Norms are values systems
Left, right. Liberal, conservative. We reflexively map out political morphology in America as dichotomies. Us, them. Urban, rural. The problem the country faces as tensions build across the modern political divide is that the framework of the United States of America, flaws and all, is built upon a set of values the framers shared: self-evident truths, unalienable rights, a government built to promote justice, domestic tranquility, the general welfare, etc.
Even then, agreement was not universal. The colonies were home to federalists and antifederalists, slave states and free, colonial rebels and Tories/Royalists. Dahlia Lithwick and Michael Podhorzer imply that it was always thus, that the greater “We the People” never really shared those values, the same truths, or else did not view them the same way.
How left and right view governance today reflects the same contrasts. Donald Trump saw the Department of Justice as “his” to deploy against enemies. Joe Biden left the prosecutor investigating his own son in place. Attorney General Merrick Garland and special counsel Jack Smith “have taken elaborate care to keep Trump’s criminal investigation at arm’s length from the White House.” Why? Because “Democrats are virtuous and Republicans are hypocrites? Or that Republicans are strategic and Democrats are chumps?”
What if we never shared the same value systems? For that is what unwritten norms are. “So we make the mistake of assuming that MAGA voters and their leaders will at some point be persuaded to return to American norms which they never agreed to in the first place.” The problem is that that theirs are “radically different from the norms of mainstream liberal American democracy,” Lithwick and Podhorzer suggest:
Perhaps it is time to reconsider what we call a norm, and also to ask why we bind ourselves to ideas and values that are not shared. If the norms of democratic governance are not shared, then they are simply rules to which one side binds itself and the other does not. So perhaps instead of referring to all these soft rules and conventions and traditions as norms, we should more accurately refer to them as “rules to which we adhere and they do not.”
It’s emphatically true that if you cast these norms in that light, you begin to look like a chump. When one side is persistently priding itself on “going high” while the other side is already plotting the ways in which it can sink lower, one is forced to wonder whether following norms for their own sake is an end in itself. Maybe it’s just misplaced confidence in the moral arc of the universe. Instead of waiting for MAGA Republicans to come to their senses and embrace a set of norms of governance to which they do not adhere and to which they don’t want to adhere, it’s long past time we come to our senses and realize that their norms are not ours, and never have been. Thus, the stakes are not the preservation of norms, but democracy itself, and who writes the history of these times.
Lithwick and Podhorzer suggest that Americans, left and right, etc., despite lofty values expressed in the Declaration and the Constitution, never really shared a fully common set of values. They do not explore why.
George Lakoff maps the differences to holding some blend of his strict father (“A Boy Named Sue“) and nurturant parent views of the world. I’d elaborate that Lakoff’s strict father hierarchy comes out in people’s tendency toward, well, holding a Royalist’s view of the world. That is, there are those preordained to rule and those destined to follow, those who deserve to get ahead and those who deserve to be left behind. It is a cutthroat, Darwinist view and a capitalist one. The capitalist model, Marx believed, contains the seeds of its own destruction. His faith in the ultimate victory of the proletariat may have been unfounded, another “misplaced confidence in the moral arc of the universe.”
The framers began the Preamble with the words “We the People” purposefully. Perhaps they, too, overestimated at the founding the degree to which “we” share a common set of values and aspirations. What Trump and the MAGA Republican right have stripped away is any pretense of valuing the general welfare or of governing in its service.
Capitalism may be the unseen foundation, the unstated premise, upon which the framers erected this experimental nation. Capitalism’s contradictions are fundamentally at odds with their dreams of realizing human equality in a more perfect union. Just two days ago, I proposed that Trumpism “represents the triumph of the profit motive (monetary and personal power) over government stewardship.” The right’s governing principle is not democracy, but “What’s in it for me?”
Selfishness is a bad look even if it is what you value.