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.
