I spent my weekend in Cynthiana, Kentucky, a small town of 7,000 people located northeast of Lexington, Kentucky. As I spent time with the people of that town I realized how different, or rather, how similar those in the Blue Grass state are to mid-western Cheese Heads. While they may not wear unusual edible objects on their heads, the residents of this region of Kentucky are unbelievably loyal to their Kentucky Wildcat football team, which, not to be rude, is not that great. I’m reminded of the loyalty of the Cheese Heads to their beloved Green Bay Packers during the 70’s and 80’s where season after losing season was met with continuous sell-out crowds.

But as I read the post on riding in the moral Ferrari, it occurred to me that while Kentuckians are morally different than Wisconsites (I’ll let you decide which one is Berkeley), and any other state in the union, for that matter, there is also great moral similarity.

As I drove from Louisville to Lexington, the speed limit was seventy m.p.h., slightly higher than my own state’s, sixty-five. And yet, there on the side of the rode were numerous people who had violated that speed limit and been pulled over by the dutiful law enforcement. Cynthiana, being a small town, has more stop signs than stop lights, one of which I ran right through without even noticing it. I chuckled as I realized that I was in the middle of nowhere with not a car in sight, but later that evening as I was riding in someone else’s car I noticed that the driver stopped at that middle of nowhere stop sign, just as we do in Wisconsin.

It’s true, all of us, from whatever state, may not fully agree on the destination of the moral red Ferrari (see Dan Kelly’s earlier post), or the speed limit, or even the road (government vs. non-government, see Connor Ewing’s earlier post), but we do agree that there must be a car, a speed limit, with rules and consequences, and a road, regardless of which one it may be. While there may be those in philosophical schools somewhere in the world who claim that there is no such thing as morality, the very organization of our driving laws, the enforcement of those laws in our towns, and the value of undying loyalty to a team that gets beat by a lower level team, demonstrate that there is already a moral consensus in American life. Even this weekend as my wife and I enjoyed the use of cable in our hotel and watched HGTV, I was struck by the two gay men on the show who talked about adopting a child. We may not all agree on what defines a family, but we do all agree family is important.

Karen Rupprecht’s earlier post suggested that there is already a possibility of moral consensus on the local level, but I would also suggest that it is possible on an even larger level if we properly understand our task. We are not attempting to create moral consensus in a vacuum. Rather, we are attempting to build upon a foundation of moral consensus to create even more consensus, building on the idea that we all agree family is important to discuss what family looks like. That is really what the founding Fathers did when they wrote the constitution, even using words like “WE believe.” The American experiment is one of moral consensus, across religious, racial, and socio-economic lines. And that moral consensus, while more divided today than in Madison’s and Washington’s day, still exists. There is hope for American agreement on many of these issues because we already agree on much of the foundation. We may not agree with how we got there, we may disagree with what team to cheer for, but we do agree with the general rules of the game and the road, and can build from there.

The challenge is still great, but at least we do already have a starting point. Whether it be Berkeley or Branson, there is already some moral commonality to build upon.

Dan Kelly’s thoughtful post of the other day asked us to consider who it is that we expect to join our Ferrari ride toward renewed moral consensus, what issues we might agree on, and where it is that we’re going in the first place. He also mentioned that the answers to these questions would likely be different “if we are starting in Berkeley as opposed to Branson.” I agree. But I think we should have a closer look at those local differences, which seem to be a cause for moral dispute rather than consensus, because they might actually be key to figuring out both where we’re going and who’s going with us on this moral consensus road trip.

I was recently in, well, Berkeley for a conference on Aquinas (you read that correctly – Berkeley, Aquinas), but I took advantage of the trip westward to visit a dear old Peace Corps friend in the area. Peace Corps has a way of rendering small the ideological differences that might, stateside, prevent people from forging lifelong friendships. After all, when you’re all in the trenches of homestays with Berber families, away from running water, sanitation and the English language, even radically different political ideals seems fairly unimportant, and this friendship was no exception. Back to Berkeley. I was having a chat one morning (over our granola and hemp milk, naturally) with my friend’s boyfriend, who shares her political views, and while we weren’t discussing politics per se, we were at least complaining about the current American cultural and political milieu – and finding quite a bit of common ground in the process. Most striking was a moment in which he proclaimed with a great deal of conviction that “the problem in this country is that the states don’t have enough power.” Well now. It turns out, I wasn’t the only one in the room who thinks that federalism is a good idea and that increasing centralization is a bad idea, even if he wouldn’t put it in such terms. He, a progressive San Francisco artist, would like to see more variety in our American cultural landscape, and he thinks that centralizing power and dictating top-down legal and cultural norms from Washington is not the way to get there. Who knew.

