In trying to find common ground for conservatives and liberals, I find myself making statements that seem utterly obvious, yet no one seems to be saying them. Or rather people are saying half of these truisms and leaving out the counterbalancing factor. For instance, when Democratic Presidential candidates discussed “big business” in recent Presidential primary debates, they focused largely on the damage that large corporations cause to our environment and to our social and economic well-being. On the other side, I hear Republicans lauding the growth in “the economy” as an unquestioned good.

Both rhetorics seem off-balance to me, and thus I assert an inanely simple corrective: large corporations are both dangerous and beneficial.

First, let’s talk about the slipperiness of words, as I so often do in this blog. In politics there’s a lot of talk about “business,” a term that applies to both hot dog stands and hotel chains. But it’s easy for talk about “a climate favorable to business ” to shift meaning toward “policies that favor large corporations.” Small businesses do not have the same interests as multinational corporations, but without the resources to advocate for themselves, their interests can easily get shoved aside by larger players.

The most common indicator we use to describe the health of “the economy” is the Dow Jones, a measure of the largest publicly held corporations. When the Dow becomes a stand-in for the economy, then we have reduced the market to its largest forces (Fortune 500 companies directly employ only 17% of the American workforce, though their indirect impact on employment is larger. The Gross Domestic Product is also a problematic indicator of economic health.). Small businesses are an afterthought when it comes to policymaking; they are served after the big boys get a seat at the table. It would be one thing if policymakers described their actions more clearly: “I want a climate that is favorable to large multinational corporations.” But being “pro-business” allows a useful slippage that substitutes a general term to hide its real focus.

Since we liberals tend to be suspicious of large corporations, I’ll start with the positive case: that corporations (to echo a bit of corporate PR) “bring good things to life.” For a demonstration of the benefits of contemporary market practices, you need look no further than your local grocery. I grew up in a world where there were two kinds of mustard (yellow and brown) and four television networks; now there’s an entire mustard section in my grocery, and there’s more good TV than I can possibly watch.

According to the BBC Podcast of the same name, the limited liability corporation is one of the 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy. The corporation makes it possible to pool resources and share risk, both vital forces in a robust economy. And while I don’t think that monetary profit is the only motivator for inventive thinking, a profit motive is one of the most important sources of innovation in history.

The corporation not only creates newer, better products, but it also provides employment. “Employment” is probably a better measure of “the economy,” but it’s harder to determine. For instance, do part-time, underpaid jobs in the gig economy count as “employment” in the same way that full-time positions do? Rising employment numbers and a healthy Dow can still be quite separate from pockets of discontent, as the Democrats discovered in the 2016 election when angry displaced factory workers challenged the narrative of broad economic recovery.

At this point I will call out one of the great lies of politics at the national level: that political action can create jobs. Every politician trumpets his/her ability to create jobs, but the decision by a businessperson to add a new job to the payroll is an extraordinarily complex one. It involves a complicated calculation of risk, confidence, assets, profit, market, prediction, need, taxes, technology, labor costs and availability, liabilities, and access to finances. The government only influences a few of these, and so it has at best an indirect effect on most job creation.

Of course the government can directly create jobs. When George W. Bush created the Department of Homeland Security, he created jobs (and increased the budget). We certainly can create jobs this way if there is political will to do so, but I don’t think this is the kind of job creation that most politicians are talking about. Politics can create a climate that is favorable for job creation, but that’s a much humbler claim. We need to stop the dishonest pretense that creating jobs is a primary function of our national politics.

Nor is it quite right to say that job creation is a primary concern of big business. Creating new jobs is a byproduct (sometimes) of the large corporation’s primary goal: to create profit for its stockholders. The profit goal is often at odds with increased employment. Imagine if a CEO announced that the company was going to decrease profits so that they could keep more people on the payroll. That executive would be instantly fired for fundamentally misunderstanding his/her job.

It is in the corporation’s best interest to employ as few workers as possible. Human (full-time) workers are expensive. Skilled labor costs always go up because of inflation, salary increases, the rising costs of health benefits, etc., which is an enormous problem with any endeavor that is necessarily labor intensive (such as my own worlds of education and the arts). If it is possible to do so, the corporation is best served by firing employees and replacing them with automated processes.

No worker is surprised by a pink slip when a corporation replaces them with a machine. They understand that this is just a corporation acting like a corporation with no loyalty to individual persons other than their stockholders. While machines tend to be expensive on the front end (with development costs), they require significantly less money to maintain (health care costs for machines are much less than for people, and automated processes don’t take paid vacation). Many big businesses did exactly what they were expected to do with Trump’s recent cut in corporate taxes. Instead of creating jobs, they largely engaged in stock buyback programs (artificially boosting the value of their own stock) and invested in automating their businesses.

