Progressives Aren't the Only Ones Who Care
Centrists, Libertarians, and Conservatives can be just as earnestly idealistic
You might have seen The Politician, a Netflix Original created by Ryan Murphy and starring Dear Evan Hanson’s multi-talented Ben Platt. It’s a pretty neat and weird show, full of backstabbing, hilarity, and some nice and crazy performances from legendary actresses (Gwyneth Paltrow, Jessica Lange, Judith Light, Bette Midler) that bring the show to life. It’s an absurd show that tries to skewer politics and often succeeds, but also often ends up being so absurd it severs from our politics altogether (which is fine, since it’s still insane and fun to watch even as the viewer may be left truly nonplussed). The thing is, the show is preachy. Even as he engages in the cynical behavior of old politics, taken to absurd new heights, Payton Hobart is a charismatic(-ish) standard-bearer of progressive values. The environment, in particular, receives quite a hearing. Conservative and libertarian values are hardly entertained — I think the closest the show gets to including Republicans is the inclusion of Payton’s horrible ‘brothers’.
This got me to thinking about a common problem. When it deals with politics, entertainment – and I exclude conservative talk/news shows in this title – goes progressive. The young people of this country can’t but be progressive, right? If they’re actually idealistic? Idealism, by which I mean an uncompromising sincerity and care about social and political issues, thus becomes synonymous with progressive values. In pushing progressive values (see also The Good Doctor, One Day at a Time, Grey’s Anatomy, and a host of other shows), perhaps this synonymity of idealistic youth with progressivism is a strategy to more convincingly pull on the heartstrings of older Americans, more removed from young people’s idealism, and get them to vote that way, too. Maybe youthful idealism’s synonymity with progressivism is nothing but reality — look at Exit Polls. Maybe the two phenomena feed each other.
So I guess my question is…what about the 31% of voters aged 18-24 who voted for Donald Trump? Hell, what about the 43% of voters aged 25-29, who voted for Trump? Is that 31% constituted of cruel, heartless people? Has that 43% already forgotten what compassion is? When one hits 50, is one simply cursed with lack of empathy?
I don’t think this is an uncommon narrative. And with all due respect, I dissent.
If you look at the exit poll data linked above, you’ll notice that the overall change in the percentage of people voting for Trump is 21% — from 31% in the 18-24 category to 52% in the 50-64 and 65+ categories. But notice that if we exclude 18-24 year olds, the percentage change is only 9%, from the 43% of voters aged 25-29 to the 52% of voters aged 50+. This change is less than the jump between the 18-24 and 25-29 groups. Thus, this theory seems plausible but not terribly dramatic. The biggest shift, indeed, is from 18-24 to 25-29. Must the reason for that shift be loss of idealism? It seems no less reasonable a hypothesis to suggest that people in the 25-29 category are simply more grown up, and more pragmatic, and that this pragmatism may well be as or more valid than the young group’s idealism. Does pragmatism exclude empathy? What if it’s not pragmatism at all that (some) people gain as they get older, but a different approach to the issues that seems less idealistic but is, in fact, only a better solution to a problem one still cares deeply about later in life?
Data is always tricky, as are terms. So I’ll move onto the better question: Does voting Republican exclude empathy?
Because I do think there might be something to idea that young people have empathy. I just don’t think that empathy need be embodied by progressive politics. In fact, I think it might be perfectly reasonable to claim that people in the 18-24 category are simply naive, and haven’t come to understand or fully consider the range and nuance of issues in politics.
I’m biased. When I was 16, I was pretty much a democratic socialist. I figured there was no way the market could help facilitate equality, and that it was the role of the government to step in, forcibly reduce income inequality, and initiate spending programs reliant on an increased and more progressive taxation that would help continue the war on poverty. Income transfer seemed not to be an injustice; I couldn’t fathom government inefficiency or inefficacy. I never questioned the narrative on climate change; if 95% percent of scientists said global warming was a thing, global warming was a thing and it was going to destroy the world within virtually the blink of an eye. And when we were presented with racist violence and police misconduct, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd, Brionna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and more, how could we not feel outrage?
It seems horribly unromantic, but the truth of the matter is, a lot of young people don’t think super clearly. Our brains are still developing while we’re 18-24, and life experience for us is (in general) almost by definition less than it will be for our older peers, especially when they’re already 30 and older. Young people are more rash and impulsive. Think about that quotation so often misattributed to Winston Churchill: ‘If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.’ I have a hard time understanding how someone who hasn’t done a deep dive into the issues, taken a few economics courses, spoken to people with a variety of moral and political perspectives, and sees the horrible things happening in our world, wouldn’t want to take action, or wouldn’t want to see our government, the government that represents our interests and is supposed to contribute to a more just society, take positive steps against the horror. I’m not saying every young person would feel this way. But think about it. Compassion alone would suggest hope that a superhero might swoop in and stop the horror: end income inequality, end poverty, end hunger, end horrible wars, end police brutality, end mass shootings.
