How are Americans supposed to make a more perfect union when we can’t agree on whether we need to turn our cultural clocks forward or backward?
This question is among the more difficult that people can pose to their fellow countrymen. Not just because it has no obvious or easily agreed upon answer, but because it’s more likely to be asked during contentious times, like the one we are in today.
Part of the answer is self-evident. Despite our differences, displays of petulance, and occasional brawls, Americans are still working through them.
The state of our union may be further from perfect than it’s been in a while, and our mood more dyspeptic than chipper. All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, we aren’t close to painting ourselves into antagonistic corners as we did in the 1970s, when we last had a serious reckoning over our past and the kind of people we wanted to be in the future.
Our differences today, however expansive, overstated, and disposed toward violence we may be in addressing them, are not as unbridgeable as we make them out to be. This essay deals with the liberal and conservative values Americans call upon to sharpen our differences but also use to soften them so we can push on together.
These days, we are waving our values in each other’s faces harder than we have in a while. What we don’t recognize, much less credit ourselves for, are all the ways we bring liberal and conservative values together in the most important parts of our everyday public lives.
The partnering and self-conscious reconciling of liberal and conservative values is most often seen in our politics and how our government works. There is a good reason for that.
Not having as much history together as their English and European forebearers did, Americans 250 years ago had to distinguish the kind of people they aimed to be from the ones with whom they had just parted ways. The words they used to explain and justify their parting were laid out in documents like the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution and its amendments. Added more recently was The American Creed, which was written in 1917 to win a contest on patriotism.
These are all political documents; the values enumerated in them are politically inspired. High-sounding and abstract, they laid out the liberal and conservative sides of principled arguments Americans are still having about their politics and how their government should work.
Samuel P. Huntington’s view of The American Creed, to take one notable example, extolled the virtues of both liberal and conservative values. Americans supported minority and majority rule, liberty and equality, and individualism and democracy.
He did not see these values set against each other so much as a logical complement. Talking out our differences using principled language made our disagreements sound more civic-minded and public than personal and self-serving.
An unheralded feature of our virtue-signaling political statements is what they don’t cover: the civic-minded values built into other important ways that people act in public every day.
Liberal and conservative values are every bit as important to the way that shoppers and investors give expression to the twin promises of orderliness and prosperity that are foundational to a bourgeois civic culture. They are apparent in the way businesspeople make such displays possible. And they are practiced by people organized around their religious and ethnic identities who show how the world need not dissolve into displays of irresolute nastiness, because they figured out it was alright to be alike in some ways and different in others at the same time.
The liberal and conservative values practiced in each of these arenas differ, but are no less complementary than those brought together in our politics and government.
These other community venues are not immune to problems of their own making that governments and politicians were disinclined to touch. Governments have other questions to address that are closer to their core concerns and are legally resolvable. Economic inequality was one of those persistent and nagging problems, perhaps the biggest one, that they didn’t want to touch.
As political moves go, sidestepping this one was not as cynical as it looks.
Politicians and elected officials found ways to work through some of the inequality that women and black people had long experienced. These people became protected classes whose diminished social status was redefined as a legal issue affecting their rights as citizens. Stretching their legal protections into the economic realm – covering anything that might affect a woman’s or a non-white person’s standing as a wage earner or homebuyer, for instance – was more difficult. For many conservatives, a conversational non-starter.
A new collection of “progressive” Democrats and “Democratic Socialists” is finding just how hard it is to define people’s unequal economic status and grossly unequal wealth as legal concerns. As much as they might try, people’s economic prospects are not easily tied to their citizenship. It’s not illegal to be poor or unwealthy.
Economic inequality affects everybody. It is thoroughly “baked” into the way communities are organized, politics is played, and our government works. Furthermore, anything politicians might do to change people’s economic fortunes would be hard to square with ideas about personal liberty and freedom, which would include an individual’s “right” to have more money and spend it as they like.
The matter of their unequal economic prospects aside, early Americans thought they had a bigger problem than their neighbors' economic standing.
Owing to the variety of people who settled here first and all those who came later, Americans were much more concerned about our “cultural” differences. It was harder for us to see how individuals from so many disparate backgrounds, races, and religions might be brought together as a united people than it has been to accommodate differences in their economic prospects.
Apart from making newcomers and outsiders citizens, finding ways for people from different cultures and economic classes to come together or see each other as equals has been a moral enterprise in the United States.
From the early 19th century onward, our moral crusades sometimes played out as reactionary campaigns to return us to a time when our differences weren’t as obvious or were more easily ignored. And sometimes they played out in more progressive campaigns where people demanded and got a chance to share more of the privileges and rights that had once been the exclusive “property” of higher-status men and women.
People with better social pedigrees didn’t give up these privileges easily or happily, even in part. That is why so many white people and men today are pushing back and trying to reclaim bits and pieces of their lost privileges and public status. Their aim is to return America to a time when they ran everything.
The larger problem in turning to governments for solutions to everybody’s “issues” is that the number and variety of people clamoring for public attention and accommodations might grow and has grown dramatically. The result is that our civic culture has become more divided and contested than it has been in many decades.
Crusading reformers today may want to bring their cultural fights to a more conclusive liberal or conservative-friendly end. But that’s not going to happen, because our custom of bringing liberal and conservative approaches together to address our differences makes ideologically cleaner solutions impractical and unsustainable.
The bad news for people who sympathize with more progressive ideas is that Americans are unlikely to ever become as equal as they want us to be.
The bad news for people who find reactionary ideas more appealing is that Americans already are more culturally alike than our ancestors ever imagined possible.
The surprising and very good news for all of us is that the liberal and conservative values we use every day have kept our culture together better than our economic, political, and legal differences have pulled it apart.
I can live with it.
We all can.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.
