Them by Ben Sasse

Author:Ben Sasse
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2018-08-15T16:00:00+00:00

Each group interprets events differently and comes to different conclusions in no small part because it starts from a different guiding premise. Still, we can see that all three lenses spot different facets of reality—even if each has its own blind spots.

Russ Roberts of the Hoover Institution, following Kling, shows what each group misses. Progressives, “in their eagerness to empathize with the victim . . . can turn the victim into an object rather than an independent actor. Poor people are so oppressed in the liberal view, they don’t just have limited agency to choose and live life in meaningful ways.” Conservatives, on the other hand, “in their zeal to preserve civilization and the American way of life,” often “demonize those that they see as a threat to civilization. They can forget that most immigrants are hard-working individuals who want a better life for their children.” Finally, libertarians—how Roberts himself identifies—“often romanticize the power of economic freedom. We struggle to imagine that some people are poorly served by markets, that some transactions involve exploitation of ignorance and that the self-regulation of markets can fail.” He confesses that libertarians, in their “zeal to de-romanticize government,” often just “ignore the good that government does, especially in cases where freedom might perform badly.”13

When we understand these different starting points, it’s easier to empathize with political opponents, even if we still passionately disagree with their policy preferences. Understanding each other better doesn’t mean that we stop debating and join hands around the campfire—but it does help us to talk, having dispensed with the self-deceptive assumption that our opponents simply hate and want to crush us. When we start from the assumption that our opponents are like us—decent folks who want what’s best but who start from a different place—we are more likely to be respectful and to have a conversation that’s productive. We can treat our opponents as individuals rather than as representatives of some malevolent bloc.

CPAC, the American Conservative Union’s annual megaconference, has long been among the most important annual events for the nation’s most energetic conservative activists. It’s always been a little eccentric—attendees are more than a little likely to be donning tricorn hats and carrying “Don’t Tread on Me!” flags—but nonetheless full of enthusiastic, patriotic people. In 2018, however, when a speaker noted that illegal immigrants tend to have far more conservative values than one might expect, the audience erupted into loud booing. Wondering if perhaps the booing was directed not at his statement but at the act of illegally crossing the border, the speaker, radio host and Forbes writer Rick Ungar, pivoted from illegal to legal immigration. He began to describe the glories of a naturalization ceremony at a county courthouse.

If you’ve ever attended or participated in one of these ceremonies, as I have been fortunate to do, you know how they can make the heart soar. The swearing-in of new citizens—new Americans affirming our shared creed—is the culmination of years of work and dedication. The new citizens had to

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