Watching the headbutting at the impeachment hearings of President Trump these last weeks, the glaring contrast between what passes for the Left in America these days and what passes for the Right became so obvious it was almost forgettable. But then we were brought back to reality when President Trump, with perfect mistiming, went after America’ poorest citizens. And it’s then that we caught a glimpse of the real differences in the 21st century between liberals and conservatives in our country.
In a move that Common Dreams pointed out is what “cruelty really looks like,” Trump and his people are busily making a starvation list of some 800,000 Americans – right at Christmas time – that they deem undeserving of food stamps. That amounts to more than all the people who live in metro Albuquerque dumped brutally deeper into penury.
The justification? Restoring “the dignity of work to a sizable segment of our population and to be respectful of the taxpayers who fund the program,” according to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue who announced the cuts last week. Childless and able-bodied people from 18 to 49 will be denied access to food stamps if they don’t meet the work requirement of 20 hours a week for more than three months over a 36-month period.
Trumpians, and conservatives in general, assume that people who aren’t meeting that requirement are somehow gaming the system, are too lazy to work, are unfit for public assistance because of some kind of moral failure. But what if they just plain couldn’t find the work, lived in areas of high unemployment and bad public transit, or belonged to less favored classes and races than the more well off? What if they were just down on their luck, or depressed, or had lost a spouse, a child, or had a series of mishaps that left them too poor and tired and run down to look for work? What if they didn’t know how to cook for themselves and were so malnourished they simply didn’t have the energy to leave the house? Has depression and bad luck become a death sentence in America?
And how the Sam Hill is this going to help taxpayers? Am I going to be paying less taxes because of this draconian savagery? Don’t make me laugh. We’ll pour what pathetic savings there are into waging more unconstitutional wars or spend it cleaning up after polluting industries who privatize profits and socialize costs.
This is where the schism in American life is the most apparent. It’s all about two diametrically opposed views of human nature. And there’s really no way out of it except annual political oscillations moving power fretfully back and forth between both views. This is no American dialectic where a thesis and antithesis resolve into a synthesis. This is just the way our country is and has always been.
Conservatives feel human nature is basically flawed and untrustworthy. They view human beings as deadbeats, spongers, lazy parasites in the making, with no inherent sense of honor or self-reliance if they belong to the wrong class or race. Those who succeed in life, they feel, are few and far between, and they should be rewarded for their competitive cunning and ferocity. Thumbs down, more or less, for all the other “losers.” It’s not just a dog eat dog world, it’s a world in which superiority has no obligations other than to maintain its advantage. If you can’t compete, well tough and so be it. Money is virtue, and you ain’t got any. This view has been expanded to include non-combatants, the “collateral damage” of children and the elderly, and women who can’t get anywhere in a world rigged to prefer males. Conservatives hold that there is a natural hierarchy in the world, and those who rise to the top have it coming it to them, as if the wheel of fortune was tilted in their direction. Luck likes them because they are better by nature. The reality of “the commons” and the “common good” is a fantasy to them. They see natural resources as there for the taking and the environment itself as a mere idea designed to thwart their aspirations and projects. There’s no such thing to them as a fair share.
That’s the kind of thought process that goes into stripping almost a million hard-up people of food stamps, as if, in the grand scheme of things, they really didn’t want to work or be responsible for themselves and self-reliant, as if they really wanted to be destitute. To think otherwise, conservatives contend, is to be hopelessly naïve, like the liberals who oppose them.
The liberal view of human nature is summed up in one equation. It’s better to let some cheats slip through the system than to brutalize hundreds of thousands of innocent people because they can’t find work. It’s the same logic that says it’s better to let a few guilty people dodge penalties than to imprison or execute one innocent person. Liberals believe human beings have inherent value. If you give anyone a fair chance, as a general rule, they will try to do and be their best.
Liberals understand that we have absolutely no say over who our parents are and into what circumstances we are born. They know that some people have overwhelming advantages, through no virtue of their own, advantages that they exploit at the expense of those who are not as lavishly graced by class, race or gender as they are. Liberals believe that human nature is not inherently flawed, that all things being equal, most people’s best efforts should be quite enough, in a fair society, to earn them a good living and a comfortable life. They see as inherently flawed a social system that allows a few people to make vast amounts of money with virtually no “work” at all while millions of others must slave 80 hours a week or more just to make ends meet.
And liberals believe in the words chiseled in stone over the portals of the U.S. Supreme Court, which read emphatically “Equal Justice Under Law.” That sense of equality extends to voting rights, rights of citizenship and equal rights for all genders.
The default positions for liberals are equality and cooperation. The default positions for conservatives are freedom and competition. Most Americans lean more one way than the other, and most of us struggle to reconcile both views within ourselves. When push comes to shove, though, most American revert to form, to the dominant liberal or conservative impulse within them. This is when politics becomes something reminiscent of a team sport where winning is the only option.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
(Elephants and donkeys from photos by the Boston Public Library)
Wow. Yes. Sadly. I’ve been reading George Lakoff for years, now, and you’ve hit his/the nail on the head. Current neuroscience research and the field of Cognitive Science have shown your analysis to be grounded in fact. That said, I was born into a family with strong Conservative leanings. Over the years I’ve moved strongly and unambiguously into the Liberal camp. Let’s hear it for neuroplasticity! Also: my family lived, and instilled in me, certain core values that seem not to have changed during that evolution. Perhaps there really is hope for deep, common ground? I don’t know, but I hope so.
It’s clear that liberals need to break this logger jam by, among other things, reaching higher than their default position. I think one of our serious problems has been that “liberal” now defines someone who is simply willing to play defense, to do as little as possible to appear different from conservatives. We need a much more creative offense or this absurd–and dangerous–political game will play itself out to the detriment of all humanity.
Thank you Barrett for this brilliant article.
So well said!