Every group claims Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Douglass. Every group says the other produced Calhoun and eugenics.
The more I learn from different traditions, the more I find each group claims that their intellectual and cultural forebears are the people everyone likes and says the others descend from the ones everyone dislikes.
I grew up in liberal, progressive households and schools. I learned that people who worked for liberty and freedom, and who fought against slavery and tyranny were the ones our traditions descended from. I learned that conservatives and libertarians just wanted profit. They would sacrifice the things we valued, like liberty and freedom, in favor of helping themselves. Hence, they were responsible for slavery and laissez-faire practices that caused hunger and poverty.
I didn’t learn to see the world from their perspectives. When I started to, in recent decades, I heard them claim they wanted to help the poor and create freedom and liberty. I thought they were just saying these things. As I learned to put my viewpoint aside and genuinely look from theirs—to empathize—I learned that they weren’t faking it. They had different means but similar goals.
Then as I learned more, I found that many of them learned to view liberals and progressives with similar suspicion and distrust. Few of either group seemed to try to empathize with the other group. I’m not special for doing so. I think more people did before media learned to target groups and other techniques of modernity.
In any case, I was surprised to find conservatives and libertarians claiming Lincoln and Douglass of their tribes. I grew up seeing John C. Calhoun’s “slavery is a positive good” talk and eugenics as products of other tribes’ views and practices. I couldn’t have imagined others seeing it the other way.
I’ve learned: Every group claims Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Douglass. Every group says the other produced Calhoun and eugenics.
Now I feel shame at the polarization, partisanship, and bigotry I learned and internalized with too little skepticism, though it’s tempered at seeing most Americans doing it too.
I intend to reverse that trend. It’s a big topic of my upcoming book.
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