On liberals and conservatives

My friend Alexandra has dropped a very difficult little assignment in my lap: to put into words the ways in which liberals and conservatives agree and are the same, and how it is that we can mutually respect and value each other. UPDATE: Suzanne points out in the comments that it would help for me to specify that I'm talking about liberalism and conservatism in the realm of American politics here, not theology, etc.

It turns out to be much more difficult than I expected. You'll have to excuse the stream-of-consciousness nature of this post; I had no idea where I was going when I started, and was quite surprised at where I wound up.

When I try to come up with things liberals and conservatives genuinely agree on (that is, where they not only say the same words but mean the same things), I get a list that looks something like this: ...continue reading...

We want our children to grow up happy, to spend their lives doing something that is useful and emotionally rewarding, to be free from the fear of violence or economic disaster, to be well fed and healthy and secure. We want those things for ourselves and for those we love, and we want that for other people's children, too, and for everybody in the world, at least as long as we don't have to sacrifice our own children's happiness for the sake of the happiness of people we never met. If we start having to choose between our own kids' happiness and somebody else's, well, that gets problematical.

But most of us are able to imagine situations in which we would be willing to put other people's happiness ahead of our own kids', for the sake of something that, for lack of a better word, I'll call Justice. Most of us agree that there are times when individuals should submit their own pursuit of happiness to a greater good, and most of us would like to think we'd be willing to make that sacrifice ourselves when called on. And the sacrifices we're willing to make because we believe the greater good demands them, are sacrifices that generally speaking we think other people ought to make, too.

Now, we know that there are going to be differences of opinion about the greater good. In the West, both liberals and conservatives agree in principle that those differences of opinion should be settled through some process other than killing all the people who disagree with us. We think we ought to be able to talk to each other and come to an agreement, and, where that's not possible, we think there ought to be rules followed to decide which side gets their own way and which side has to be the losers. We expect those rules more often than not to be based some variation on "the majority wins," only we agree that there are some things that ought not be done even if the majority wants to do them. And we think both the winners and the losers ought to obey those rules and do their winning and their losing gracefully.

We agree, most of us, that we ought to respect people with whom we disagree, and that gratuitous abuse is a bad thing. Of course, most of us have trouble remembering that rule when we get mad, and most of us are willing to grant that humorists are allowed some leeway for comic effect, and most of us think that this rule is suspended if the guys on the other side are real jerks and have it coming, and those of us from New Jersey are apt to have a much higher threshold of what constitutes abuse than are those of us from Alabama. Still, we agree that gratuitous abuse is a bad thing even if we don't always agree where the line falls and even if we occasionally stray across it our own selves.

Where we start parting ways...well, when I find myself in a disagreement with somebody, I personally start trying to figure out what kind of disagreement I'm dealing with. There's almost always some common ground, and if you don't start there then the conversation is doomed to uselessness before it starts.

In some cases, there's a disagreement over the ends I and my friend seek; in other cases we agree on the ends but disagree on the means.

Take, for example, nationalized health care. I think it's an absolutely terrible idea; that the current "health care crisis," such as it is, is a direct result of massive government interference in medicine over the last thirty years; and that if you want the greatest number of Americans to live the longest and healthiest possible lives, then the government should be banished from the health care arena pretty much entirely, other than to put ferocious limits on the ability of lawyers to make millions off of frivolous medical lawsuits. I have, however, an exceptionally intelligent friend who absolutely prefers the British NHS to the American system -- even though she admits that Americans, even the poor ones generally speaking, get much better health care than the Brits or the Canadians. The reason is that she believes that Justice demands that everybody should get the same health care, and that this is more important that that everybody should get good health care. I'm not kidding about this; we've discussed it in some detail, and she firmly believes that a system in which everybody has a life expectancy of 60 years is better than a system in which poor people have a life expectancy of 65 years but Bill Gates can expect to live to be 120. For her, Justice demands equality of result; and so she wants the most effective health care system that is possible without allowing inequity. In my opinion, Justice could care less about equality of result, and therefore I want the most effective health care system possible, period.

If, therefore, she and I are going to bother to talk about health care at all, then we can skip all the part about how badly government-run health care sucks, because that's not what we disagree about. We should start with the fact that she and I both care deeply about Justice, but that we disagree about whether equality of result is required by Justice. That's what we can talk about. And we can talk about it at length precisely because we both care about Justice; each of us passionately rejects any social model that would say "the strong exploit the weak and the weak can just die for all we care," as in Saddam's Iraq or Stalin's Russia, and we would like to be able to join forces against Injustice. If either one us just didn't care a rap about Justice to begin with, there would be nothing to talk about. Unfortunately we don't agree about what Justice is, exactly; but perhaps one day we will. In the meantime neither one of us wants to shoot the other one -- though if she were to try to bring her sucky U.K. health care system to the U.S. I would use every acceptable political means to frustrate her efforts, and she would return the favor if I were to start trying to abolish the NHS and to replace it with a free-wheeling laissez-faire medical marketplace.

