Our political landscape is one psyche

“A recent study shows that children who are raised to have strong beliefs are also more likely to rebel against those views as they age.” The Atlantic, May 1, 2014*

Initial hypothesis

Visiting the cosmic plane for a moment, doesn’t it seem that in any sizable, non-homogeneous group of strangers – municipal meetings, county referenda, state and national elections – there is typically a broadly even divide between adherents of the two main political-moral ideologies, Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal? Big issues and elections often come down to close or very close counts. Eyed from a neutral or naïve stance, shouldn’t this seem awfully strange? Shouldn’t we expect, tabula rasa, one cause or candidate to be clearly better than the opposite one? I think it’s a matter worthy of inquiry that in a country of millions, ardor will be nearly equally proportioned between the diametrical philosophies of: individual and the masses, property rights and redistribution, keeping and giving, self-aggrandizement and egalitarianism, proud and humble.

If this observation has even the scantest substance, then I believe we are looking at a phenomenon the cause of which must be subterranean and recondite. This would be the psychology of family dynamics and the individuals within them. It seems necessary that something in the atmosphere of homes, the chemistry of parents’ benign and toxic influence and force, produces either clear perception or rebellion that in the aggregate manifests as feeling differences about self, others, life and world. Political ideologies are at root emotional, attitudinal, ego-defending systems. They begin in childhood, in feelings of love, injustice, anger, revenge that are later justified and codified. Part of the complexity is that either pole of feeling can and does feed either ideological position.

The answer can’t be as formulaic as, for example, brutal, unloving Republican fathers producing needy, humanitarian sons; or cold, hypocritical liberal parents producing egoistic, moralistic conservative children. Obviously, many offspring do not depart from the family dogma. That might explain one-half of the entrenchment of the two poles, but couldn’t explain the original sources of the “equal difference” I’m suggesting. I believe at its core structure is an energy in the nature of traditional parenting that leads to opposition, to opposites, including the political but extending beyond it to the psychological and existential. A liberal may have a big heart for the less fortunate, but actually may be motivated by hatred for the rich and successful. A conservative may have contempt for the weak, but could simply be someone who values his own autonomy and freedom. There must, then, be a more fundamental energy: a thesis leading to antithesis. What it is that brings half the country to vote for a Narcissist bigot, and the other half not to?

Improved hypothesis

I came to think that the conflict we all accept, liberal versus conservative, is fundamentally illusory, because the feeling source beneath it is an oceanic unity. We respond to lifeboat situations** created by society’s felt need for governance. In this contrivance, people are not free to be social or insular, to help or refuse to help others according to their lights, their sense of compassion. Instead, we buy in to institutions that concretize mutual indebtedness and forced brotherhood: We cannot be libertarian. Our choices are of degree: pay some taxes or many, not none. Support public or private schools, but require children to be educated. Champion decriminalization of certain drugs but not others, and certainly not all. Defend police methods or abhor them, but you may not purchase your own police force, as David Friedman, Milton Friedman’s radical libertarian son, proposed. On the battlefield of Hobson’s choices, our feelings are muddled and can morph according to our internal states and our impressionability. A given entrepreneur is a hero, but I nevertheless dislike “capitalism.” Millions of people breathe in and admire Obama, breathe out and admire Trump. America is interventionism, or is it isolationism? I, oddly enough, am “political fluid,” where “don’t tread on me” feelings merge harmoniously and absurdly with respect for the social compact. Many people change political parties.

Settled hypothesis
The two hypotheses have given way to a final one: The core of each person is ambivalent, literally containing two opposites. We need to bond, but must be a self. We reach out for love, but recede into ourselves because that critical need can never be met in its deepest place. We need engulfment in a mother, but then we smother. We grow the persona of independence when we are neediest. We love democracy, but individuality. The inner split in us must manifest in the political, ideological duality. Our political landscape is one psyche.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/parents-political-beliefs/361462/.

** The lifeboat situation: https://mises.org/library/lifeboat-situations.