A consequence of extreme political polarization is that people are punished for acknowledging a good idea if it comes from the other side. When people sort themselves into political tribes, finding something to admire in the opposing tribe doesn’t get interpreted as open-mindedness—it gets interpreted as treason.
This threatens to strangle our society’s capacity for self-improvement, because it perverts the process by which good ideas are distinguished from bad ones. People in a polarized society assess an idea by asking who proposed it, instead of what comprises it. If it came from an “enemy” group, the idea is bad. Humans exercise this sort of bias all the time, but a highly polarized society encourages it by turning it into a virtue.
Conservatives should take the left seriously—not just because it will improve the marketplace of ideas, but because their base is practically screaming at them to do it. The most recent generation of Republican congressmen, including outgoing Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, advocated Reagan-style economic policies that their voters don’t want. Republican officeholders have compensated for this rejection by waging a culture war that harms the country and does little to help struggling workers in red states. Trump’s election (and persistent popularity) is a signal that these voters don’t want free-market orthodoxy—they want protection from the dislocations of globalism.
The left has perspectives and ideas that the right could mold or incorporate into their agenda. Here are three of them.
Equality of Opportunity is Elusive
When the 15th Amendment guaranteed blacks the right to vote in 1870, many thought that equality of opportunity had been achieved. Republican congressman and future 19th President James A. Garfield proudly noted that the amendment “confers upon the African race the care of its own destiny. It places their fortunes in their own hands.” Garfield, like many politicians before and since, was underestimating exactly what it takes to achieve real equality of opportunity.
Conservatives believe passionately in equality of opportunity. They idealize a society in which individuals are judged on merit alone—the classic formulation of the American Dream. While people may differ in their abilities, justice is done so long as the government ensures that all have equal rights and suffer no formal bars to advancement. The rest is up to the individual. Most Republicans therefore attribute poverty to lack of individual effort or discipline—often failing to recognize factors beyond an individual’s control that render equality of opportunity elusive.
The truth is that children born to poor parents face obstacles to achievement that require exceptional—and unequal—effort to overcome. Poverty forms a social ecosystem, shaping the psychology of children raised within it. A key social lesson absorbed by a poor child is that the world is a hostile place and other people can’t be trusted. Only 18 percent of people who describe themselves as “struggling” economically feel that other people are generally trustworthy; for the well-off, the figure is 50 percent. This low-trust worldview is well-adapted for fending off enemies, but it is extremely maladaptive for the kind of personal risk-taking necessary for upward advancement. Investing time and money in ventures like education and job training requires trusting that the world will reward you later—yet everything about living in poverty teaches the opposite. To get ahead, poor people have to reject social messages that wealthier people never encounter in the first place.
As if that weren’t bad enough, the debilitating effects of poverty operate at the neurological level. Research abounds that poverty impairs the cognitive development of children by drowning the brain in toxic stress hormones, reducing the volume of gray matter essential for cognition. Early intervention has been shown to arrest these inhibitions, but many poor children aren’t lucky enough to receive it.
Contrary to stereotypes about urban living conditions, access to opportunity increasingly depends on your zip code—and many of the most disadvantaged zip codes are located in red states. Since 2010, rural areas have seen more businesses close than open. During the Obama presidency, every group of prime-age workers gained millions of jobs on net, except whites aged 25 to 54, who lost 6.5 million jobs. These are inhabitants of economic dead zones, whose life expectancies decline against a backdrop of strip malls and heroin. They’re the people Trump was elected to help. Supply-side policies do nothing for them, because they’re not interested in a bargain that asks them to trade the dignity of work for the opportunity to save at the dollar store.
Rather than pursuing tax cuts while casting moral blame on the poor, conservatives should passionately join the fight against inequality with their best ideas: Funding successful nonprofits, incentivizing work through wage subsidies, turning faith communities into hubs for upward advancement, and restoring the “middle layer” of institutions between the individual and the state. Such contributions provide a vital check against the left’s tendency to favor top-down solutions to poverty, many of which have ended in disaster.
