Are Politics Who We Are? The Defining, Inescapable Nature Of Political Choice

They couldn't have turned out more differently, Bob and Dave, despite having come from the same privileged corner of New Brighton, from the storied families of Northumberland, the American Industrial Revolution, and the post-War privilege of Nantucket, and Biarritz. 

There had been no cracks in the walls of the elite redoubt of the West End - Christmas balls, skiing in Aspen, and the long summers on the Vineyard.  Theirs was a comfortable, pleasant life, and neither one thought about it, the legacy they both inherited, or their ordained future.  Both boys were enrolled at Groton went on to Yale, and were expected to prosper.  Perhaps most importantly, they were friends.  

At New Haven their lives began to differ.  Bob joined Fence Club, dined at Mory's, and entertained young women from Boston and New York, girls with similar upbringing, tastes, and social inclinations.  Dave was a Scholar of the House in his Senior Year and well on the way to an academic career in history or economics.  Neither one had an interest in politics - Yale was still a a calm, conservative reserve in their day, on the cusp of the protests and civil disobedience of the Sixties, but still a place solidly and happily apolitical. 

 

There were a few outliers - young men who went on Freedom Rides, marched across the Pettis bridge, and challenged Bull Connor and George Wallace - but they were few and far between.  Their convictions were too obvious and too irreconcilably passionate for the singular, well-heeled, comfortable lack of convictions  Neither Bob nor Dave had any interest in issues, for both were taken enough with sociability or academics to bother. 

Both Bob and Dave had grown up without politics. While their parents were Republican, such affiliation had more to do with their family legacy than any particular electoral interest or political philosophy, and Yale did nothing to change this; but somewhere along the way Dave began a different journey. 

Perhaps it was Chicago that did it - left-leaning academics at the university who were just beginning to apply European Deconstructionism and the New Historicism to traditional American curricula. Deconstruction called into question the fundamental concepts and hierarchies of Western philosophy and dislocated and destabilized the structures and assumptions that shape human history. 

Whatever it was, or however this philosophy made its way into a once conservative, traditional, legatee of old New England and the Enlightenment, was a mystery; for when Dave returned east and met up with Dave, he had profoundly changed.  While he had no interest in electoral politics - inconsequential bandies on both sides - his political philosophy had changed.  He had become deeply committed to the  changes that must and can occur in the privileged, over-estimated, coddled, and arrogant society from which they both came.  

America was not the land of opportunity, but the land of oppression.  It was not a nation of individualism, but crass personal greed. Progressive change towards a more fair, equitable, verdant, and compassionate world was possible. 

  

Bob had changed as well, but rather than straying from his family principles, he saw for the first time how they were far more than just aspects of inherited privilege.  Individualism, private enterprise, unaltered and uninhibited personal freedom, competition, and a healthy respect for excellence were the bedrock of American history and would be for generations to come.  Human nature - competitive, self-interested, territorial, and aggressive - had not changed since the first human settlements and likely never would; and conservatives who understood, accepted, and embraced this reality, were America's future.  

So these two young men who had grown up together, skied and summered together, danced at the same cotillions, and dated the same bright girls from Smith and Holyoke now found themselves at odds.  The childhood friendship that was formed before politics, philosophy, or economics were ever issues, was a matter of instinct and natural affinity.  They liked each other.  It was as simple as that; and given this fundamental, essential bond, nothing should ever change it. 

For years they tried to overcome their growing political differences. Bob believed that the essential, uncomplicated, innocent childhood friendship that was based on an instinctive, natural affection trumped all else. They as adults were no different from the twelve-year old boys that swam off Gay Head and bunked together at St. Moritz.  Childhood friendships are elemental, permanent, and defining. 

Dave said that the reasons how and why he had become a committed progressive were incidental. As an adult he found Bob's very sedentary attitudes and life of complacency and arrogant class assuredness off-putting at best.  He could no longer be friends with such a person. 

Bob was disappointed, hurt, and surprised by his friend's decision.  How could he throw away a friendship of so many years - a more intimate, undeniable friendship that could never be found between any two adults.  They had shared childhood, after all, and discovered something ineffable about the character and personality of the other. What was he doing?

Yet, Bob could not deny that contrary beliefs do not simply define politics, but the way one behaves. One's understanding of man’s relationship to God, secular institutions, society, and the geo-ecological environment are profoundly different. Our reactions to and sympathy/empathy for others is determined by a moral philosophy which either blesses and anoints others as brothers and sisters; or sees them as evolutionary competitors struggling for survival, dominance, and genetic longevity.

Some researchers have even suggested that political philosophy has a genetic basis.  Although society, culture, education, and upbringing certainly have a role, it is bits of DNA which align in certain ways to produce conservatives or liberals.  Journalist John Judis wrote in 2014:

Over the last two decades, political scientists, and psychologists have used genetics and neuroscience to claim that people’s political beliefs are predetermined at birth. Genetic inheritance, they argue, helps to explain why some people are liberal and others conservative...The field itself has a name—genopolitics—and in the last four years alone, over 40 journal articles on the subject have appeared in academic journals. 

As much as this theory has been contested in recent years, the genopolitics proponents are right in one regard – nurture alone cannot be responsible for the selfless or selfish individual.  Somewhere in the double helix there is some combination of DNA bits and strands which predispose some of us to love and caring, while others of us are naturally willful, fearless, and ambitious.

The good news is that Bob and Dave reconciled thanks to Dave's admission - progressivism was not all he hoped it would be, and that he had become more moderate and tolerant of Bob's point of view.  A social historian and critical observer of politics recently wrote:

Liberals do not become conservatives overnight.  There has to be a  gradual unclogging of arteries, more fluidity, clarity, and accelerated thought; but it takes only one illuminating event to bring the past to a close.  If, after all the predation, territorial wars, brutality, and inhumanity of the Twentieth Century, such offenses still continue; and if the same disregard for polity and community continues to be repeated despite the most optimistic predictions, there must be something to the idea of historical permanence.  Once grasped, never forgotten.  A progressive early, a conservative late, a historical imperative as conclusive as quenching a thirst.