I’ve been trying to write this post for months, but I just don’t feel like I know enough to tackle the topic. (And if you’re thinking that’s never stopped you before, well, um, yeah). But I'm about to sign off for a month or two (more on that in the next post), and this is the one thing that keeps coming up when I think of things I want to say. I'll just warn you that I don't have a coherent argument here, I've only got -- as usual-- some things I've been thinking about.
As someone who leans left but lives in a decidedly conservative state, one of the few things I feel I can legitimately offer here is some insight into how "normal" people in the so-called flyover states think-- not the politicians or the influencers or the opinion people or the writers of click-bait headlines, just the normal, everyday conservatives who live down the street from me or shop at the same stores or play with me in the community band.
If you also lean left, you're unlikely to hear from those folks. Our increasingly segregated online life has shunted them off into their own world, just as it has shunted us off into our own lefty world. For people on either side, it's hard for us to imagine that a decent, thoughtful person would have the opinions that those on The Other Side have. We assume they must be evil or ignorant or something. Because of course anyone who had any decency at all would agree with us.
One time I heard in the space of about ten minutes a person on one side saying our president is evil, and then ten minutes later on my phone, our vice president calling another politician evil. I'm not going to weigh in on the question of whether or not a human being can truly be evil, but if there are evil people, I'm pretty sure there aren't very many of them. Most of us believe what we believe, and our opinions are reinforced by hanging out with people who agree with us, and the rest of it is just trying to get through the day.
So having said that, it seems to me that there is a very important conversation we’re not having, that we could have, if we could remember to curious and interested instead of instantly judgmental and critical, and that is around the question of morality.
I don’t think that liberals, particularly over-educated liberals (*cough* like me) realize the extent to which they are damned (sometimes literally) in the eyes of conservatives by the perceived "immorality" of the left. Among the rank-and-file conservatives I know, this is the #1 reason that they have done the "hold your nose and vote for the current president" thing. They may not like him, but it's better than what they see as a slide into moral decay.
I know. You are already formulating the million reasons this is ridiculous, as I did. But I'm not writing this so you can tell me how wrong I am (they are), I'm writing this to try to get you to see how we are inadvertently making things worse by the way we talk about certain topics.
The first time I realized this was even a problem was about ten years ago when I read a comment attributed to a well-known conservative pundit saying words to the effect that “of course” liberals were immoral. I think "of course, liberals have no moral core" was the way it was worded.
I was so surprised by this that at first it refused to compute. Liberals are immoral? There had been a recent high-profile scandal of some democratic politician having an affair, but there have been plenty of republicans who have had affairs—that’s hardly a party-line difference.
In my mind, the conservative tendency to sell out to business interests, creating a version of capitalism that causes money always to flow upward to those who already have it, was far more immoral than anything I'd seen from liberals.
It has taken me years to tease out what this might mean, and honestly I think most liberals have no idea how strongly this figures in the current rank-and-file conservative disgust with liberals. We want to dismiss their fears as prudishness, nothing but homophobia or transphobia or a prurient reverse obsession with sex. But that's not giving them enough credit. It’s more like an abhorrence of what they see as a slide into "anything goes" morality, a type of moral anarchy, a lack of respect for social norms that they see as holding communities and families together in a positive way.
A small example-- if you’ve ever been a part of a close group of families and one couple gets a divorce, you know that divorce has a community effect. It's not just two people doing what's right for them and the world will roll merrily along as if nothing happened. We've been involved in that situation twice over the last thirty years, a group of families with kids of similar ages who do all kinds of things together, including camping and vacations-- until one couple splits up, and both times our friend group was never the same. (Although neither can you stay together only for the sake of your friends. This isn't a simple problem. There's always a balance.)
This idea that liberals are morally depraved is daily, repeatedly, constantly reinforced (and also exaggerated) by the conservative press and a zillion other online sources. But it has to be said-- we aren't helping anything by the way we talk about issues around sex. We may say that "anything goes" between consenting adults, but do any of us who are parents no matter what our political beliefs want our adult children (male or female or fluid/trans) in situations like that frat party at Cornell? Are we helping the public conversation around sex when we carelessly refuse to admit that maybe there should be some guardrails, some caution, some care?
And yes, I know, you can insert here my long-held anger at conservatives who balk at sex education in the schools, the place where conversations about safety and dealing with predators and party drugs and etc could happen, especially for kids whose parents aren't capable of providing that information at home. This isn't simple. It isn't an either/or conversation.
It seems to me that conservatives' idea of "morality" tends to cluster around sex and sex-adjacent issues. The reason that I was so surprised by that pundit's comment when I first read it was that it completely ignores entire swaths of moral issues that are, honestly, more important to me than most sex-related issues—rapacious greed, lack of care for those less fortunate than ourselves, feigned ignorance about climate change (in the service of profit), lack of justice for the oppressed and downtrodden.
On those issues, liberals aren't immoral at all. Morality isn't just about sex. But on the other hand, other people's beliefs are their beliefs, and we can’t tell them it's ridiculous to believe that, YOU SHOULDN’T BELIEVE THAT, and dismiss the issues that are important to them as non-problems.
I don’t know the answer to this. I probably haven't even explained myself very well. But it’s not a topic that I hear being discussed, and it needs to be. It needs to be something that we address, because it’s a large part of the wedge that drives the two sides apart. I mean, at least we could have a little respect for their deeply held beliefs.
Yeesh. I've been working on this post for days and I'm pretty sure I still haven't said quite what I meant to say. Maybe there will be a follow-up. Have a good weekend.
Related: Summer Fun, Had Me a Blast
