Why I am a liberal. It's our job. It's what we do. We own the vision thing.

Argh. This is long, but I can't bring myself to erase it. I've been doing some reading.

So, short version: Liberals, conservatives, and libertarians, we all share the same set of values but in different proportions. But we can't hear each other because we don't understand where we are all coming from, but we all need each other. We must learn to communicate. Culture wars aside, someone doesn't want us to play well together. And, yes, we probably can work past the culture wars. Liberals are the ones who figure this out. That's our job. It's what we do.

For the very long version, skip to the links at the end.

Intuitive human values thus identified are care, fairness, liberty, respect for authority, loyalty to group, and sanctity. We all share these, but what divides us is the emphasis we place on each one. Progressive liberals place primarily emphasize care, fairness, and liberty, seeing fairness as equality. Our strong ties to these three things define us. Also, we are far more open to new ideas and ways of seeing things than conservatives. That is our strength. Libertarians, classical liberals, focus on liberty and fairness, seeing fairness as not cheating and taking others hard earned stuff. Conservatives tend to place equal weight on all the values and see fairness as proportionality, you get what you deserve. It's a lot like karma. This is one reason parochial schooled Catholics can feel so guilty. Conservatives anchor cultures. Liberals tend not to understand the respect for authority and the sanctity of religion and religious precepts nearly as much as conservatives so we can tend to be more rebellious and destabilizing (surprise, surprise).

Understanding the importance of strong cultural and religious ties is something I had to work on. Things that bring us together in positive bonding experiences are important to people. Our valued institutions keep us open to community and more sensitive to the needs of others. We are facing a looming cultural divide that has been brewing since the Enlightenment. Many people of strong religious faith who are conservative and many classical liberals are at odds with many of these changes. We must understand their concerns and the underlying value that they have for us. They may have valuable perspectives for reaching progressive goals that we actually do need. Actions puzzling to us based on sanctity, loyalty, respect, and fairness rooted in personal responsibility seem to overshadow that they do care about people. They can care about helping the less lucky. Quite frankly, we really do need the liberal evangelicals for help here.

A huge hurdle is understanding that a person's primary decision making comes from the heart not from the head, intuitive not reasoned. That is one HUGE reason that liberal politicians have such an inability to communicate with the conservative mindset. But, they instinctively know what pulls our strings. Since many of us are not religiously devout and can be skeptical of authority, and we place individual liberty at very high value above sanctity and repect for authority, their use of reason makes sense to us. For us, individual liberty comes after the belief not to cause harm but well before religious restriction or familial respect. For conservatives, not so much.

Today's conservative messaging contains a confusing mix of conservative and libertarian views. Politicians who do this well manage to pull all of the value strings at some point. Libertarians who would fall in with us, but don't because of the "welfare state" boogyman. And the excesses of the welfare system in our recent past does give them some reason. Many policies were not well thought out and actually did cultural harm. The instincts were right but the research on cultural and psychological understanding was lacking. We are doing much better now. Good for us.

Happily, we all have learning curves. We need to communicate with each other. Conservatives and libertarians are not going away. Can we write them off? Not really. None of us have anywhere else to go. We need to learn how to get along. Winning an election or two will not fix things.

None of this speaks to the out of control growth of the large international corporations. They are the central problem we face. They are amoral and not accountable, really, for anything they do. Two things can help, coming together as an American people with a renewed vision, and demanding total transperancy from the corporations. Let's find out what all this really cheap "stuff", whether it's gas, t-shirts, or entrail laced hamburgers actually costs us. The corporations love to hide behind veils of secrecy, and they use pitting us against each other to avoid accountability. We have to come together to fix this.

Liberals are great and necessary people. We are more open to new ideas and experiences than conservatives and libertarians. If we don't start this, who will? There may be more of them than there are of us, but we have the vision thing. And that is the most important part. But, we are going to need a lot of help.


I'm not asking you to accept this on my say so. But you should give this work an honest look.

http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/

http://righteousmind.com

http://www.ted.com/speakers/jonathan_haidt.html/


I wrote this a few sessions, I hope it hangs together OK.