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This blog grows out of my conviction that every aspect of our lives is sacred and is to be nurtured and celebrated as a good gift of God. Most of the posts will be the sorts of things you would expect from a historian and worldview teacher, but some are likely to be a bit surprising. Since God created all things good, including all aspects of human life, everything is interesting and important from the perspective of a biblical worldview. Everything under the Sun and under Heaven is thus fair game here. I hope you find it interesting and enjoyable.

Friday, April 13, 2012

Conservatives and Progressives redux

Nearly two months ago, I posted on some of the assumptions that lie behind conservative and progressive ideas in America. That was a pretty widely read post for my blog, so I decided to do a follow up with some additional thoughts about the subject. This one’s likely to be a bit more controversial than the last, but it is based on my experiences and observations with people on both sides. Your mileage may vary, but if you disagree and feel the need to respond, please explain where I’ve gone wrong rather than just tell me I’m wrong. Thanks.
OK, let’s go.
Another difference in underlying assumptions between conservatives and progressives is how the two sides conceive of individual vs. group identity. For the progressive, group identity seems paramount: we are seen as part of groups identified with race, class, gender, and sexual orientation; similarly, we identify with labor (i.e. unions), and possibly with other types of groups as well. This is why progressives frequently are involved in identity politics.
If you are part of a group identified as among the oppressed—women, racial minorities, homosexual, etc.—it is assumed that you will hold progressive views. Conservatives from these groups are seen as traitors: Black conservatives are routinely labeled as “Uncle Toms;” conservative women are savaged by the media with nary a peep from feminists and accused of “not being women,” etc. Of course, if you are one of the privileged, then holding progressive views demonstrates that you are enlightened and have risen above the limitations of your class.
To take this further, problems are also caused by collective entities. The most recent villains are greedy corporations, “Wall Street,” bankers, etc., though it could also be the rich (“the 1%”), or as was the case a few years back, upper class white heterosexual males. Perhaps the reason for this is that progressives tend to believe people are basically good, so they generally don’t want to blame individuals (other than the Koch brothers or members of the Bush administration). It’s easier to blame a group and then challenge individuals to cross sides and align themselves with the good guys. Thus because he sided with the Occupy Movement, Michael Moore isn’t part of the 1%, despite the fact that he is well within the 1% top incomes in the country.
If collective entities are the problem, they are also the solution. Unions must balance the power of corporations and increasingly of governments, and progressive government (i.e. government in the hands of the Democrats) is the ultimate solution to undermining the power of those that exploit or abuse less powerful groups.
Conservatives tend to think in much more individualistic terms. They genuinely do not see group identity as being primary. Thus when Mitt Romney says “corporations are people,” he does not mean that a corporation is a person. He means that corporations are made up of people—the owners and employees are the corporation. As a result, you can’t pit corporations against “the people” because “the people” include those that make up the corporation. Progressives misunderstand his statement because they think in terms of the corporation as an entity, not as a collection of people working together for a common economic purpose.
Similarly, criticism of Pres. Obama is often seen as racism, as were Newt Gingrich’s comments about welfare—despite the fact that race was never mentioned. Conservatives hear criticisms of the president as being about policy, and comments about food stamps as being about increasing rates of poverty; progressives hear a racial subtext that must be present even if not stated because they see things in racial terms and because they assume conservatives are racist, along with sexist, homophobic, etc. The difficulty in communication comes about because of different assumptions about collective vs. individual identity.
For conservatives, group identity is secondary, but it still exists. The most important groups, however, are not based on race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Rather, they are the groups which you join voluntarily. This includes churches and service organizations, political parties and PACs. This idea of voluntary association even extends into your job—you are not owned by the company that employs you, and you can always quit and work elsewhere. This emphasis on voluntary association is the reason why conservatives support right to work laws. Where union membership is mandatory, rather than voluntary, it violates the right to free association. To put it simply, if you want to work for an employer, you should not be required to pay another organization for your right to do so.
Conservatives tend not to see problems as being caused by a clash of interest groups per se; rather, they see them as driven by individuals promoting specific ideologies and translating those into policy. It isn’t typically a matter of group identity. As a result, the solution is to promote a different agenda built primarily around entrepreneurial action on the part of individuals acting for their own and for their community’s good. This is where many of the voluntary associations conservatives support fit in: religious groups and service organizations can deal more effectively with many problems than the government can, and thus they should to be promoted ahead of government action.
None of this is absolute, of course, and there are exceptions. For example, there are conservatives who are bigots, though not nearly as many as progressives seem to think there are. But based on my observations, the distinction between individual and corporate identity seems to be another piece in the puzzle behind the thinking of progressives and conservatives in America.