Be Suspicious of Power
For much of the Middle Ages, Venice was the richest place in Europe. It got that way because of a competitive system of maritime trade based on freedom of contract between mariners and investors. That system produced a lot of wealth, but soon enough the richest merchant families decided that they’d rather entrench their gains and put an end to competition. In 1296, they imposed the Serrata, or “closure,” which replaced freedom of contract with an exclusive system of monopoly by the large merchants, and restricted membership on the governing Great Council to members of those same families. That system lasted for 500 years, successfully defended by conservatives loyal to it even as it strangled Venice’s prosperity and reduced it from a great power to a historical footnote.
Conservative defense of the institutional status quo from change can abet the interests of actors who have already accumulated too much power—like the large merchant families of Venice. This results in “power bubbles”: When the power of some entity remains unchallenged for too long, it engages in abusive practices.
This is easy to see historically. Conservatives have usually committed themselves to a defense of the established monarchical or aristocratic order, insulating it from reform and critique. The results—whether in France, Russia, or Iran—were governing institutions that grew sclerotic, corrupt, and predatory. On the other hand, conservatives that were willing to accept some progressive changes to these institutions were able to thrive.
Luckily, skepticism of government is baked into American conservatism, because the institutions that conservatives seek to preserve include the libertarian principles of the American Founding. But conservatives can be strangely blind to the dangers of “bigness” in other settings, creating Venice-like parallels. Republican leaders have often been eager to aid in the concentration and rent-seeking of corporations and top tax brackets, and the automatic deference that the rank and file pay to church leaders, the military, the police, and other establishment institutions can breed unaccountability.
No institution whose power remains unchecked remains a good actor. Businesses that go unregulated form cartels and offload their externalities onto taxpayers. Churches whose clergy command reflexive moral authority commit and hide abuse. Mythologizing the military leads to destructive adventures. Too often, these behaviors are abetted by conservatives urging deference to power.
For example, current Republican policy orthodoxy gives corporations a free hand to pursue tax and labor arbitrage, strategies that achieve profitability growth by offshoring to jurisdictions with low taxes and cheap labor. This discourages investment in productivity-boosting technology and cheats the American public. Likewise, Republican voters should be mystified by their party’s embrace of a laissez-faire antitrust policy, permitting corporate consolidation that President Trump himself intuited was harming his base.
Liberals have a propensity to be skeptical of “bigness,” and that’s often been an effective check on these abuses. But liberal faith in government to execute the check blinds them to the government’s own rent-seeking. Conservatives would do well to adopt some liberal skepticism of powerful institutions, on the condition that liberals extend their own logic to the most powerful institution of all—the government.
Question What is “Normal”
The Jim Crow South was filled with conservative Christians, but very few managed to demonstrate moral leadership on the evils of segregation. When the Civil Rights movement arrived, most Southern conservatives deferred to their fear of change instead of subjecting their instincts to harsh review. They couldn’t answer what we now know to have been an easy question. Instead, they had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the right answer through outside intervention: court orders, Freedom Riders, and the National Guard.
Conservatism can often devolve into knee-jerk anger at change that feels painful or threatening. That response can prevent conservatives from rigorously analyzing moral questions that in retrospect had clear answers and contributes to conservatives too often finding themselves on the “wrong side of history.” It is a sobering truth that many historical injustices like torture, slavery, and the legal subjugation of women were (with some prominent exceptions) ended by liberals who could think outside of convention, over the opposition of those conservatives who clung to it.
But a note of caution is important, lest we think that the job of conservatives is to be dragged into the future by progressives: Conservatives play an essential role as gatekeepers, enforcing quality control on the ideas of progressives. As we know from evolutionary literature, the business world, and many other contexts, most would-be innovations are non-productive or counterproductive—while those that endure often do so because they have qualities that make them good and worth preserving. Hence, without sufficient vetting, checks, and refinement, interventions by well-intentioned social reformers can (and often do) cause great harm.
For generations, the leading edge of progressivism was Marxism and its watered-down variants, whose adherents were likewise certain that they were on the “right side of history.” Conservatives weren’t so sure. They successfully blocked the entry of these ideas into the American mainstream, for the most part, recognizing their incompatibility with basic human truths for which conservatives maintain reverence.
Conservatives must improve their quality control. Their moral failure during Jim Crow should loom as a constant reminder of the ease of getting it wrong. But our experience with Marxism should loom as a complementary reminder that without conservative quality control, progressives might very well lead us over a historical cliff.