These reasons are certainly why I was drawn to Bernie Sanders and other progressives. I cared most about income inequality and the weakening of American manufacturing and the middle class. Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown speak directly and seductively to that issue. With them, it seems anyone who takes a different position is simply promulgating the interests of evil, rich, businesspeople and corporations. Theirs, by their account, anyway, is the only solution.
But what if I had been raised in a different household? A household where my parents shot guns, weren’t wealthy, lost a meaningful portion of their income to the federal and more local governments, saw relatively few returns for their tax dollars, and still got hit by an implicitly regressive tax in the form of inflation?
What if, for that matter, I’d read Bjorn Lomberg instead of (or in addition to) Al Gore and Greta Thunberg? What if I put stock in the notion, learned in my basic microeconomics class, that environmental policy, like any policy, requires tradeoffs and has an equilibrium that doesn’t involve completely upending everything we do in order to avert a problem that possibly isn’t as clearly etched in stone as Greta Thunberg and her acolytes seem to think?
What if we more vigorously encouraged critical thinking in young people, made sure people were more aware of different nuances inherent in virtually every political issue, and facilitated a sharper and more inclusive political dialogue? In this circumstance, given different psychologies, preferences, and values, it would seem likely that politics would balance out a bit more than they do at our age. True, they might not resemble the politics of the elderly, but is it even clear that age alone makes one more conservative or close-minded? The issue, much like gun control, crime and punishment, economic policy in general, and even something like abortion, is likely more nuanced than that.
Thus, two considerations before my final point:
First, I don’t mean to say that all conservatives aged 18-24 are far more thoughtful and nuanced than their progressive counterparts. Not at all. Rather, I suggest that it’s quite possible that there’s a similar knee-jerk (I mean that with love) reaction to the catastrophes of the world coming from a more conservative approach. As many likely read the Huffington Post, Mother Jones, The Young Turks, and/or other left-leaning sites, and allow those views to give voice to how they feel and think instinctively, so, I’m sure, do others consume the National Review, Breitbart, and good ol’ Fox News and do the same. Here, I simply ask: Why would they be less idealistic? Weird as it sounds, it’s not necessarily not idealistic to say that the government can’t afford to give poor people more money. They might make the point that the government technically doesn’t have any money, and takes the money from people, including among whom (under current rules, anyway) are poor people. They may not have a solution, but that isn’t necessarily because they don’t care in some larger, existential sense — they probably just haven’t thought the issue through. They might claim charity. They might even claim self-reliance. The individual isn’t the worst fallback, and the unthinking youth of the right, as inhumane as a claim of “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” might seem, don’t deserve to be dismissed as unfeeling. They’re most likely just guilty of being unthinking.
Second, I do think nuance has a tendency to take us farther away from extremes. In my case, I realized that there was much more at play, in pretty much every issue, than I’d once thought. Since I was 16, my political philosophy and approach to issues has been evolving, as I take in more information, points of view, and grasp more nuances. Some people are probably quicker than me, and figure their political philosophy out more easily. These political philosophies will probably be all over the map. Mine, as it turns out, is fairly classically liberal, perhaps leaning ever so slightly to the right. But I haven’t lost my idealism. I still care about the issues — I’ve spent huge amount of time thinking about abortion, let alone going back and forth on education, guns, criminal justice reform, et alia – I just have different solutions, informed by more knowledge and, well, more thinking — than I did when I was 16. The process of nuance, crudely put, can lead us in different directions, but it need not dissolve our idealism.
Final point: having attended Brown University and been deeply engaged with the center and right-leaning political communities, I can honestly say that the college population is very, very engaged on political issues. We do care a lot. We are idealistic. We aren’t content with our broken healthcare system or failing education system, and we worry about the environment. It may well be that this concern and unwillingness to throw up our hands at it all are particular to youth. And I’ve met people at the center and on the right who display ‘knee-jerk’ ideology and others who display ‘nuance’. People in both groups are idealistic, and care: One of my good friends from Brown, squarely in the nuance camp, is a libertarian passionate about education reform and gun rights. He’s also passionate about reducing deaths from gun violence, and he despises most war. His solutions will be different and better-considered than the vast majority of his peers, but it is easily apparent that he cares just as much, or possibly even more, than they do.
After all, isn’t (desperately) seeking nuance a sign of caring, and an idealism, in thinking that what we think, say, and do, matter?
I’ll conclude with another TV show: The Newsroom. The show begins with Will McAvoy (played wonderfully well by Jeff Daniels) declaring that “America is not the greatest country in the world. Not anymore.” He cites statistics, among others, showing how poorly we’re doing on healthcare and education, and how many incarcerated citizens we have. American prosperity is in decline.
We should care about these statistics, as he suggests, and not merely fall back on ‘freedom’. (Though I daresay he and his writer, Aaron Sorkin, are wrong that America isn’t exceptional in how we guarantee freedom). We should care about prosperity. The thing is, you don’t have to come to Sorkin’s – or Sanders’, or Brown’s – solutions to care about these things. We in the middle and on the right do care. We just have different solutions, and in some cases, I think that makes us more concerned, and more idealistic, than our counterparts on the left.