Of course those words “corporation” and “stockholders” have changed over time as well. At the birth of the American Republic, the formation of a corporation required an act of Congress, a system that has major advantages and disadvantages. Under that system, forming a corporation is an insider’s game only available to those with considerable political influence. This constrains economic growth since only a few businesses can amass the needed money for a large industrial effort. On the positive side, Congress could require that private business serve a public good before it entrusted them with the benefits of incorporating (digging a canal, for instance).

In the 19^th century, America opened up the incorporation process so that now virtually anyone can create a corporation with a little bit of paperwork and money. That’s beneficial, but at the same time we lost the idea that incorporation is a conferred advantage that should be repaid by a reciprocal contribution to the public good.

Thus freed from its broader responsibilities, the corporation took its modern shape as envisioned by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. The corporation’s primary purpose is to provide profit for its shareholders; nothing more, nothing less. Who those stockholders are has changed as well. Stock buy-in programs for employees and investments from retirement funds mean that the distinction between stockholder and rank-and-file worker has blurred. But perhaps the more important change has come through technology.

The computer bypasses the individual human stockbroker and thus allows stock trades with incredible rapidity. We live in a world in which investment houses seek shorter physical cable routes so that their computerized transactions can arrive at the stock exchange a millisecond earlier than mine, and the modern corporation reshapes to that reality. A “stockholder” may be someone who holds onto a share for seconds, and pursuing that investor encourages the publicly held corporation more than ever to focus on quarterly reports and short-term profits rather than long term economic health. Add to this the modern tendency to fire and hire top corporate executives when profits falter, which produces leadership that has little continuity and loyalty to the corporation. In this environment, neither stockholder nor executive is in the game for the long haul; success is defined as the short-term appearance of economic health.

Pursuing short-term profit boosts the corporation’s tendency to participate in the “tragedy of the commons.” Economists have long recognized that a common resource (the environment, for instance) can be depleted by those who are acting solely for their own self-interest. The tragedy is that by pursuing their individualized short-term goals, the players actually work against their own long-term interest. The resource that made their activity possible in the first place can be destroyed by their own short-sighted actions. We shouldn’t be surprised when large modern publicly held corporations ravage the environment. We shouldn’t be surprised when corporations cheat, lie, or break laws; if they can get away with it, there’s a profit incentive to do so.

Although some corporate leaders have publicly announced that shareholder value is no longer their main concern and although public relations was created to soften the image of the corporation’s profit-focused activities, the large modern corporation remains rewarded for delivering short term return on stockholder investment and not for addressing its public responsibilities. Large corporations cannot be trusted to do anything other than what they are fundamentally designed to do. We shouldn’t pretend that such corporate activity will naturally benefit the society as whole.

Large modern corporations have used their deep pockets to expand their influence. One important way to do this is in the writing of laws. Congress holds hearings about an array of highly technical issues (such as collateralized debt obligations) that are boring and complicated as hell but that can have significant bearing on people’s lives (as we discovered in the 2008 recession. See Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia for a vividly written indictment of how technical expertise paid for by corporate deep pockets can produce disastrously self-interested results). The primary voices in many of these hearings are those that can afford to weigh in with expertise on these matters: large corporations.

Corporate lobbyists “help” understaffed legislators by drafting legislation that can be adapted by representatives but that still begin with language favorable to the industry’s interest. We may rail at politicians for creating unreadable 1000-page laws, but much of this complexity comes from big business using their influence to tuck exceptions into the statutes. Needless to say, few private citizens have the time and money to devote to monitoring such technical matters (the outcry about net neutrality is a rare exception), so the seemingly democratic process of public hearings gets warped.

Large corporations have also extended their reach in the courtroom. Most people recognize the power that a “cease and desist” letter from corporate lawyers can have. Even if the company is in the wrong, private citizens know that corporations can simply outspend them in legal fees, making it difficult to challenge the corporation’s will.

At a larger level, modern corporations understand that it is a good investment to argue cases in front of the Supreme Court where rulings can shape national laws and regulations. Although technically any court case could be heard by the Supreme Court, the process of rising through the system is an expensive one, and so cases with corporate backing have much more likelihood it to that level. It costs a lot of money to hire one of the select group of lawyers who argue before the high court, and large corporations are much more able to foot that bill.

Supreme Court rulings have significantly enlarged corporate rights over the years, culminating in the Citizens United decision to give  corporate “persons” the right to engage in political speech. This corporate right (operating in conjunction with the ruling that money may be considered a form of speech) distorts the political process even further away from democracy in favor of moneyed interests.

I became outraged by the fact that the 14^th Amendment –  passed in 1868 to grant the rights of citizenship to former enslaved people  — has been used more often to protect the rights of corporations than for its original purpose (again, the distorting power of money and privileged access to our higher courts. See also Mark Achbar’s and Jennifer Abbott’s The Corporation.) This led me to favor a Constitutional amendment stating that “A corporation is not a person,” thus denying the corporation the freedoms conferred on individual citizens.