But this is just one anecdote, right? Surely we can’t expect allies to appear in such unlikely places very often? Perhaps we can, or at least more often than we might think. Our nation is deeply divided at present; no one needs to point that out. But I suspect that in at least some ways, we’re not going to get past those rigid ideological divisions towards a more unified America by tackling the issues head-on. What I mean by that is that we usually can’t expect to argue anyone who is ideologically distant from us – and, let’s be honest, that’s a lot of people – into joining our moral stance(s) on family, church, and civil society. I don’t think that my Peace Corps friend, her boyfriend, or I would have budged very far from our respective positions if we had tried to do so. But my friend and I had lived and worked both with each other – and with people with even more radically divergent religious, cultural and political ideals – for two years in Morocco and yet, somehow, we were able to get some things done and cooperate on matters that actually required some measure of moral consensus, at least for the projects at hand. In other words, we might not all agree on what education should be, but when it came to getting a community educational center in the village, we could still come together for the sake of our local community, making compromises when necessary and actually working with people with whom we disagreed, often fundamentally. I suggest that this is because we were acting through face-to-face interactions, at a local level, rather than simply picking up the local details of a top-down, centrally planned project.

The same thing can be true here in America, and if my Peace Corps friend and her boyfriend are any indicator, Americans want it to be true, at least at some level. There are places for ideas and arguments (goodness knows I spend most of my day with them), and certainly there are times when decisions have to happen at the national level. Still, achieving moral consensus also – perhaps even primarily – requires real interactions and activities, not just debates, between people at the local level, working out actual problems concerning their own communities. Doing so will mean that there continue to be different ways of doing things in Berkeley as in Branson, but that’s precisely the point – those who want a Berkeley society can live in Berkeley, and those who fit better in Branson can live out their lives there.

This is overly simplified, of course; much of where we live and who we live with is given rather than chosen. But then again, if our local politics and engagements are allowed to have any real bearing on our lives, that might be a very good thing.

For anyone who watched more than a few minutes of the recent political conventions, a sharp distinction between Democrats and Republicans was in fully display. Democrats, it was widely remarked, looked like they were having more fun. They were smiling, singing, and dancing, and every crowd shot showed hundreds of devoted faces. In contrast, the Republicans were as staid as, well, Mitt Romney. This difference was not lost on the punditocracy, either. The days following the Tampa and Charlotte confabs were filled with reports of the excitement gap between the parties. The accounts differed but the observation was the same: unlike Republicans, Democrats are jazzed up for this election.

While there is certainly room to question the accuracy of this observation, I think it points to a deeper and more consequential difference between conservatives and liberals. More important, it is a difference that bears directly on the quest for any kind of moral consensus. It is a difference that threatens to stymie any attempt to seek the common good.

As I watched the speeches at the DNC, I too was struck by the intensity of devotion and the depth of passion of those in attendance. And I began to ask myself a very simple question: Why? Was there a reason for the apparent discrepancy between Democrats and Republicans? Was it mere coincidence? As I turned the question over in my mind I began thinking of other episodes that illustrated the same phenomenon, the gap between liberal and conservative political passion. (Being from a state that recently underwent a gubernatorial recall election—which was itself preceded by months of political organization and before that months of political protest—examples were easy to come by.) There was a drive for political power amongst Democrats that Republicans couldn’t even get close to mustering.

After thinking through a few possible explanations, I arrived at a beguilingly simple answer: It’s because they want it. That sounds unhelpful—of course they want it, that’s why they’re trying to get it!—but it marks a profoundly consequential difference between the two dominant political factions in America. On one side, the political left, there is a group that in order to pursue and achieve its goals must control the levers of power. When you want to maintain or increase funding for Planned Parenthood or enact marriage-equality legislation, mere representation will not do. You need majorities. And to get there, you need to win elections. So a political campaign is the kind of thing that will elicit a pretty strong response.

On the other side, the political right, there is a group that goes to great lengths to talk about limiting the reach of government and rolling back many of the powers the state has assumed. When you want to stop the expansion of government and seek progress outside of government, you are much less concerned with winning elections. Indeed, your primary motivation to engage might be solely to prevent the other guys from doing what they want to do.

There are, of course, several qualifications to this argument. For one, there are most certainly Republicans who are as (and more) power-hungry than Democrats. There are also aspects of the Republican agenda that, to be enacted, would require political control. And on top of this there’s a feedback process by which the agenda of any one party draws the other into a contest for power. Nonetheless, a fair reading of the parties’ platforms (Democratic, GOP) makes the difference clear. By and large, Democrats see government as the proper arena for pursuing common goals while Republicans see non-governmental spheres as the proper location.

I don’t want to be hyperbolic or unnecessarily polemical, so I assert this a contestable observation and not an accusation: liberalism in its modern manifestation is primarily a vision for government and is only derivatively concerned about civil society. Conservatism, on the other hand, puts great value on an independent civil society that delimits the scope of government.