On the other hand, a few years ago some people came to my door asking me to sign a petition for nationalizing health care "so that every American can have quality, affordable health care." Those people and I, unlike I and my friend in the U.K., agree on the ends -- but we disagree very deeply about the efficacy of the means. To them I would say, "I would love for every American to have quality, affordable health care, and that's precisely why I want anybody who wants to put the government in charge of our health care to be tarred, feathered, and ridden permanently out of Washington on a rail." (If I seem disrespectfully abusive here, I claim leeway under the comic-effect clause.) They and I don't need to argue about whether it's a good thing for poor people to have good health care; we agree about that. We can settle in to discuss economic cause and effect and to try to work out which approach is most likely to bring long-term, effective benefit to America's poor.

My point is that with both the petitioners and my U.K. friend, there is common ground from which we can start. It's different common ground in the two cases, but there is still common ground.

Now it occurs to me that there is another, even more important, piece of common ground, real estate shared by liberals and conservatives alike: we're all, pretty much, jerks. One of the most saddeningly amusing things about the whole Miers civil war has been those bewildered conservatives who have whined, "We're acting just like liberals; I thought we were better than that." Um, hon, if that's what you thought, then you are, with all due respect, a complete ditz. Period. I'll tell you something right now: you hang around me long enough, and you talk about enough subjects with me, and sooner or later I will reveal myself to be one heckuva jerk. That is my solemn promise to you, and it's the one promise almost everybody in the world can make and be sure they'll keep. (Well, I don't think my friend Judy Stowell would be able to keep it, but most of you won't ever be lucky enough to meet her.)

If all the people who agree with you seem like nice folks...well, what do you expect? You agree with them; of course they're going to act nice around you. Try disagreeing with them about something they really want, some subject they really care about -- like, say, the Miers nomination -- and just see how fast they get nasty and foul-tempered.

So we're all jerks. And I think, myself, that that's (perversely) the best common ground of all to start with. If you, Mr. Liberal Democrat, and you, Mr. Religious Right Republican, and I, my anti-abortion anti-War-on-Drugs libertarian self, can all accept that each of us is periodically going to go off the rails and be a jerk, then we can all cut each other some slack when it happens, and we can get past the constant moral one-upmanship that makes most conversation between liberals and conservatives so difficult. You don't need to prove that I'm a jerk; I admit it. I don't need to prove that you're a jerk; you admit it. So we don't need to have an argument, do we? After all, the whole point of an argument is to prove that the other person is a jerk, and since we all admit that up front, there's nothing left to prove...which lets us get back to the topic at hand and start making some actual progress on the issue.

Really and truly, I may seem insane, but I think this is a fundamental key to getting along. A very dear friend of mine once told me that the single thing that amazed her most about me was how accepting I could be of other people, including people that she personally couldn't stand. She wasn't a Christian, and she had been raised to think that conservative Christians were intolerant of other people, and she knew that I was a deeply conservative Christian of strong and traditional moral views -- and yet I seemed genuinely to like all kinds of people that she thought were jerks and that, she knew, I knew were engaged in behavior of which I deeply disapproved. I tried gently to explain that one consequence of the doctrine of original sin is precisely that it frees you up to love everybody no matter how they behave -- no matter what happens, you're never disillusioned because you always know anybody is capable of anything given the wrong circumstances; and love is never conditional on your deserving it because nobody deserves it anyway. Liberals and conservatives are really all just people, which means we're all jerks; so, um...well, so if you're a jerk, so what? Like that's supposed to keep me from liking you? If I were going to refuse to have jerks for friends, I'd be one heckuva lonely guy. And if everybody else refused to have jerks for friends, too, who would put up with me?

If you want to go back and forth about whether liberals or conservatives are more morally admirable people, well, feel free, but if that's all it's about then I've got better things to do, like, say, watching a thrilling match of curling. If you want to try to help me figure out where I'm wrong...now that's something I'm interested in.

Which brings me to the last way in which it is at least possible for liberals and conservatives to agree. In an argument, each side is trying to prove the other side is a jerk. In a debate, either each side is trying to prove they're smarter than the other guys, or else each side is trying to get their own way. But in a discussion, each side is trying to learn something. Liberals and conservatives seem to disagree on which side is morally superior; well, a plague on both your houses. Liberals and conservatives seem to disagree on which side is more intelligent, and since there are smart people on both sides, if that's what it's going to be about then nobody's ever going to get anywhere. Liberals and conservatives want to implement different agendas and policies; you're not going to agree about that.

But give me a liberal who wants to learn and a conservative who wants to learn, and that's something we can agree on: if I'm wrong about something (which I'm bound to be), I'd like to find out, and I'll be grateful to anybody who shows me. If we agree on that, then the more other things we disagree on to begin with, the more learning is about to take place.

In the end, it comes down to humility and intellectual integrity. Both virtues are available to liberals and conservatives, and there are liberals and conservatives who exemplify them both. And the house of discussion is big enough for all those of humility and intellectual integrity, however divergent our specific opinions might be, even though every now and then each of us is going to have a bad day and be a jerk.

How's that, Alexandra? Not very good, I'm afraid...