Adam Winkler’s quite readable history of major judicial decisions about corporations (We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights) has helped me nuance that position. The corporation is a legal but non-human “person;” it can own property and it can be sued. The separation between the human owners and the corporation is a fundamental advantage of incorporating; it prevents the owners from losing their personal property when a corporation is sued. But while the corporation once possessed only property rights, the Supreme Court has given the corporation “liberty rights” that once belonged only to human citizens (such as the right to “speak” using money).

Adding to my collection of obvious statements here: the more money you have, the more influence you have. I’m not naïve enough to think that this basic principle will change anytime soon. I do believe that the expansion of corporate influence can and should be rolled back (through, say, a constitutional amendment limiting corporate rights to property rights). And I understand that such measures will necessarily be imperfect. Capital is liquid; it probes for crevices and cracks in the system. But as I have said elsewhere in this blog, the perfect is the enemy of the good. We must monitor the modern corporation as it seeks new forms of influence. The price of the corporate innovation in our society is eternal vigilance.

Dealing with such corporations is like handling fire, a force that can lay waste to the landscape when it’s out of control. As I learned in scouting, you never leave an active fire untended; to do so is to invite disaster. But fire has a constructive energy as well. The internal combustion engine in your car is essentially a highly coordinated series of fiery explosions. If you put the right amount of gas in contact with the right amount of fire and you time those explosions correctly, you create propulsive force. If any of those elements get out of whack, then the car either runs badly or not at all. An internal combustion engine balances explosion and regulation. There’s even a part explicitly called a “regulator” which is designed to keep the fire from getting out of control. Regulation is not the enemy; it’s part of the necessary functioning of a healthy system.

Admittedly, no one likes being regulated, whether they’re a private citizen or a business owner. Conservativism channels small business owners’ frustrations with financial reporting laws and building codes into a politically advantageous “we’ve got too many regulations” position. But regulations have very different consequences for large and small businesses. Dealing with regulations is an ongoing cost for many corporations, and so they are willing to devote significant short-term money (in the form of lobbying and lawyers) to rolling those rules back. If they can link their efforts to ordinary frustrations with bureaucracy, they can turn that energy into political support of corporate self-interest.

I’m not arguing that all regulation is good. That’s as extreme a position as the right wing “no-more-regulations-we-have-too-many” rhetoric. We can have too many regulations and still need more. Again, my apologies for saying something utterly obvious, but we need to eliminate bad regulations and create good ones (particularly for newly developed enterprises such as the circulation of political rhetoric on social media). A central (and totally unsexy) job of politics is to evaluate how effective regulations are, to add new regulations where needed, and to reduce or eliminate ones that aren’t working well. We need to reaffirm the noble and necessary function of regulation, just as we need reinvigorate the discussion of social responsibility that comes with the rights and privileges of incorporation.

To cite another basic principle of this blog’s politics, we need to pay the full cost for what we receive. We need to be able to weigh (as Robert Greenwald puts it) the high cost of low prices. The modern corporation brings a blend of variety, quality, and reduced cost to our lives; is that worth the hidden human and environmental cost? If we are to have this conversation, we need to see both the benefits and the dangers that are built into the basic structures of the modern corporation.

My friend James Livermont shared this with me, and I thought it was definitely worth resharing this advice.

A friend (thanks, Tim Engelbracht!) suggested that conservatives prefer continuity and liberals favor change, and I’d like to explore that nugget. (Please don’t blame Tim for the length of this blog entry, however!) I’m expanding on an idea from a previous post:  that if the right and the left see each other as counterbalancing forces leading in different directions, we can value what each group brings to the negotiating table.

In that blog entry, I focused on what liberals and conservatives want, on their goals for the future. In this post I’ll emphasize their different relationships to the past.

Conservatives make no bones about the importance of the past; it’s right there in their name. One of their primary jobs is to conserve what is best about our history, to make sure that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Conservatives have an important function: to remind us of the achievements of the past and to ensure that those legacies continue into the future.

Liberals have a tendency to say, “My, that baby sure still is dirty. Looks like it needs another bath!”  Or at times we can say, “What baby? Look at the damage caused by patriarchy or whiteness or religion or capitalism. Throw ‘em out!” We can romanticize social revolution (admittedly, some right-wingers are a bit too in love with the idea of armed rebellion against the government). We liberals can overestimate the power of policy to change society. At times we can be in love with programs and their potential. Conservatives can temper our desire for change by rearticulating the values of the past.

The tricky question is: “which past?” There’s a broad thread of American life that glorifies our history: the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, the battles won by the “greatest generation.” There’s another broad tradition of questioning and criticizing that vision of a shining past. This recognizes the tendency to bathe the past in the comforting glow of nostalgia. Although some assert that America should be a “love it or leave it” proposition, we need to recognize that that love can take very different forms. The nostalgic and the critical are both time-honored American traditions.

