MAY 20, SATURDAY

LIBERAL PERSPECTIVE ON MAGA VALUES

Yesterday I tried to see from a MAGA perspective and was left realizing that their perspective made sense. But of course, from a liberal perspective their perspective doesn’t make any sense at all. From a liberal perspective MAGA people are trying to return to a glorious agrarian past that has slipped away while the world is hurtling into a future in which technological change is upending the old way of life and forcing our values to change as we try and adjust to a very uncertain future. From a liberal perspective this attempt to return to the past or to hang onto it is pointless and can only end in disappointment and further anger.

But back to my attempt to deal with this. Two things seem clear to me. Liberals have to listen to MAGA people and empathize with them and their rural values. There is much in their traditional values that is a bedrock for moving forward into the future. Freedom and individualism is a central cultural value for all Americans. A tension between big government and individual freedom is a cultural tension for all Americans. The importance of rural agriculture is important to all Americans. And all Americans have to deal with the threat of secular values and science to religious values. We all yearn for something fundamental which is lost when religious fundamentalism erodes. We are all, as Americans, in this together and to remain strong and properous we have to somehow find a way to bring rural traditional values and urban liberal values together. Both sides are right but in different ways because they are going in two different directions. We have to find ways to bring them together. If we are going to be strong and healthy we have to compromise the two sides, not insist on one or the other. We have to hang onto what gave us identity in the past and have to open ourselves up to a technologically changing world with changes of values forced onto us. And the way this seems possible to me is to first step back and distance ourselves objectively by understanding both sides of our polarization and secondly by lowering the heat through trying to empathize with the opposite perspective. We most of all have to listen to each other and then see if together we can find a way out without threatening each other.