We all know now that in America there are two types of people. There are conservatives and there are progressives. There are Reds and there are Blues. Each group looks at the other with skepticism at best, at worst with contempt that can slide into hatred.
This crude division of people into one camp or another is mistaken. Adapting a term from William Blake, I call it a cloven fiction. People are much more complex than our current cultural template—based on either-or-thinking—can allow us to see. This cloven fiction—liberal or conservative, left or right—has deeply harmful effects on us all.
The current mythology goes this way. Conservatives devote themselves to flag and family, tradition and faith. They are patriotic and willing to go to war for America or send their children. They believe that America is the greatest nation in the history of the world. We are exceptional in many, many admirable ways. Conservatives are devoted to family: They will do anything for the people they love. And of course there is faith. Conservatives tend to be religious. They worship God and do so at church. Conservatives also value tradition: they are guided by the past in most everything they do. Everyone knows that, right?
Then there are progressives. There’s a mythology about them as well. They tend to view America skeptically. We’re not a city on a hill, just a nation among nations, and one that has committed some serious crimes on the way to the power and wealth we now hold. Progressives don’t disdain family exactly, but their chief allegiance is often to humanity, the family of man. They may not be atheists, but their lives usually do not revolve around religion. They are skeptical about individualism and the hunger for individual freedom. They find their most authentic identity in groups. Their respect for tradition is limited. Let’s start from scratch! Let’s begin all over again and do it the right way (the fair way!) this time. Or so the mythology goes.
The fact is that, at least as I observe matters, these two types virtually never exist in their pure form. They are fictions, and destructive fictions at that.
Me? I’m not unrepresentative in this. I support Saint Bernie of Vermont: His political commitment to the poor and working class is crucially right, as I see it. But I am also patriotic, though not uncritically so; somewhat religious—I believe in God (though his ways remain a mystery to me) and affirm the moral teachings of a figure I think of as Jesus, though not Christ (Christ being the term for the anointed one, the Son of God). I’m an individualist and a strong free speech advocate, mildly allergic to most groups and institutions, with the salient exception of the University of Virginia, where I have taught for decades. I have been married for almost 40 years. When someone called me a family man during a recent introduction, I flashed on Ward Cleaver and Ossie Nelson but felt no real urge to protest.
Tradition? I have spent my life talking with students about old books: the canon, the tradition, what I take to be the best that’s known and thought. And yet I reserve the right myself (and hope to offer it to my students) to examine the anointed treasures of the past and say, politely, gratefully: No, thank you. The writer David Bromwich speaks of a “choice of inheritance,” neatly combining his conservative’s affection for tradition, and the progressive’s human right to choose this tradition and not that. I’m with him.
I’m a patriot, in a manner of speaking. I have the strongest Whitman-inspired hopes for the spread and deepening of democracy. I believe that America is the cradle of democratic life and in many ways exemplifies the best of that amazing human invention. But I lived through the criminal war in Vietnam and almost had the chance to die there. Some of my high school mates did. It’s not an event that’s easy to forgive and forget. When I traveled to Vietnam, I was overwhelmed by a sense of American crimes. I walked through Saigon with a weight on my back. I went twice to the Museum of American War Atrocities, and re-learned what napalm can do. I’m a patriot, but not a serene, resolved patriot. I’m a mix of conservative and progressive when it comes to America. And I think this is the case with many of us.
My concern is that many people now don’t feel free to put an identity together from the aspects of culture that appeal to them most—and create a story that explains and justifies their identities. They seem compelled to buy a whole menu. When it’s their turn to order, they look at the progressive menu or the conservative, and feel forced to say, I’ll have all of one or all of the other.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, our wisest writer, imagined people who have taken the best from both worlds, and fused them together in a functioning whole. “Nature,” he says, does not give its approbation “to the rock which resists the wave from age to age, nor to the wave which lashes incessantly the rock.” The superior form “is with the oak which stands with its hundred arms against the storms of a century, and grows every year like a sapling; or the river which ever flowing, yet is found in the same bed from age to age; or, greatest of all, the man who has subsisted for years amid the changes of nature, yet has distanced himself, so that when you remember what he was, and see what he is, you say, what strides! What a disparity is here!” Emerson celebrates growth and stability. He’s all for tradition and innovation. Each side of the equation, progressive and conservative is, Emerson says, “a good half but an impossible whole.” Both have to combine to create a flourishing individual.
I would extend Emerson. In virtually all of us, apart from a few politicians and journalists who squawk from morning to late night on social media and TV, we all combine both sides of the equation. By affirming one side and suppressing the other, we make ourselves into half men and half women. We are only a moiety of what we could be. I commonly see people who, say, love their churches, are committed to tradition, yet are highly critical of American policy and are virtually socialist in their economic views. I see people who affirm every progressive social position: reparations, trans rights, opening the borders. Yet they live in traditional families and love them. Get them going about their ancestors and they won’t stop.
I think most people are similarly complex. Though they often try to squeeze themselves into one camp or the other. And of course, everyone around them wants them to declare for a candidate, declare for a team.
But we could see ourselves in full and make our decisions in life based on the whole soul and not the half. We could see more, know more. We could look more charitably at those we disagree with, knowing that our beings are not ruthlessly opposed but have considerable overlap. Maybe more overlap than opposition.
This division in politics and personal life between progressives and conservatives cheapens our sense of self. It sabotages our politics. It makes us all one-dimensional, without understanding and true intelligence. It often seems as though people become impassioned in order to suppress, or even banish the side of themselves they do not want to own. Progressives squash their conservative values; conservatives haven’t a good word to say for any progressive cause—though they may think them.
Our reductive politics now demands that an individual embrace one side of the divide or the other. If you tell me your opinion on, say, capital punishment, I can probably tell what your professed opinions are on a span of other issues. Does it matter that there’s at least a mild tension between being for capital punishment and against abortion? Not to many people. They may notice the tension and be half-inclined to deal with it. But the current dispensation, which demands that we become partial men and partial women does not encourage it. Pledge allegiance! Be on one side or the other! Commit and stay committed! And above all believe the fiction: There are numberless pure progressives out there and there are numberless pure conservatives. And they should spend their days fighting.
Why do we wish to whittle ourselves down to half our natural size? Why be partial when we can be whole? The world invites us to take complex views—sometimes even temporarily to contradict ourselves, for like Walt we all contain multitudes. Says Emerson, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” In time, we may make our views cohere, or at least be able to explain our disparities to ourselves (for we don’t really owe that to anyone else). The point is to reject the simplistic version of self that media and political parties offer. No one is a pure conservative. No one is a pure progressive. We all contain elements of both. Our lives will be richer, our ethics more plausible, and our politics deeply improved, if we can remember this simple fact.