I remember hearing a news story about a college campus that decided to have a Fifties day in the dining halls. You can picture what this would be like: cafeteria workers in poodle skirts and ducktails, Chuck Berry and Bill Haley on the sound system. Someone suggested that this be turned into a different exercise in time travel: that food should be served only by black people; that only white students could attend classes; that water fountains be labeled “white” and “colored.” Both are visions of the past: one nostalgic and comfortable, one necessarily challenging and uncomfortable.

Liberals can come across as party-poopers when it comes to the past. Who wouldn’t rather go to the Bill Haley Fifties day than the “white/colored only” version? And so I think conservatives have an easier time celebrating and invoking the past as a repository of greatness. Conservatives often call themselves “realists” compared to unrealistic dreamers on the left, and yet liberals are often the ones asking for a more realistic, uncomfortable understanding of our past.

Yes, the greatest generation had mighty military and industrial achievements; there was also much more misogyny and sexual abuse going on at that time than we ever realized. Yes, the Founding Fathers created a remarkable new system of government; they were also wealthy landowners looking out for the interests of their property (including human property). Yes, the public education system in America (particularly in the G.I. Bill era) was the envy of the world, but remember how many women and people of color were excluded from those hallowed halls. The triumphs of the past depended on a system of unpaid/underpaid labor from women, the poor, and people of color, and it’s misleading to extricate the achievements from the system that made them possible. And so a return to poodle skirts and rocking around the clock is a return to a fiction, a Marty McFly journey to a world that never existed except in a few isolated pockets.

Nostalgia’s lens is further clouded because it often focuses on the era of our childhood. The “good old days” we want to return to are simpler times partly because we were children then; we weren’t aware of the complexity of the adult world. My favorite example of this is John Boorman’s 1987 film Hope and Glory, rooted in his childhood memories of being in WW2’s London Blitz. Rather than a traumatic experience, it’s a sunny film with children playing among the rubble. When the local school is bombed, the kids shout to the sky, “Thank you, Adolf!” Childhood of course is not sunny for everyone, but Hope and Glory reminds me how childhood memories can put a rosy patina around even the most difficult times. The question of “whose past?” is important.

As L.P. Hartley noted, the past can be a “foreign country; they do things differently there.” The battle lines in the past are always clearer, given hindsight’s clear seeing. Every new era looks shabby and messy compared to the Golden Era, and politicians can always make use of this narrative of decline. (It’s at the heart of any fundamentalist movement, whether that revival is religious or political.) The story of civilization’s decline and decay is such a constant that Patrick Brantlinger has written a history of such rhetoric called Bread and Circuses (to be honest, the book is a little disappointing – wink). Seeing the past clearly (and not solely through the rhetoric of decay or nostalgia) is tough, and thus the importance of liberals’ annoying questioning of the uses and value of the past in today’s world.

Competing visions of the past recently re-emerged in the controversy about Confederate statues. Supporters of these statues usually argue with H-words (“heritage” and “history”). Someone has said, “When you hear the word ‘heritage,’ it always means ‘bad history.’” (Clearly a liberal talking there.) There was an uptick in Confederate statues and the use of the stars-and-bars on flags during times of racial unrest, and so these markers of “heritage” have a clear but coded message in the way they repurpose history for contemporary purposes. History has its usefulness in the present.

The controversy over statues is about who we commemorate and why, not about history. No one is asking that we erase the books written about Robert E. Lee; they are arguing that we stop commemorating the action of rebelling against the government to promote the continued enslavement of black people. Heritage necessarily whitewashes.

Both left and right tend to cherry-pick from history. On the one hand, Michelangelo and the modern economy; on the other, protests and the poor. One difficulty with conservative cherry picking is the temptation to think that history is over, that we have accomplished the goals of the civil rights movement or worker’s rights, and now we should just move on. Liberals, to this way of thinking, are too obsessed with race, gender, class, and the Sixties. It’s counterproductive for us to dredge up the difficult past. Let’s move forward.

The standard liberal reply is William Faulkner’s classic “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” And thus the weirdness of the conservative’s relationship to history: they advocate that parts of our traditions should remain alive and well while discounting the past’s full influence on the here and now. History for conservatives alternates between being really important and not important at all.

Liberals can’t help but note that “let’s move on” also means “let’s ignore how conservatives in the past opposed crucial progressive changes that are now widely accepted” from the minimum wage requirement to Social Security to voting reform for women and African Americans. Conservative pushback on such initiatives often emphasizes the possible unintended consequences of change, and it often foregrounds the frightening possible outcomes (economic or social) of a new program (and fear, as I noted in a previous blog post, is a particularly dependable touchstone emotion of the right).

