The Conservative Predicament
It might be a painful admission for conservatives to accept they may have to live and let live in the future. As a left-wing socialist once kindly reminded me, the left said the same thing when the Berlin Wall fell.
A proud conservative author, Francis Fukuyama, famously proclaimed the “end of history,” believing the market system had forever won the economic argument and was destined to be our perpetual economic system. Ironically, we are now talking about the rise of Communist China, and if you go to any university campus across North America and Europe, you can see that socialism isn’t dead.
The Resilience of Ideas
There’s a line from Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo: “Ideas never die, sire, and though they may slumber for a time, they wake up stronger than when they fell asleep.” An example of this is democracy. Discarded after Augustus made Rome an empire, it seemed dead and gone, especially by the Middle Ages. Then, in America in 1776, it rose again to wash over the world and become the dominant system of governance.
The difficulty with ideas is that we can’t kill them. Our victories are temporary because the left will rise again. “The left” is a clumsy term we use, as liberalism, socialism, and “the woke” aren’t the same thing. They do share a belief in using government intervention, but not for the same purpose. It’s not just one idea but at least three separate ideologies we hope to destroy. It seems impossible to destroy one, never mind many. The good news is that our values can be forced into hibernation, but they can’t ever be killed. This does mean we can’t stay on top forever.
Escaping the Political Culture War
For some, this conjures an image of a perpetual battle between good and evil, a battle between angels and demons in Christian theology. In this view, we must engage in spiritual warfare with our political opponents until the end of days.
In their eyes, these opponents are promoting sin and aiding the devil. It’s a narrative I can’t accept, though I respect their right to argue such a case.
In my personal experience, the average left-wing person is disappointingly human. Like conservatives, they have both angels and demons within them. I am not here to argue for a perpetual battle but for a permanent peace that should relegate future politics to a competition over who has the best practical plan to better our lives, rather than a cultural battle for the future.
This desire is captured for me in a scene from the 1965 film Battle of the Bulge.
In a conversation between Colonel Hessler and his adjutant, Conrad, the Colonel admits Germany can’t win the war. He sees the war not as a means to victory but as a positive, endless battle that lifts man to new heights through the ultimate form of competition. Conrad bitterly tells the man he admires that such a view is a mirage and that the war is only destroying Germany and claiming innocent lives.
Luckily for us in politics, the stakes aren’t as high as in real warfare. But we should note that the polarization of politics in America has divided families, ruined friendships, and at times risked bloodshed—all for a culture war no one ultimately wins. Many will condemn me for writing this, but may it be easier to take a leaf out of our Lord and Savior’s life and seek to be peacemakers, a spirit many here claim to hold dear.
A Path Forward: Live and Let Live
History is littered with examples of distinct belief systems living in harmony. There is no reason why a simple distinction in political views can’t live comfortably together. For example, if the people of Scotland and England, after centuries of fighting each other, can live as part of one nation, I don’t see why traditional conservatives and progressive liberals can’t end their political struggle against one another.
President Donald Trump has already shown how this can be done. By giving the issue of abortion back to the states, where individual states, through internal democracy, can decide the issue themselves, he ended the national war over it. By moving this issue from a federal or national one to a state one, it was taken out of the national battle to define American culture.
This allowed for a live and let live view of the issue, where it was tolerable for different states to have distinctive views on abortion. So, why can’t we apply such logic to individuals? If it is tolerable for different states to have different views on an issue, why not different people? This is in keeping with the correct view of freedom from government interference in people’s beliefs, particularly religion. It also signals how we can seek a more peaceful politics.
