A colleague of mine named Joel Dvoskin recently wrote that “conservatives are for individual freedoms, so long as no one ever tries to use one, and liberals are for diversity and tolerance, so long as no one disagrees with them.” What I have found is that when I tell my conservative friends that I like Barack Obama, they are likely to say, “I hate Barack Obama.” When I tell my liberal friends that I like George Will, they are likely to say, “I hate you.”
I think this has to do with how personal a political issue can be for the particular liberal or conservative. There can be an intellectual, mutually respectful disagreement about whether government is too big, and about how much income tax is too much. But the intellectual tone and mutuality of respect disintegrate around certain personal issues. These include abortion on the conservative side and some civil rights on the liberal side. Some people idiosyncratically personalize other issues as well, such as the liberal who gets quite activated at the idea of genetically-altered food and the conservative who gets irate on the issue of the capital gains tax. When the subject of politics becomes personal, you have to expect the discourse to become emotional.
What makes me crazy is the issue of gay rights. I would have thought racism or the First Amendment would do it, if I’d had to guess, knowing what I know about myself and my upbringing. I suppose this has to do with the fact that I came late to understanding that gay people and straight people are just the same, so I get angry at the self I was, not just at the issue in front of me. I’m not saying this is true of every angry reaction in politics, that it is psychological—I’m saying it’s true about me. I always knew (I always had been taught) that black people and white people are just the same, but it wasn’t until Stonewall that I even began to think about gay rights, and it wasn’t really until my twenties that I made friends with a few gay people and could see the idiocy of invented distinctions between gays and straights. (There are uninvented distinctions that make perfect sense, such as matchmaking your straight friends with members of the opposite sex.)
Because I’m personally implicated, I can also get a little heated on the issue of white guys.
When I was growing up in the protected middle class, politics had a lot to do with elections and not much else. Disenfranchised people worried about political issues, not us. Even during the violence around race, I sympathized, but it didn’t seem to have much to do with me, much like Sudan and Syria now. Then, the Vietnam War made everything political. For one thing, I was personally involved, since the wrong lottery number could have sent me packing. For another, the discourse got ugly because it was accompanied by ugly pictures of people dying at the hands of Americans. Either you were a murderer, an abetter of murder, or someone calling other people murderers, many of whom were mainly (if clumsily) trying to protect the world from totalitarianism. Everything got ugly.
You can be a liberal without imputing racism, homophobia, and callousness to conservatives. You can be a conservative without imputing immorality, communism, or hyper-emotionality to liberals.
Michael Karson, Ph.D. 
Great stuff as usual. A question that came up for me that maybe you can answer. Why has the idea of centrism (which is to some degree the middle ground you perhaps allude to) never truly appealed to this country and its people as another ‘politics’ of choice? I m asking about centrism not as a replacement to bipartisanship, but as an additional plausible model of political discourse. Maybe then we can apply this same question to the multiculturalism dilemma and our current psychological discourse. I mostly want to speak about politics here but I m sure you ll see a lot of parallels with our usual arguments dispersed here and there as I go on.
I m asking the question above because I m not placated by Ross Perot’s 19% in ’92. A bold statement of popular sentiment perhaps, but not one I personally attribute to some internal political maturation of the U.S electorate, especially if I were to interpret this result through the geopolitical lens of the time in question. To further my point, let me venture a guess at the inner workings of the average College educated, 40’s something, White middle-class professional (i.e., family of two, yellow lab and picturesque house in the suburbs) right around ’92 before the Clinton years:
“At last the time has come. We can breathe a huge collective sigh of relief for CNN says the Soviets kicked the bucket for good! Maybe now is the perfect time for me to voice some of my previously muffled liberal frustration of 20 years in the making (as a misunderstood White guy) after 8 years of Reagan sprinkled with another four of George Senior’s oil wars (round one, but of course he didn’t know that back then). I have decided I m going to vote Perot this next election. Clinton will be elected anyway so we are in the clear. Win-win! I can go to bed with a clean conscience.” When he goes to bed however his unconscious stars to muse: “You ll get up in the morning and fill up the SUV with $1/gallon gas on your way to work (work = play a round of golf with the boss after lunch and talk about CNN and smart bombs). You ll treat yourself to a big mac from that McDonalds drive through on the way back home because your wife is busy taking the boys to soccer practice and won’t have time to cook that healthy veggie dish that’s her new favorite and which you have to tell you you love so much. Heaven! You ll tell yourself you ll burn the extra calories off at the gym later tonight, but seriously? Come on, we both know you won’t do that. You ll just watch that cool new show Miami Vice and doze off in the bliss of your suburban home.”