3 comments:

  1. I would say that, not only are some conservatives bigots, but that a much larger portion of progressives are. But if you are the group who defines the terms of the "debates"--and let's face it, liberals do--you just don't label it as bigotry because your hatred is directed at a group that is deem hateable.

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  2. I found these posts from a link on Doug Groothius’s Facebook page and they are very interesting. It is nice to see someone doing analysis that doesn’t involve name calling and that recognizes that neither the label “conservative” nor “progressive” is a one-size-fits-all tag.

    As someone who is broadly on the progressive side of this debate, though, I do have a different take on what drives progressives. Or at least some progressives. Or at least what drives me.

    While I think that individual liberty is important and should be limited by the law only when there is a sufficient justification for it, I think that the conservative (or classical liberal) view that we are fundamentally autonomous agents who are strictly defined individualistically is untenable. From the beginning of our lives, we are dependent on the care and nurturing of others—parents, teachers, and those with whom we go to church (synagogue, mosque, etc.), friends and others in the community. Even after we are grown, our economic well being is partially due to our individual skills and gifts, and on how hard we work, but it is also crucially dependent on the economy in which we are embedded. Without a good work force to employ, and public transportation system to deliver goods, we would not be able to produce much and what we did produce would have little value.

    Given the partially social nature of humans, the idea that they are entitled to keep all they earn is implausible. We can earn what we earn because of our economic community. Paying out of our paychecks what is necessary to keep our community in good order is only appropriate because what we earn is crucially dependent on our economic context.

    So we would disagree at a pretty deep level about the nature of individual selves. But there is more. Because humans are all fallen and largely selfish creatures, it is overly optimistic to think that the less fortunate will have their needs met by the generosity of good-hearted people who act from altruistic motives. Of course, there will be some who give above and beyond, and many who will give some. But in a society with, for example, the healthcare costs that ours has, it is simply Pollyanna to expect that the financial medical needs of the uninsured will be met by generous, voluntary donations of fallen people. Or even of the best intentioned. Take your average low-wage earner whose job doesn’t include health coverage. Suppose she gets into a bad accident or comes down with cancer. Her treatment will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And there are lots and lots such people. There just aren’t enough good Samaritans with the means to pay for the healing of all their wounds...

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  3. ...The progressive, or at least this progressive, also sees government in a different light from that in which the typical conservative sees it. Whereas the conservative sees government as essentially a limiter of the greatest good (freedom) that exists for the purpose of keeping us from killing each other and protecting private property, the progressive sees government (in a representative democracy) as that entity which helps us do what we all decide to do together. Yes, it should keep us from killing each other, and protect private property and individual liberty, but those are only three of the things that we as a majority-rule-but-rights-protecting society want to do. We want good roads, safe food and labor, research that brings about innovation, a safety net that guarantees that citizens have basic needs met (even as we require those who land in the net to do what they can to contribute), and that insures that people get the medical care they need without going bankrupt in the process. Big government isn’t a goal. But the size that is called for is a function of the goods it can produce that the private sector can’t.

    As for the very rich, we have nothing against them. Our concern isn’t that there are some who have incredible riches. What we worry about is that systems that allow the 1% to have percentages of the overall wealth that they current enjoy require, as a matter of economic necessity, that those who are in the 20%-80% have much, much less than they would if the 1% were still very rich but not quite as rich as they are. We think that a strong middle class is important for the stability of a nation and we worry that a society that increasingly has a greater divide between the haves and the have-nots is a less stable society.

    I can’t pretend to be an expert in any of these matters. I’m just a Christian, analytic philosopher who pays attention to politics. I appreciate the opportunity for dialogue.

    God bless, Glenn.

    Tom

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