Yes, conservatives are correct: there are always unintended consequences, which (by definition) can’t be predicted. But liberals would rather be on the side of change rather than not trying anything and thus avoiding unintended consequences. For liberals, we’d rather try a new solution than do nothing. For conservatives, doing nothing is not a bad thing because trying new things can do more harm than good (a political repurposing of the Hippocratic oath).

True enough: change CAN do more harm than good. But that argument can be raised about any new idea or program. If you emphasize how frightening the unintended consequences (economic, social, whatever) can be, you’ll never implement any change. If you want a guarantee that a program will do exactly what it hopes without causing collateral problems, then you would never start any program. Avoiding all unintended outcomes is a recipe for the status quo. Which is not a bad thing for conservatives because they are designed to be a voice for preserving the status quo (or at least returning to a version of the status quo in the recent past, whether that’s Reagan or Eisenhower or even Hoover).

Forgive the extended flashback into history (or our attitudes toward it), but my argument here is that our differing visions of the future (and the means we trust to get us there) have much to do with our different relations to the past. Our understanding of the past and its value shapes our decisions in the present.

It’s hard to imagine a purer distillation of American conservativism’s relation to the past than “Make America Great Again.” It acknowledges the nation’s superiority but then suggests that’s not so true right now (because libs have been mucking it up). It locates that greatness in the indefinable past (but not so far in the past that it’s out of memory). Let’s go forward by going back.

Nor can one imagine a terser call to arms for liberals than Obama’s “Change.” Change to what? From what? Such details matter less than the need to change what’s wrong.

Here’s where liberals have an obvious advantage in the culture. Every advertisement in our consumer world tries to convince you that buying a new and improved thing can give you a new and improved life. Virtually every narrative is about how characters change for the better. There are few novels and films about staying the same; change is the basic material of drama. Morals and mores necessarily change. No wonder conservatives feel that their values are under attack; the cultural cards are structurally stacked against them.

The other rhetorical awkwardness of the conservative appeal is that Republicans can become the “party of ‘no.’” Instead of being able to argue forcefully for what they want to do (“so what IS your alternative to the Affordable Care Act?”), conservatives can more powerfully assert what they don’t want to do: no more taxes, no more regulations, no more immigration, no more Obamacare, no more expansion of Constitutional rights, no more new forms of gender and sexuality, no more having to worry about what pronouns to use. That is their job, after all, but it’s not a particularly sexy one. Our society has a prejudice toward those who build new things; demolition is not nearly as glorious a job. And thus need to anchor the conservative appeal to when America was great (as opposed to a strong affirmation of the ongoing “American experiment,” which is necessarily open-ended and exploratory).

Again, here’s where an understanding of the yin and yang of politics can be useful. We liberals can acknowledge that a shiny new program is usually tempting for us and that we need questions and opposition from the right to temper our optimism and shape better policy. Conservatives could recognize that their tendency to distrust the new can hinder the republic’s progress, that they need the questions and ideas of the left to move forward (not back into an all-too-imagined past). You need both an accelerator and a brake to drive a car.

So how would such a discussion move forward? Conservatives would need to address liberals’ questions seriously and not sneer at these concerns as silly or disingenuous or uselessly navel-gazing. What is good about patriarchy, or whiteness, or capitalism? What of these historical forces should we hold onto, and why? Are their advantages inextricably caught up in their disadvantages, or can they be separated? Are they worth the damage that they have caused? In spite of our idea of “progress,” there are always tradeoffs. The past wasn’t simpler; there were tradeoffs made (some good, some not so good). The same is true for the balance of stability and adaptability in our current institutions.

I’m in an interesting position here myself because I’m a political liberal who is personally invested in one our oldest, most stabilizing institutions: organized religion. I recognize that there’s an awful lot of bathwater here. I acknowledge that organized religion has been one of the most retrograde, violent, repressive, damaging forces in human history. And yet I still believe in the Baby. I believe in working from within rather than throwing the whole thing out. I believe that clearly seeing our past (both our collective sins and our collective glories) is vital to the process of living fully in the present and moving toward our future.

As I search for middle ground where liberals and conservatives can work together, it seems reasonable to ask what the other side wants. If each of us can understand what our political rivals desire, then perhaps be can more sensibly steer the conversation toward a mutually acceptable compromise, one where we all get a bit of what we hope for.

Before I look for an answer to my title question, it’s only fair that I hazard an answer about liberals’ goals. My late conservative father-in-law frequently harangued me about what he saw were the false end-goals for liberalism: the idea of “equality” and a belief in the perfectibility of humankind. (Bob spent a lot of time telling me that he didn’t think liberals had gotten over Rousseau and the Romantics)  He said that true equality was impossible, that people could not all be the same because they had different capabilities. Because of human nature, people would remain fundamentally flawed, and so it was hopeless to try to improve human interaction till we all join hands and sing “Kum Bah Yah.”

