As suspicious as I normally am of almost anything that appears in the New York Times when it involves those strange creatures their writers and editors generally don’t understand (the American Conservative), I found this piece by psychologist Jonathan Haidt quite penetrating. He says to forget following the money, and instead focus on the sacred belief systems of two great American tribes, the American Conservatives and the American Liberals.
The Liberal Tribe’s great myth goes like this:
“Once upon a time, the vast majority” of people suffered in societies that were “unjust, unhealthy, repressive and oppressive.” These societies were “reprehensible because of their deep-rooted inequality, exploitation and irrational traditionalism — all of which made life very unfair, unpleasant and short. But the noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality and prosperity struggled mightily against the forces of misery and oppression and eventually succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare societies.” Despite our progress, “there is much work to be done to dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitation and repression.” This struggle….“is the one mission truly worth dedicating one’s life to achieving.”
This is a heroic narrative to rally around, with familiar figures and groups used as the totems. That it is filled with truths, half-truths, and a lot of sloppy assumptions is not the point: most myths are like that. Contrast that to this heroic narrative:
Once upon a time, America was a shining beacon. Then liberals came along and erected an enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They subverted our traditional American values and opposed God and faith at every step of the way.” For example, “instead of requiring that people work for a living, they siphoned money from hard-working Americans and gave it to Cadillac-driving drug addicts and welfare queens.” Instead of the “traditional American values of family, fidelity and personal responsibility, they preached promiscuity, premarital sex and the gay lifestyle” and instead of “projecting strength to those who would do evil around the world, they cut military budgets, disrespected our soldiers in uniform and burned our flag.” In response, “Americans decided to take their country back from those who sought to undermine it.”
Yet another heroic narrative to rally around, with familiar figures and groups used as the totems. That it is also filled with truths, half-truths, and a lot of sloppy assumptions is also not the point: once again, most myths are like that.
I was rather startled by how well this encapsulates my own experiences with political discussions. I know, and am friends with, many people who fully buy one or the other of these myths. They practically eat and breathe these myths.
A great frustrations of being a “centrist” in American politics, a so-called “moderate,” is that you probably don’t really buy either one of these myths, although you can see some truths in both. And maybe moderates/centrists have their own collective myth, though I’m not sure quite how to define it, maybe because I am one of them and thus blind to my own prejudices. On the other hand, maybe it’s because “centrists” don’t really exist as a cohesive group in the first place, being often wildly at odds with each other depending on the issue. For example:
1) Can you be both pro-gay-rights and staunchly pro-life?
2) Can you believe that gun ownership is a fundamental human right, and so are health care and education?
3) Can you believe Affirmative Action is wrong and destructive, and that we need higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans?
4) Can you believe trade unions are a good thing, and that America’s going to Iraq was also a good thing?
I believe the answer to all of those questions is “yes,” and furthermore, that you can reverse every one of them to its opposite and still say “yes.” Which automatically puts you out of both the major tribes of American politics, and pretty much makes you a “centrist,” even if there are other “centrists” who bitterly argue with your stance on some or all of those.
So I don’t think any particular centrist myth exists, save maybe this one:
“We have a country where all voices are allowed to be heard in the public sphere, and then we all get to vote to settle those disputes, and every 2-4 years if we don’t like how things are going we get to try to change them, and as contentious as things sometimes gets it tends over time to work itself out pretty well over time.” Maybe that’s a myth too. I could rally around it though, since I do believe it to be true.
Anyway, read Haight’s whole piece, it’s good. It also makes a nice dovetail to Carl M. Cannon’s recent piece about Mitt Romney about the Governor’s core, wherein he ponders whether it’s Mitt Romney who lacks a core, or American politics itself that lacks one.
(This item cross-posted to Dean’s World.)
Dean Esmay is the author of Methuselah’s Daughter. He has contributed to Dean’s World, Huffington Post, A Voice for Men, Pajamas Media. Neither left nor right wing, neither libertarian nor socialist.