Common Conviction

A recent Wall Street Journal article offers some new insight into the polarization of American politics.  It cites, with some dismay, a series of experiments suggesting that “The human brain in many circumstances is more suited to tribalism and conflict than to civility and reasoned debate.”  The best antidote it could find features TV ads portraying candidates and voters of opposing parties in “good faith effort to understand someone with differing views … but [those] effects diminished over time.”    

The impulse to partisanship was described by one researcher: “If my party loses, it’s not just that my policy preferences aren’t going to get done … it’s who I think I am, my place in the world, my religion, my race, the many parts of my identity are all wrapped up in that one vote.”  This effect adds up to make partisanship a psychological “Goliath” to any reformer’s “David,” in another researcher’s words.

One question that a reader of that article might raise is: how do people decide to describe their identities?  If the topic is politics, is there an unconscious default in American minds, that limits identities to two opposed choices, left or right, Democrat or Republican, red or blue?  Is there some implicit assumption we carry that the two poles define the landscape?  Do we see two and only two fundamental and immutable sides?

The question may be worth testing; the consumer of mainstream media coverage might be excused for seeing this bipolarity as our image of political normality.  

A reflection shows the limits to this image.  It portrays politics as a tightrope, a wire between two towers where the only question is how far the tightrope walker is from tower A, and how close to tower B.  But any tightrope act occurs in a big circus tent; any line between two points exists in three (or four) dimensions.  Why do we let two points define the possibilities in our political universe – and thereby in our civic identity?  Especially when those two poles are made up of career politicians focused foremost on besting the other? 

Is such a limited conception of our political landscape necessary?  The two poles are human constructs, not geological features.  This blog maintains that America does have an independent, ante-political, bedrock.  

The bedrock is the language in which the nation conceived itself in 1776.  The Declaration of Independence introduce itself as the explanation of a “people,” as it dissolves its bonds with another.  It only names this people as “we,” who hold certain “self-evident” truths, of unalienable rights equally endowed in all persons, and of government created for the purpose of “securing” those rights.  No other unified expression of the British colonies had occurred before the Continental Congress.  No other definition of the new nation was offered later, unless one counts the insistence on states’ rights to nullify federal law, which underpinned the Civil War’s southern confederacy.  And the preamble to the Constitution actually echoes the terms of the creed, so affirms, rather than replaces, the creed’s definition.

On the creed’s bedrock, political differences will arise over the inevitable disagreements over vested interests that any polity will face, perhaps couched in divergent interpretations of the abstract creed’s tenets.  But it offers a common identity to all Americans, in fact borne out in the language the two parties invoke – insisting that “my side’s” rights are ignored or neglected by the other, never getting caught actually disputing the creed’s tenets.  If more of us see this creed as our true bedrock, then for more people, “my party losing” does “become just that my policy preferences aren’t going to get done.” 

If the “human brain is in many circumstances more suited to tribalism than reason,” can a reason-based tribal identity enable more civil debate and campaigning?  As Americans we can name that identity.  If we revise our idea of politics to make that our first allegiance, we might be able to defuse our polarized paralysis.