Divided by Commonality; Wm. Raspberry may be on to something

Divided by Commonality
By William Raspberry
Monday, August 18, 2003; Page A19
[email protected]
washingtonpost.com

I like Ed Chinn.

No, we're not bosom buddies, and we find ourselves on opposite sides of most of the big political issues. What I like about him is that he seems always open to new insights -- even about himself.

An example: He just called my attention to the work of four university researchers who say they have found psychological factors -- one is tempted to say "symptoms" -- that political conservatives have in common. They tend to be fearful, aggressive, dogmatic, in need of "cognitive closure," intolerant of ambiguity and tolerant of inequality.

Chinn, a conservative who works as an organizational consultant in Fort Worth, thinks the list is too negative. He wondered what a study of the psychology of liberalism might turn up: Distrust of liberty and individual initiative? Impatience with process? The need for control? Generalized altruism?

Then he realized his list must seem as negative to liberals as the professors' list seemed to him.

The professors -- Jack Glaser and Frank Sulloway of the University of California at Berkeley, John Jost of Stafford and Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland -- based their findings on an analysis of previously published journal articles, books, papers and speeches from a dozen or more countries.

Chinn doesn't see much of himself in the picture they paint. "I tend to accept the need for change," he protests. "I'm not dogmatic, not terrorized by terror, not intolerant of ambiguity." Where, he wonders, does that leave him?

It leaves him, I think, in need of the special insight of A. Lawrence Chickering, whose 1993 book, "Beyond Left and Right," argues that "liberal" and "conservative" categories are insufficient to understand the pull and tug of American politics. Each of these broad categories has its own subdivisions, which Chickering labels as "freedom" and "order." And at any given time, the fiercest political battles may be not between liberals and conservatives but between the freedom and order impulses of each group.

To return to the professors' study: If fear and opposition to big government are conservative traits, why are liberals (or at any rate, civil libertarians) left to lead the struggle against the invasive Patriot Act? If dogmatism marks the conservative, why is political correctness associated with liberals?

Chickering's insight is that both conservatives and liberals extol freedom -- and both eventually get tired of too much freedom and demand order. For conservatives, too much liberty may lead them to support expanded police power, limits on abortion and other coercive trends. For liberals, "too much" may trigger legislation against hate crimes -- that is, a desire to punish not just behavior but the thoughts behind the behavior.

"Freedom" liberals brought us the free-speech movement that radicalized college campuses in the 1960s; "order" liberals brought us political correctness, which made certain ideas unutterable in the 1990s. "Freedom" conservatives espouse free trade, entrepreneurial risk-taking and the right to private association; "order" conservatives oppose NAFTA, demand government indemnification for insurance companies and rally against gay "marriage."

Accepting Chickering's political taxonomy doesn't necessarily lead to consensus. But it might, if we are lucky, get us, left and right, to hear one another -- to argue against a point of view without demonizing those who hold it.

It's the demonizing that bothers Ed Chinn -- whether the blunt force mud-slinging of hard-core politicians or the patronizing put-down-cum-research of our four professors.

He is bothered by what he calls "a new level of intensity and polarities in our national psyche -- best represented by the very sharp and emotional reactions of some to Bill Clinton and now to George W. My own almost Pavlovian recoiling from anything associated with Clinton is exactly mirrored in some of my best friends' reactions to Bush. And, you know, it absolutely transcends or circumvents any kind of rational thought. Deep down, I know that Clinton cannot be all bad."

You see why I like Chinn?