In his post-mortem examination of the Democratic Party which he delivered on Dec. 5, Barack Obama suggested that one reason Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump was that progressives insisted on “ideological purity.”
“Purity tests,” he declared, “are not a recipe for long-term success. In a democracy, we all have to find a way to live alongside individuals and groups who are different than us.”
I tried to figure out what Obama meant by “purity tests,” and I came to the conclusion that he is accusing many Democrats of believing — and I use that word “believing” intentionally — in progressive ideology almost as if it were “religious” truth.
Progressives almost never use the word “God” or quote Bible verses to support their arguments, but when they start talking politics it sounds like religion to me.
Obama put it this way. “It [isn’t] just a fight about tax rates or roads anymore. It [is] about more fundamental issues that [go] to the core of our being and how we expect society to structure itself. Issues of identity and status and gender. Issues of family, values, and faith.
Jonathan Hart, the founder of a public affairs and public relations firm, declared, “Religion doesn’t go away. It just goes somewhere else. In America today that place is ideology. Today’s political rhetoric certainly suggests we’re not less religious but religious about something else.”
I think that’s what Obama meant by ideological purity.
When I suggest to progressives that their ideology feels like religion to me, they respond with, “But religion involves God; ideology does not. Separation of church and state, and all of that. God has no place in political decision making.”
I thought about that and came up with the following analogy: If it looks like coffee and smells like coffee and tastes like coffee, it’s probably coffee even though it’s been decaffeinated.
If it is as intense as religion and stirs up strong emotion like religion and is firmly, wholeheartedly believed like religion, it probably is religion even though it’s been de-godded.
Or if not religion per se, at least Ideology with an upper case “I.”
Progressives like to assert that they are rational, critical thinkers who use reason as the basis for their decision making. I hope my columns, for example, make sense. There have been, however, several psychological studies that follow scientific procedures with a control group and so forth, which conclude that it just ain’t so.
For example, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, reveals that we aren’t as rational as we think.
“Haidt’s understanding of the mind,” according to the website SuperSummary, “runs counter to the typical rationalist beliefs of Western philosophy. He asserts that emotion and intuition carry far more weight in our judgments than does reason.”
He uses the metaphor of an elephant (emotion and intuition) and a rider (reason) and concludes that the elephant is more powerful and ultimately in control of moral decision making, while the task of the rider is to act like a president’s press secretary, i.e. to somehow make sense of what was originally made by emotion and intuition.”
Therefore, Haidt concludes, if progressives want to understand and change the minds of MAGAs, they should not begin by addressing the rider but by engaging with the elephant.
“It is difficult to change anyone’s mind, including our own,” SuperSummary argues, “unless we talk to the elephant.”
Keith Payne, another social psychologist agrees with Haidt. In Good Reasonable People: the Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide, he writes, “History, race, class, religion and urban versus rural living set us on different paths … and we come to rationalize our own point of view as the only right point of view.”
He adds, “Those very same psychological responses blind us to our own logical contradictions. And they make it hard to have civil conversations about any of it because we see our own side as arguing in good faith, but we see the other side as intentionally trying to do harm.”
It is time, Barack Obama seems to be arguing, to build bridges of empathy instead of defending ideological purity to the death (or loss of an election).
“Pluralism … is not about abandoning your convictions and folding when things get tough. It is about recognizing that in a democracy, power comes from forging alliances, and building coalitions, and making room in those coalitions not only for the woke but also for the waking.”
Review readers get into political conversations every day, directly or obliquely, and have to choose words that articulate ideological purity or to build bridges of compromise from “our side” to whomever we judge to be on the other side.
Most of us don’t have a lot of political leverage, but that’s no excuse for not intentionally seeking out people who think differently than we do, not trying to understand their elephant, and not thinking of the conversation as a win/lose battle.
