The Real Difference Between Progressives and Conservatives
People often argue that political parties in the United States aren’t that far apart on most issues, meaning voters don’t have much genuine political choice. The reason our parties have converged on many issues is that most of the older “hard questions” in politics now have largely agreed-upon answers. Those who make this argument often want a party that promotes an idea or economic system that is widely known to not function.
Similarly, people often complain that the distribution of political issues between parties can feel random. Why does the party that promotes “small government” also promote things like abortion bans or bills restricting school-based exposure to sexual identities (e.g., the “don’t say gay” bill)? Why is the party that claims to support religions which mostly want to help the poor not a staunch advocate for state-based support programs? While it can seem as though the parties’ position statements emerged serendipitously, each actually represents two very easy-to-understand optimization functions:
**Progressives optimize for intragenerational quality of life and individual agency.**
**Conservatives optimize for intergenerational cultural fitness and fidelity.**
While the progressive’s primary unit of account in society is the individual, conservatives’ focus pivots around durable cultures. To be clear, conservatives don’t think of their actions along these lines—rather, they follow their cultural mandates and those mandates evolved over time to impart intergenerational fitness. Throughout history, cultures that were more accepting of LGBT issues or abortions had lower birth rates and died out. For that reason, most successful (in that they have a lot of reach) traditional cultures are against those things.
In the same breath, most traditional cultures also offer strong social safety nets—in fact, social support is one of their primary selling points. When a state starts offering those same services, the culture’s relative value within its community degrades and it will bleed members at a higher rate. While few groups are more functionally communist than the most conservative evangelical communities or the Amish, they are communist within their community units. A state offering those same services can trigger the extinction of traditional cultures, as can be seen with the Shakers who, being a group that didn’t have sex, died out when the government began to offer state-run orphanages (before that, most Shakers grew up in Shaker-run orphanages).
Even the most ardent progressive will likely concede that intra-community social support networks run by conservative cultures are dramatically less wasteful with resources than state-run alternatives (perhaps even hundreds of times less). Progressives are more likely to see cultural support networks in a negative light because conservative cultures often use resource exchanges to promote their cultural values (consider the Salvation Army’s history with the trans community as case in point) and will sometimes exclude cultural outsiders (though this is not always the case).
We might be ambivalent as to which perspective is more “correct” if the progressive mindset had not begun to falter in motivating at-or-above-replacement-rate birth rates starting in the 1970s. This failure to self sustain through birth rate (rather than conversion) is a big problem with progressive political branches. In the absence of a sustainably growing (or at least stable) population, they have begun to aggressively force children from diverse traditional cultural backgrounds to attend public school, where their traditions are more likely to be erased and replaced with society’s dominant cultural mindset.
Note: This is not an intentional process but an evolutionary one. The iterations of progressive culture that did not aggressively adopt this strategy have died off and been replaced with the ones that did.
As slaver ants are unable to breed worker ants of their own, they raid the colonies of other ants, bring back the pupa, and cover the pupa in slaver ant pheromones to confuse them into thinking that they, too, are slaver ants. These pupa then work for and feed the slaver ants of their own “free will.” Because these pupa now grow up into ants that don’t breed, slaver ants must constantly raid other ant colonies for new recruits in order to sustain their own populations. This works because slaver ants and non-slaver ants maintain a functional equilibrium between their populations.
Progressives have become unsustainably effective at converting people out of conservative cultures, like slaver ants that exhausted all of their surrounding feeder colonies. Regardless of your thoughts on the ethics of this current iteration of the progressive movement, its present level of societal domination, combined with its low birth rates, cannot be sustained without very negative long-term ramifications that we explore in detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion but don’t cover here in an effort to not get too political.