My reply was that I didn’t recognize these goals at all. I couldn’t think of a single liberal who would say that perfecting human society was achievable. Liberals believe that society can be improved, and incrementalists believe this change comes one hard-fought gain at a time, not through revolution (a more romantic and inspirational rallying cry, but revolutions are usually very tricky to implement). But just because perfection is impossible doesn’t mean that we should short-circuit our efforts to improve the lot of humanity.

Nor did I accept that talk of “equality” meant that people were literally the same (in fact, we’re the folks who are talking about cultural difference all the time!). Equality didn’t mean uniformity (either socially or economically). I suppose Bob could be forgiven for mistaking talk about “redistribution of wealth” to mean that everyone would receive an equal parcel of wealth (though discussions of a universal basic income do veer in this direction. Many liberals have too much in their 401(k) to support a fundamental equalizing of capital). We liberals often emphasize “equality,” but that may need a bit of elaboration to explain ourselves to conservatives.

This portion of my discussions with my father-in-law went nowhere because Bob kept accusing liberals of having goals that I didn’t recognize or accept. I learned from this exercise in frustration that if this dialogue is going to proceed, both sides should start with a version of liberalism/conservativism that that the group itself recognizes. If liberals tell conservatives what conservatives think (or if conservatives do the same), then the entire discussion becomes about whether that label fits. That may be a discussion worth having, but it’s not a discussion that can start us working together. I suggest that as a working hypothesis we should begin with a self-description that liberals and conservatives recognize.

My modest proposal is that Bob just needed us liberals to use a few more words. Utter equality isn’t the goal. I assert that goal for liberals is equality of opportunity. (Since it’s my blog, I get to speak for all liberals here.  (wink)  )

Equality of opportunity would mean (in part) counteracting the structures that make opportunity unequal: poverty, racism, sexism, and others. I want to emphasize that these are social and economic structures with long histories. It’s not simply a matter of changing people’s attitudes, though that’s part of it. Although Americans love to reinvent themselves, histories have weight; they’re hard to change quickly. And so rather than pretending that everyone exists on a level playing field, we acknowledge that everyone is not equal when it comes to the opportunities provided by birth. You can’t judge the race to success by who crosses the finish line first; you have to acknowledge that some people’s starting line is much further back than others.

And so working toward equality of opportunity can look like treating people unequally in the here and now because we’re looking at them as people with histories, not freestanding individuals without context. It may require programs targeted to help poor people gain life skills that middle class people gain for themselves along the way. It may require family leave policies that allow women a longer period of absence from the workplace. It may use affirmative action, Head Start, and summer programs to open up educational opportunities to those who may not recognize that such opportunities exist for them.

I’m not necessarily advocating any one of these policy suggestions (the advantages and disadvantages of policies always have to be weighed against each other). I’m simply making the point that a slavish adherence to “equality” of treatment in the here and now looks different from the idea of equality of opportunity that acknowledges we all have a history.

The list of pseudo-policy suggestions I just made is pretty slanted toward economic opportunity. We’re so conditioned to think fiscally these days that we forget that citizenship is more than just being a consumer. The government has impact on our lives beyond taxes and spending. When I say “equality of opportunity,” I also mean equality of opportunity to access the full range of the government.

This would include equality of access to justice. We all know that the justice system looks different if you have an expensive lawyer as opposed to depending on an overworked public defender. If we talk about being “equal before the law,” then some of us are more equal than others.

This would also include equality of access to policymaking. Lawmakers hold hearings to gather perspectives on policy, but often the only people invited to those hearings are technocrats who have an interest in shifting the policy in an economically self-interested direction. Lobbying also requires money to gain access to decisionmakers, and so well-funded interests have a stronger voice in shaping policy. Equality of opportunity would mean opening up those channels to influence how laws are made and enforced.

You might say this is liberal pie-in-the-sky thinking to believe that money can be counterbalanced, and you would be right. I have no illusions that the justice system will ever treat poor and rich people equally or that lawmakers will ignore special interests with deep pockets. Having money always is an advantage. But just because true equality of opportunity/access isn’t impossible doesn’t mean that this is an unworthy goal. That’s what makes it a goal. We don’t throw the concept of justice out simply because it’s an unattainable ideal. It’s an aspiration that we can work toward one step at a time.

I apologize for the lengthy sidetrack into what liberals want (at least my version of that), but I do think it’s useful to make your goals legible to the other side. If I ask conservatives to articulate their goals, I should be able to do the same for the left.

There’s a fairly standard conservative “wish list” that would include: smaller government, lower taxes, a stronger military, fewer regulations, a pro-business stance, and a return to established values. My first question would be: are these directions or goals?

That may seem like a fairly academic difference, but I think the distinction has ramifications. Let’s say that conservatives successfully advocate for increased military spending in a given budget cycle. Do then they ask for another increase the next year, and another, and another? That depends on whether they think of a stronger military as a goal or a direction. Do they have an end result in mind — a particular vision of the military – or is military strength a never-ending direction, something that can always be improved on? Negotiation proceeds differently in these two scenarios. If I can picture your desired goal in a negotiation, that helps me in working toward an acceptable compromise. Negotiating with someone who always wants more military spending or more tax cuts is a very different thing.