So yeah, I don’t see a lot of true political maturation nor do I have much hope for that anytime soon. The above musings could probably be very similar 20 years later (election is coming up, big mac is the same, just change Miami Vice to Breaking Bad) but then add some stronger denial defenses into the mix because gas is almost $4/gallon, the recession is still going strong after 4 years, and so are the oil wars abroad. But that’s another story for another time… Back to my point. I m equally not placated by other smaller aberrations here and there beyond Perot’s and other previous attempts at centrism over the last couple hundred years over this side of the pond (i.e., Teddy Roosevelt, JFK, Robert Kennedy – and last two were both assassinated so that’s interesting to say the least).
You do touch on the social “awakening” of the 60’s, affirmative action, people taking sides and being passionate about their beliefs, equal rights for minority statuses, people essentially recognizing they are not much different than everyone else around them. These things originated over here too, to be fair. I think this fire was burning slow for quite a long time but circumstances were also ripe around the time the fire erupted because everyone (even the more privileged ones than others) slowly grasped that they were not operating in a vacuum anymore. The illusion of safety of two ponds away was forever shattered. You said the wrong lottery could mean you packed your bags for Nam (i.e., random events like that challenge privilege). I say the cold war and the fear of nuclear holocaust because some crazy Dr. Strangelove would hit the button any given moment. That fear was random and as real at it gets. So there were good things that came out of bad ones. Science and philosophy followed this path. Even psychology came up with a “third-force” alternative around that same time to distance from psychoanalysis and behaviorism. Why can’t U.S. politics do the same?
Since you like ice cream metaphors here is another one! Vanilla and chocolate are so awesome, but sometimes I just want pistachio! Makes the chocolate and the vanilla taste better when I go back to them. I mean, I m just baffled at how such a diverse context is still predicated by a bipartisan system that is a bit reductionistic to say the least, while from an outsider’s vantage point like my own its not even as complementary as it purports to be (or as you attempt to present it when it dresses up in its most idealistic fashion). Having more than two options is always a good thing! Otherwise you get polarization and all the things that you criticize in today’s blog. Its unavoidable!
To close with some optimism, albeit of the painful kind. Given that the pillars of capitalism around us are slowly collapsing (whoever is denying that I think is in for a rude awakening not that far down the road), maybe the forces upon which this nation has been built which won’t let things move as far left as the center will seize to be as strong eventually. To paraphrase you, maybe all those republicans who call Obama a “commie” and all those democrats that call Romney a “bigot” will eventually see them as just two men trying to balance a 16 trillion dollar deficit in the budget their predecessors created at a time of fat cows, and attempt to pull some more jobs out of a magician’s hat in the midst of a ‘post-2008’ world. I see two ways this can occur. A) Social and political maturity and a “third road.” B) Rude transition to reality without the necessary time needed for maturation (i.e., abrupt awakening). Alas, because time is not a privilege for anyone (rich or poor) I think this realization will probably come out of necessity and not out of choice.
Kind of like transitioning into adulthood from adolescence, this country will grow up whether it wants to or not, then eventually get old wither and pass away (like we are beginning to see with Europe right now). But that’s my answer. I d love to hear yours!
To me, the biggest similarities between the political system and multiculturalism have to do with the way hegemonies start off trying to do good and end up self-interested. In fact, I think most Americans are centrist, and most politicians are as well, but they have to appeal to their basest bases to win elections. Another analogy to multiculturalism is that so many people don’t participate that it overly weights the voices of those who do. If everyone voted, politicians would appeal to the center, not the edges. But in a country that hasn’t seen a serious threat to the system in living memory, it’s easy to take the system for granted (which is why I think the one required course in every high school and college should be civics). I’m not sure we’re immature politically so much as retired.
These hegemonies you speak are the ones who don’t want civics and ‘realpolitik’ type multiculturalism in the classroom. As for those who have retired and don’t vote because they have given up, thinking their individual sentiments won’t make a difference, well they are just doing the rest of us who care and are trying to make a difference a disservice. The illusion and ultimate brain-washing to believe that a democracy is no longer a practical system as it was designed only for smaller constituencies angers me to my core. But then I calm down because I remember my physics (i.e., the laws of thermodynamics) and let that inform my civics. Homeostasis only works right before the bubble bursts. But why do we have to be so masochistic as a species when it comes to meaningful change?