressive” frame within the party, focused on multiculturalism and racial justice.
The important thing is that these orientations are not fads or temporary products of political sloganeers, nor are they just personality types. They are competing visions of a good society that have emerged from a long arc of Western history.
The Traditional frame has characterized most human groups since the dawn of history. It believes that societies work only if everyone shares a basic sense of right and wrong across all domains of life. That sense must come from some combination of tradition and religion shared by all; and it has to be strongly inculcated in everyone, because failure to do so threatens the order. This shared belief provides strong stability and confidence: when you cross paths with others, you can be pretty sure that they will see things the same way you do and will act as you expect.
The problem with the Traditional view is that it doesn’t give a way of dealing with people who don’t share your religion and traditions. So when Traditionalistic groups have to deal with outsiders, they usually fight. The religious wars of the 16th century in Europe were so bloody that societies at last moved to the next step: an agreement to tolerate differences and to accept individual freedom.
The Freedom frame emerged, in the West at least, during the 17th and 18th centuries with an acceptance of the moral autonomy of individuals – a centerpiece of the emergent Protestant faiths – and, with it, the importance of personal responsibility. From this perspective, it doesn’t matter what tradition or religion others come from: they can do whatever they want in private. All that matters is that they follow a few basic rules in public that we have agreed to – a “social contract.” Otherwise we stay out of each other’s way, live and let live.
The early modern era combined the Tradition and Freedom frames: people maintained their traditions and religion in their private spheres, and made impersonal deals in their public lives. These two frames have now allied in the Republican party. The alliance is not always comfortable: libertarians, who emphasize Freedom, are often in tension with the Traditionalist wing of the party. Nevertheless, both represent a “conservative” orientation in that they reflect views of society that have long histories and fully-developed institutions of social order.
The Industrial revolution complicated things further. As society became more complex, big organizations began to take space from markets. Big businesses were able to produce efficiently on larger scales than pure markets; and government grew to regulate and coordinate them. A view developed that saw society not as atomistic individuals and tribes making deals with each other, but as systems of rules and organizations. Nations throughout the West organized around three key institutions that grew rapidly in the mid-20th century: corporate bureaucracies, “big government,” and unions. This "System" view was the framework for thirty years of great prosperity and social advances throughout the West after World War II..
Starting in the late 1960s, however, this view lost support: confidence in those big institutions has declined sharply throughout the advanced nations, and “bureaucracy” has come to be seen as a bad word rather than a good one. In its place, there has developed a frame around Diversity. It emphasizes the value of cultural differences and seeks to eliminate the status differences that have kept some groups subordinated to others. Personal identities have become much more fluid – less based on traditional roles, more constructed from engagement with a range of others. As the newest of the four frames, it is still an idea more than a program, with the least experience in actually building large-scale societies.
In the Republican party, the tension between Tradition and Freedom sometimes bursts out, for instance in battles over economic protectionism or around Traditionalists’ impulse to impose their moral codes. The Democratic party is often torn by tensions between the Sytem and Diversity views. Bernie Sanders, for instance – an old System guy, focused on government programs – has trouble connecting to the multiculturalists. Nevertheless, the two strands are broadly allied because they reflect views of society that have emerged only within the last century, and in many ways are not yet fully developed. Both are building their vision around partially-formed aspirations rather than concrete images from the past. The Diversity view, in particular, is still in an early stage, with many unsolved problems; it is more an impulse than a program.
These changes have caused much turmoil and disruption. Some parts of Western societies have responded “conservatively” – wanting to go back to the hybrid of Tradition and Freedom frames that marked the early Modern era, roughly the 17th to the mid-19th centuries in the West. The more urban and globalist groups have wanted to push forward in creating societies of greater participation and diversity, even when they don’t quite know how to do it. And that split has led to our current polarization. The contest between these basic perspectives will determine our future.