The person who always wants more is someone who believes their politics pursues a direction, not an endgoal. And even that person can work within the system for the benefit of all if they believe the opposition is honorably doing the same. You can think of the opposing political party as a countervailing force that acts in the opposite direction, one that will always be there, dependably exerting pressure. In this scenario, you can advocate all out for your side (cutting regulations, cutting taxes) knowing full well that your opponents will provide a check on your advocacy and that the resulting policy will end up somewhere in the middle. In this conception (liberalism and conservatism as directions), both sides depend on each other to temper the potential excesses of the other’s rhetoric. Both sides at least implicitly acknowledge the value of the opposing view to make better policy for all.

The difficulty arises when single-direction politics believes its own excessive rhetoric, that things would be better if they had full control. That can lead to a wartime mentality where the opposing party becomes an obstacle that should be eliminated. A certain amount of the politics of elimination is inevitable in elections when the cry rises to “throw the bums out.” But an “everyone who doesn’t agree with me should be thrown out” mentality doesn’t work for the negotiations of everyday politics. Now that the cycle of election/re-election rhetoric is almost constant, I worry about the politics of elimination holding sway over the politics of compromise and reasoning.

One of the reasons I’m asking the fairly abstract question about goals vs. directions is that if we explicitly acknowledge conservatism/liberalism as a direction, we can explicitly acknowledge that we’re in this together to balance each other’s excesses. That seems like a productive framework for understanding the function of both sides.

Libertarianism has always seemed more understandable to me than conservativism because of the basic simplicity of libertarian philosophy. The libertarian goal is straightforward: to maintain as limited a government as is necessary to guarantee the welfare of its citizens. And so you get lefty libertarians who are interested in getting the government out of our bedrooms and righty libertarians who advocate budget cutbacks. I’m not a libertarian (I don’t have that much faith in enlightened self-interest to solve the problem of the commons), but I understand what they’re after.

Conservativism has always seemed more convoluted to me. “Let’s be fiscally responsible (except when it comes to military spending or cutting taxes).”  “Let’s cut back on regulations (but increase them for those receiving ‘entitlements’ and keep regulations of private behavior).” The various appeals seem to pull against each other. A better understanding of what conservatives want would help liberals to see how these initiatives work together.

You’ll notice that I’m avoiding the hypothesis that the tie that binds conservativism together is racism. I’m not saying that that’s an invalid hypothesis; I’m just saying that for my purposes here, it’s not a useful one. Remember that I said that I wanted a definition of conservativism/liberalism that those groups would accept about themselves. While there’s an important conversation to be had about race and conservative policies (and I will take up race as an issue later in this blog), I don’t believe that conservatives are going to accept/acknowledge racism as a central tenet of their politics. That would be a long and painful conversation to have. I’m trying to find a working hypothesis that will allow us to move forward together. Part of the challenge of my question is to give conservatives the opportunity to explain how their various interests make sense without recourse to racism. Otherwise, conservatives would certainly leave themselves open to the charge that racism (and fear/hatred of the “Other”) is the glue that binds their politics together.

Helping us liberals to see how conservatism coheres around a goal or a direction would also help eliminate the other strongly negative hypothesis that circulates about conservatives: that they are interested in nothing but power. Of course, all politics involves power. If you eliminated the political figures that were interested in increasing their power, there would be no one left in the room, left or right. But there is a difference between gaining power in order to better serve your principles versus a raw power grab. Some on the left think that conservative politics is motivated primarily by the lust for power. This belief is so widespread that it circulates in our entertainment, as in the movie Vice when Dick Cheney asks, “What do we believe?” only to be answered by Donald Rumsfeld’s raucous laughter. We have reached a point where many liberals believe that conservatives seek nothing but power, that there is no basis in principle beyond self-aggrandizement and self-benefit.

I do not believe that is true.

If it is true for individual political figures, if they have been seduced by power and transformed into cynics, then I don’t believe that most begin that way. My sense is that most people enter politics out of a combination of conviction, ego, and hubris. I don’t see why or how you would seek a lifetime of abuse without some version of all three. And if that is true, then there is some core of conviction in the most cynical politician. Finding and connecting to that is a road forward.

If conservatives can help liberals understand what conservatives really want, this would take away the basis for liberals to believe that conservatives are interested in nothing more than self-serving power. It seems all too easy in these days of political mistrust for us to assume the worst. Understanding what the other side wants would help restore a bit of humanity to our politics.

My recommendation for how to begin your new year is to take a holiday from a political emotion.

