The problem with Democrats and liberals: A “New Simplism” approach

Most people have a sense of what it means to be a “good” person. Feeling bad if others get hurt. Not prejudiced or discriminating against people who look different from you. “Respecting” or at least being tolerant of opinions different from yours. Being kind, gentle, generous and empathic. “Good” refers, for the most part, to our response to others. Because of that, such good people may be somewhat embarrassed about the necessary selfishness we feel, and to a significant extent must embody. We can’t, obviously, give away all of our food, clothing, shelter. We can’t give our oxygen to someone who may appear especially needy or better able to appreciate the gifts of life than we are. We will feel some internal rebellion against forgoing all enjoyment, peace or pleasure.

We know about this “good” because of childhood lessons from our family and teachers, and possibly by birth instinct, and by the chemical benevolence that comes from being loved. However, people often have grown an internal truth that supersedes what they may have learned. Many children live in predominant pain from innumerable reasons, on the spectrum from abuse to loneliness. If they are never helped deeply, down to where the hurt was planted, and if there is no sympathetic witness to their plight, they will have to shut down hope that goodness will come to them, that it exists. They will callus their heart. These people might hold onto severed ideas of the good, but they will not feel it and will live it sparsely or not at all. More likely their thinking will turn as dark as their pain. “Good” will not come from love and security but from their opposite.

Liberals and Democrats are, admit it or not, widely attributed the cachet of “goodness.” They want to help unfortunate people. They see society as a compact, as brothers and sisters, not as warring islands or a fortuitous crowd of solipsists. Their problem is that – maybe with the rare exception – somewhere inside them, they have an eye of the hurricane created by early hurt in their lives. And where that exists, they are numbed or painfully bent. Where that exists, they believe in force against individuals.

They accept that the definition of “society” is, essentially, “government.” That we are not primarily individuals who should decide how to live our individual lives, should decide who we will help and give to, but are tools of a government that should make our agenda, should create and ratify “good” as it conceives it. Our eye of the hurricane says that “good is good” whether we feel it or are coerced, by fines or imprison­ment, to perform it. This numb, this callus, is the error of psychology that confuses our good no less than it confuses the good of Republicans and Conservatives who value individual rights and freedom yet disfranchise the vote, cage immigrants, feel affection for a sociopathic president, and prefer to unfairly favor the rich rather than the poor.

It's a kind of irony that the Democrats will come off worse in this confusion of the good. They, with their philosophy of altruism and brotherly love, will seem hypocritical, with a paradoxical morality that enables the conflation of liberal humanitarianism with totalitarian Socialism – while the Republicans, whose character is fundamentally “Don’t tread on me” individualism, even self-centeredness, seem consistently true to their convictions. Poor Democrats! What can they do, but try to own a realism unknown to either party or ideological system: Society is a necessity. It would be nice if we were all just individuals, but we’re a shotgun marriage, and now we must compromise for our partner. And by the way, it’s still better to be good.