The importance of resisting all political extremes

Which side of the spectrum people belong to is, to a large degree, shaped by their innate personality, and then secondarily by the environment they find themselves surrounded by. So you might have someone born into a fairly conservative environment but who has a more liberal bent to their personality. I don’t think that means they have to belong to one party or the other by necessity, and there used to be more room within the parties. You could be part of the more liberal wing of the conservative party that pulled it back from some of its excesses. You could be part of the more conservative wing of the liberal party, that spoke and pulled from within to curb some of its excesses. And we needed those people.

But at some point people started sorting themselves way harder and way more effectively, possibly because of changes in technology. In fact I would guess in large part because of technology and its ability to accumulate and aggregate across a wide spectrum. It also allowed the most extreme elements within parties to gain greater traction and exposure than might have been possible in a more usual and mixed community such as occurs more naturally in society (and one where your ability to work with others and be reasonable was more necessary for success). It’s easier to make people into a mob, thanks to technology.

So that’s led to a period of gradual purification. Both through conversion, convincing people that they really should align themselves more closely with the ideological ideal of purity, and forcibly, by shaming and casting out anyone who resists. And as the extremity of both sides rises, both sides become more and more justified in their arguments that there’s a clear extreme threat from the other side that requires a deliberate response, a wartime attitude. They become more and more right that we need to draw the ranks together and man the barricades, expunge the traitors, resist the enemy.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whether the enemy was really there or not in the way we imagined in the beginning, they ertainly will be now. If you keep saying that the other side is the enemy and needs to be defeated and there’s no room in society for them, and the reasons that compel people to be part of that group are at least in some degree fundamental to who they are, then you’re declaring war on them personally, not merely their ideas. And they won’t give in without a fight. If you don’t leave any room for people to legitimately stand, you compel them to fight for their territory. There has to be room for a legitimate conservative perspective. And there has to be room for a legitimate liberal perspective. There has to be room within those parties for a legitimate mixed perspective.

Not everyone can be some perfectly balanced, idealized moderate. Most people are going to be who they are. Biology itself seems to divide up the burden of keeping society balanced by spreading different qualities among different people. A more guarded person here to fill that niche, a more open handed person here to fill that niche. It’s time for us to learn to appreciate one another and realize that we actually have a need for both those roles, because the world is complex and changeable and dangerous and wonderful, and so are people. We need soldiers and we need teachers. We need artists and we need engineers. We need judges and we need advocates. And a society that embraces one and expunges the other isn’t being fair or honest about humanity or about the nature of the world, and eventually it will come back and bite them when the right (or wrong) circumstances roll along. You’ll be wishing you had kept those people and valued their work.

And I believe this human diversity transcends specific political structures or ideologies. You can find these influences, these attitudes and values, in every society, large or small, in every different country in every different time period. They take different forms, have different flavors and manifestations depending on the culture and environment and history. Sometimes things are working well. Sometimes everyone is racing to make their contribution, and there’s enough space provided that everyone is able to make it.

The way you ride a bicycle is to wobble effectively. There’s no such thing as riding in a single, perfectly uniform line, one perfect angle. The way you learn to ride a bike, and the reason strider bikes tend to tech you better than training wheels (which create artificial stability through limiting movement), is by learning to love with and control the wobble. You learn the balance the swing between opposing forces and sides, you learn to balance them against each other to make forward momentum possible. If you give too much to either side, your movement will be lateral, instead of forward, and a crash to either side will end up looking much the same, whichever way you take it.

The best riders have learned how to use counterbalance to keep those opposing forces in their proper tension. As the road comes to meet you, as it changes, as the curves and bumps come to meet you, sometimes you need to lean harder on one side to get through it and then return to equilibrium. But imagine the impossible task of a rider who has decided, ahead of time, that there will never be a legitimate need to lean to the right, or to the left.

The brilliance of the American system of government is that it pays respect to the potential for benefit and for disaster in differing approaches. It hamstrings the effectiveness of both sides, puts obstacles in both their paths, that limit the possibilities for either side to achieve complete dominance and so pull the whole structure over. It provides opportunities for both sides to (in a safe, limited, defined way) antagonize each other. Checks and balances. No one gets quite what they wanted, because the founding fathers were very skeptical of such a system. It didn’t seem to fit the structure of reality and of humanity.

So they tried to create a system that reflected the actual challenges and complexities of life and society, the struggle, the pull back and forth, the need for adaptation and cooperation. In some ways their system was less idealistic than that of other revolutions, since it didn’t really come down on a single formula for one way of arranging things, some magic bullet that would usher in utopia. America is founded at least partly on the idea that it’s not always safe to actually give people what they want. If everyone of one sort got exactly what they wanted, it would actually hurt everybody, them included. It was in everybody’s interest to get a little less than what what we instinctively want.