I’m not suggesting that emotion is bad for politics or that it is necessarily counter to reason. A lot of my scholarly work has been about how emotion and cognition can work hand in hand. But the left and the right have particularly tempting emotions, and if these become dominant – if they become part of your everyday stance toward the world – then they can hijack your political attitudes. (One thing I’ve learned in my scholarship is that emotions have inertia. They tend to self-perpetuate; if you are feeling down, you tend to seek out parts of your environment that confirm that emotional stance over and over. That’s part of the power of emotions.)

If you’re on the right, I suggest taking a break from anger. If you’re a liberal, may I suggest a holiday from sanctimony.

I recall watching Jon Stewart soon after George W. Bush had taken the White House along with a majority in both the House and Senate.  The Daily Show showed a speech on the floor of Congress in which a Republican was spewing vitriol, which caused Stewart to ask, “What is he so angry about? They control the government. Who is he mad at?” Anger had become such a common stance among the Republicans that it continued even when the opposition had been politically defeated.

Anger is a terrific motivation to marshal the troops. Beginning with abortion and the Moral Majority in the 70s and continuing through focus on immigration in the most recent election, the Republican party has gotten very good at finding trigger issues that anger and mobilize their base to go to the polls. It’s easy to get hooked on the righteous rush of political anger.

But anger is not so helpful when you’re trying to work together to run a government.  The difficulty is being able to pack that oh-so-useful anger away when getting down to the ordinary business of building coalitions and crafting legislation. When anger becomes a habitual stance, it feeds itself in ways that are counterproductive to basic governance. I suggest that conservatives take a holiday from anger so that they can recognize how much of a habit that emotion has become.

For liberals, I recommend taking a break from sanctimony (yes, I realize that sanctimoniousness is more of an attitude than an emotion, but I’m sticking to it). My experience has been that conservatives find a liberal’s holier-than-thou attitude to be infuriating.

As sins go, I think that sanctimony is not such a bad one. After all, being holier-than-thou at least means that you’re aspiring to some moral high ground. But it really seems to rankle many Americans, perhaps particularly conservatives who feel they’ve been painted as immoral, racist, unfeeling. Even if liberals do believe that conservative policies are immoral, a sanctimonious tone is hardly the way to convince conservatives of their error. Self-righteousness feels great, but it’s a cheap sensation, and the person on the receiving end recognizes how unearned that superior air can be. It tends to provoke a defensive reaction, the exact opposite of a productive dialogue.

This doesn’t mean that I believe we should give conservative policies a moral pass. Far from it. But I think that if we on the left want to do more than make ourselves feel superior, if we want to establish bridges and move forward, if we want our moral charges to be heard, then we need to find a way to talk slowly, compassionately, and without condescension about moral issues. Take a break from sanctimony, and see if that has become a too-easy prop for your own ego.

So historically speaking, sanctimony and anger are long-term temptations for the left and the right. And yet I wonder if we liberals haven’t been learning the wrong lessons from conservatives lately, if we haven’t been adopting a bit of the anger they’ve displayed for years.

Anger no longer feels like quite the same distinguishing characteristic that it did a decade ago. Lately many of us liberals seem to have adopted it almost as much as conservatives have. The temptation to anger is considerable, and, as I said, so is the political payoff. But unbridled anger makes civil discourse almost impossible. I believe that we on the left cannot abandon the great hope of the Enlightenment, the idea that we can reason with each other and convince each other through argument. I am not ready to throw that intellectual and political heritage away, to sacrifice it on an altar of anger, in spite of contemporary evidence to the contrary.

In such matters, I look to Martin Luther King as one of my patron saints, and I encourage both liberals and conservatives to do so (MLK belongs to all of us; he’s history, not just black history). If anyone deserved to speak in anger, if anyone felt disenfranchised, it’s a black person in the 60s. But how did MLK publically express that anger? Through moral language that was forceful without being dismissive, through action that was peaceful and public.

Certainly very few of us today have the same claim to anger as King did; how then do we rationalize namecalling and insults as justifiable expressions of anger? Maybe we need to take regular holidays from our default political emotions. I recommend New Year’s Day; maybe the next scheduled one should be Martin’s birthday.

As I mentioned, one of my academic research fields deals with film and emotion, and recently I had the privilege of hearing one of the most famous emotion researchers (Joseph LeDoux) speak at my university. For somewhat technical reasons, LeDoux said that he will no longer talk about “fear responses;” instead he will talk about “threat responses.” Anger and fear are both responses to perceived threats; the latter is an avoidance response (fleeing the threat), the former an approach response (encouraging us to attack the threat).

One might say that this is just an academic rearranging of words, but it started me thinking about how perception of a threat is crucial for fear and for its cousin, anger. If we focus on political opposition as threat, that leads to fear and anger responses. It leads to a siege mentality that encourages us to think only of eliminating the opposition, not working with them. Perhaps the key to taking a break from our habitual political emotions is to recognize the danger posed by thinking of political opposition as threat. I encourage us all to take such a holiday.