So how does this relate to attempts to seek, or even discuss, moral consensus? As Dan has helpfully pointed out, among the central issues of the debate are the preservation of family, voluntary associations, and community. Whatever agreement(s) we reach will be characterized by a limited role for government and a correspondingly expansive role for civic society.

When we consider the different conceptions of government and society in liberal and conservative thought, we are thus confronted with two major problems. The first is procedural: how do we begin to discuss our problems when one side sees government as a necessary actor and the other side sees it as an impediment? Our discourse is heavily shaped by our respective commitments to how to best go about answering questions of common concern. The second problem is substantive: if we are able to get the discussion off the ground, it is quite likely that one side will propose governmental solutions while the other will propose non-governmental solutions. What are we to do when the conversation reaches this point?

There are many answers to these questions. And there must be if we hope to meet with any measure of success in our quest for moral consensus. While I hope to explore some of those answers in future posts, I wanted first to describe some of the challenges I see ahead. Is our little endeavor doomed from the start?

A voter in Zimbabwe’s rigged elections, 2008 (Reuters)

Jay Nordlinger, in a post entitled “We the People” (including quotation marks), argues that this election is finally placing a clear choice before the American people:

For some Republicans, it is never the people’s fault. I’ll tell you what I mean: If the Republican nominee loses, it’s always because he ran a lousy campaign. Couldn’t communicate. Made tactical blunders. Etc. I say, the electorate always has a clear enough choice. Sufficient information. . . . This year, the electorate has a very clear choice, not least when it comes to economics. . . . You can’t force people to save themselves, or their country. If they don’t want to — they don’t want to. In a democracy, people get what they deserve (or at least a majority does). Republicans often say, “The Left controls education from kindergarten to grad school. They dominate the movie industry. The news media. Entertainment television. Popular music. Everything except talk radio!” Okay — and if you think that, do you have any right to be surprised when the people vote Democrat? The 2012 election, I think, is not so much a test of Obama or Romney as a test of the people. There is a clear choice, with two very different candidates, each an excellent exponent of his view. Whatever the outcome of the election, the people will be responsible for that outcome.

I affirm Nordlinger’s urgent desire to remind us that voters have real agency. There is a disturbing trend among some social scientists to dismiss elections as mere legitimizing rituals that have very little impact on the behavior of the state. That theory doesn’t survive an encounter with the facts. Just to take the single clearest example, the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were indispensable to western victory in the Cold War.

Yet Nordlinger’s understanding of what elections are and how they work is inadequate. This, too, would not survive an encounter with the facts. Indeed, I think it is precisely in reaction against this sort of oversimplication that some social scientists overreact into the opposite oversimplification.

If I recall from my grad school days correctly, research finds that over 80% of voters (something in the lower 40s for each party) form a party preference early in life and vote for that party with few changes throughout life. You can explain that in terms of good behavior – people figure out early what their basic values, principles and aspirations are, and identify with the party that represents those; or you can explain it in terms of bad behavior – voters form party allegiances for essentially non-rational reasons and then rationalize their votes based on whatever arguments their parties supply. What I think you cannot do is attribute all agency and therefore all responsibility to the voters. Regardless of how much you see the stability of party preference as the result of good or bad behavior, their partisan consistency reflects the reality that what choices the electorate is presented with when it goes to vote is largely determined by forces outside the electorate’s control. For example, the electorate did not vote to change the economic direction of the country in 2008 partly because that option was not on the ballot.

The other forces constraining the electorate’s responsibility fall into roughly two big classifications, both of which are dismissed by Nordlinger. One is the choices of the parties and campaigns themselves. The other is the ability of non-electoral cultural institutions (“education from kindergarten to grad school . . . the movie industry. The news media. Entertainment television. Popular music.”) to control how we describe our reality and thus to control what options are within the bounds of socially defined legitimacy.

But setting aside the claim that the electorate is always responsible, periodically we get elections, like Thatcher and Reagan, where the electorate is really in the driver’s seat. When it comes to 2012 I think Nordlinger’s point is well taken. Here we really do have “a clear choice, with two very different candidates, each an excellent exponent of his view.”

Take a look at that woman voting in a sham election in Zimbabwe and be thankful we really do have the right to choose our rulers.

Back in 2005, Joe Carter invited readers to submit their recommended reading lists for a “do it yourself MA” in their fields. I sent him my list for a DIY master’s in political theory, and he was good enough to post it. Recently, Justin Taylor of Between Two Worlds at The Gospel Coalition asked me to update it; the revised version went live this morning.

Looking forward to hearing what my fellow Hang Togetherites think! What would you include that I missed?