There’s also an optimism to this approach, an optimism that by everybody getting a little less than what any of us want, we might all as a whole get a lot more of what we all want. That maybe, just maybe, there’s some value in our acts of balance and cooperation and compromise that will make us all stronger. That in being restrained we will actually be come better, stronger, more fulfilled versions of who we want to be than if we were allowed to have our own way. There’s an implicit optimism that, with the right institutions that force us all to live with such compromises, we won’t all just get frustrated and try to kill each other or go our separate ways.

That’s a real possibility, after all. If we’re too divided, too different, leaning too hard either way, the mechanisms we’re trying to ride forward might not be able to handle the strain. We might tear them apart in our struggle for control. And that might be where we’re headed today. If we’ve truly lost confidence in the idea of forward momentum on this mechanism that forces us to balance, if we’re convinced the only real solution is to pull the whole thing to our side, then the ride is over. Instead we’re in the position of two toddlers playing tug of war over a tricycle, trying to see who can sieze it for themselves. And the most likely result is two crying toddlers, one of whom is holding a broken tricycle.

Breaking a mechanism of transportation like a fine bicycle is the work of a moment, and anyone can do it. Building one, putting one together, is much harder, and not everyone can do it. That’s why, whatever your persuasion as a rider is, it’s worth conserving the value of the thing that has brought you as far as you’ve come. That doesn’t mean you might not have ideas about how to improve or steer it, and have good arguments for those adjustments that will help it navigate the road ahead successfully. But the mistake is in thinking that you’ve got all the ideas, all the insights, all the vision, the one true path to forward progress, and you don’t have to share the vehicle with anyone else whose steering and ideas are in conflict with your own.

That’s where the American system pushes back. It’s more optimistic about others than we are, and it’s more pessimistic about ourselves. That makes it slow, awkward, and cautious when it comes to seizing control of the mechanisms. It makes the process schizophrenic, as control vascillates between one side and then the other, each trying to pull down the other’s achievements and drag things back to their control before being flipped the other way in a few years. And, frankly, that’s the price our faith in the mechanism demands from us. That’s the beauty and power of it. In its bloody, blinkered frustration and hassle and restraint and inconsistency and beauracracy. That probably sounds like a kind of madness, and maybe it is. But it reflects the madness that is what humanity and life are actually like. It’s a system as crazy as we are.

The solution to the problems that life presents us with, if you’re working inside the American system, then, isn’t political control. Increased power would only lead to increased potential for dysfunction. Instead, success is dependent on each of us being the best version, the best representative, the most productive and balanced and able to communicate and reason and work effectively with others, version of who we are.

We don’t have to be everybody and everything. And we aren’t. Thinking we are is one of the worst mistakes we can make. And what a relief it is to discover that we don’t have the carry the whole burden of totality in ourselves. We just need to be the best version of ourselves. The most educated, cautious, controlled, well-meaning, dedicated, humble, invested, understanding, courageous, generally virtuous version of what we are. Whatever our personal bent is, we need to be the most adult version of that thing.

And we need to recognize that there’s a version of that that we need from the people who are different from us. We need the best version of them. And each of us don’t have a monopoly on being virtuous, only a specialty in being the best version of us.

This, then, is the beginning, the foundation, for a theory of how government and society could work. It’s the idea behind the American constitution. And it’s the reason I feel obligated to oppose the extreme, the unbalanced, the childish, the unvirtuous, wherever it rears its head, whether on the right or the left. I’m a slightly more middle of the road person than average, myself, with a personality split down the middle of the Enneagram personality abyss. And I grew up as a disruptive and liberal influence in a conservative environment that I nevertheless deeply appreciated and was invested in. As such, I’m doubly vulnerable, because I have a propensity for the mistakes and errors of both sides, and I can double reinforce my own failings on top of themselves and tip myself into pathology from both angles.

The one great advantage of being a person who shares both the weaknesses of liberals and of conservatives is that it’s easier see when both sides are making the same or complimentary mistakes because I can find both errors so easily within my own heart. I can see the reflection of my own worst self in their arguments. I am constantly and forever falling off one side or the other, making one set of mistakes, then the other, failing to listen to one side, then failing to listen to the other, going stupidly too far with one criticism, then going stupidly too far with the other. I have thoroughly proved my failure and deligitimized myself and committed grave errors from both angles. I have called both sides idiots and the enemy that needs to be defeated. I have taken too much for granted that the side I was defending had all the right angles. And, like America itself, I’ve become afraid and untrusting of myself, lost faith because of my mistakes, feared my own excesses, lost faith in the mechanism, been afraid to go forward, and been afraid to value or give voice to the different sides of me because of where that’s gone in the past.

In a way, it’s the battles we fight with ourselves that are the most important, not the battles we fight with others. The battles we fight with what we love matter most because that’s where the greatest difference really lies. Between the great and terrible versions of who we could be. Maybe I’m wrong, but I often feel that the greatest differences between us aren’t the differences that lie on the surface between groups or classes like race or nationality, but are instead those that lie within them, in the differences between individual people. The differences of personality and temperament that emerge across all groups of any significant size, whether a family or a nation. And I wonder if there is a deeper place where the true differences are even greater than these differences of individuals within groups. The difference within a single individual, between who they could be and who they choose to be. That, I think, is where the greatest gulf of all lies, in the ability of a single human heart and mind to turn this way or that way, to give in to its easiest impulses or give rise to its greatest aspirations.

Is it perhaps, as MLK speculated, in our character that we differ most? And if that is the case, is it not also the case that it is within ourselves that we share the most? Is it not in our common struggle with our own natures, our desire to be the better version of who we could be, that we are most united, as well as divided? And is it not in our individual differences as people within a group that we are more united than we are by our belonging to a surface class?

Difference and similarity, I believe, exist at all these levels. And all are significant. All matter. All contribute to sympathy and to antipathy between us. The widest, most obvious differences and similarities exist at the shallowest level, but seem large because of the ease with which they can be identified and collected in our minds. It takes a much deeper knowledge of a person to even begin to discover the second layer. And it requires true intimacy to discover the third. Where we often go wrong with people is in trying too hastily to assign understanding we have not truly earned on one level based on understanding on another. Just because you know I part of this broad group doesn’t mean you know me as a person. And just because you know what sort of person I am doesn’t mean you know what I’ve done and what I could do and could be.

I wouldn’t say that such leaps aren’t all unreasonable, and they’re often very necessary, since there are limits to how much we can know and how many people we can know it about. I only think that we can benefit from remembering that these different levels exist and that it’s worth being humble and cautious about how easily we feel confidence in assigning one judgment at one level based on work done at another.

What we really need is wisdom. And wisdom isn’t a function of which group you’re part of, who you are, or even how smart you are. There is small wisdom and great wisdom, there is wisdom that was arrived at slowly and bought with great personal pain, as well as innate and inherited wisdom. I believe wisdom is a matter of finding some echo of the balance within that we seek together without. It’s those small ways in which your own wobble comes close to the center of tension, where the harmony of interlocking and balanced complexity finds fulfillment in our own divided hearts and minds. I believe the process we seek to enforce to produce wisdom without must be the same as the process by which we find it within.

As for myself, I’m not exceptionally clever or exceptionally virtuous. As I said, I have a proclivity for being wrong in enough different ways that it’s just a tiny bit easier for me to see it going wrong in both because I see both going wrong in myself. And so I find it in me to both love and struggle with both liberal and conservative viewpoints.

The fights we make with (not for) what we love and identify with are the dearest to us, because they’re a fight for who we want to be, a fight for being the better or worse version of us. I have a terribly hard time not hating Trumpist conservatism, because it takes something I love and makes it into the worst, least defensible, least understandable and loveable, least helpful version of itself. I have a hard time not hating woke, postmodernist, politically-correct cancel culture because it squanders and subverts the value of liberalism. I want to inhabit a better version of conservatism. I want to inhabit a better version of liberalism. I want them to be the versions of themselves that help and complement and balance one another. I want to be able to step safely into and out of one or the other without getting trapped or thrown out or entangled in solisistic extremity. I want a common virtue of humanity that stands across both.

And I have to believe that it still exists. Its time may be running short, the window may be closing. The movement of humanity may be away from it. But it’s still possible. What we might need to suffer to learn the lesson of its value, if we can’t remind ourselves soon, I don’t know. Unfortunately, I’m not a very courageous person. I’m afraid of both sides. I’m cynical. I’m lazy. I’m not really doing my part to ensure a better tomorrow. But there are better people than me, on both sides and in the middle. Seeing the worst extremes of both sides in myself can make me feel more cynical that I really should.

There’s still hope. Plenty of people are abandoning the extremes for a more moderate, if still divided, middle. And it should be divided. I’m not saying there aren’t things that should be opposed in any political vision. Sometimes you need to fight the other side like hell. And sometimes you need to be willing fight your own side too for its soul, so it becomes the best version of what it could be. What we need to rediscover is the best way to oppose one another in a way that keeps us moving forward and not falling over.