America is economically prosperous, but politically dysfunctional. We have the material, technological, and military resources to remain the world’s leading superpower, but the current Congress has no idea how to fix our immigration system or what role we should play in the world. They are unable to make decisions about basic questions such as whether to fulfill their duties.
What must be done to rectify this situation? Well, there are many things, but one of them is this. We must embrace more of the ideas and ways of thinking that are fundamental to being a citizen in a democracy.
This idea is known as value pluralism. It is most associated with British philosopher Isaiah Berlin and is based on the premise that the world is not in neat harmony. We all want to pursue different products, but unfortunately these products can be in tension with each other. For example, we may want to use government to make society more equal, but doing so requires expanding state power to the extent that it infringes on the freedoms of some people, and We believe that is good for us.
As Damon Linker, who teaches courses on Berlin and elsewhere at the University of Pennsylvania, recently pointed out, this kind of tension is common in our political life. Loyalty to a particular community and universal solidarity with all humanity. Respect for authority and individual autonomy. Social progress and social stability. I would add that this kind of tension is also prevalent within individuals. A desire to be involved in a community and a desire for personal space to do what you want. The desire to stand out and the desire to blend in. A cry for justice and a cry for mercy.
Choosing something good means sacrificing something else. A tragic fact about the human condition is that many choices involve loss. It is important to think about what you are willing to sacrifice for the greater good every day.
Indeed, there are times when the struggle is actually good versus evil, such as World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Civil War. If slavery wasn’t wrong, as Lincoln argued, then nothing was wrong. However, such opportunities are rarer than we think.
I think I hate Donald Trump as much as the next guy, but Trump’s style of populism represents some very legitimate values. the need to maintain social cohesion amid mass immigration; The need to protect working class wages from the pressures of globalization.
The struggle against the man Trump is a battle of good versus evil between democracy and narcissistic authoritarianism, but the struggle between liberalism and Trumpian populism is how to balance legitimate concerns. It’s a wrestling match.
Berlin had a word for those who think there is one correct solution to our problems and therefore must do whatever it takes to impose it: the monists. Berlin was born in pre-revolutionary Russia and came of age in the 1930s, when two monistic philosophies were on the rise: Marxism and fascism. They claimed to be an all-explaining ideology that promised a final end to political problems.
Today, monism takes the form of leftists or rightists who view all political conflicts as a battle between good and evil between oppressors and oppressed. Leftists describe these conflicts as colonizer versus colonized. The pro-Trump right calls these conflicts coastal elites, globalists, or cultural Marxists. But both sides harbor the illusion that the problem can be solved by crushing the bad guys.
We pluralists resist such Manichean moralism. We start from the premise that most political factions in democratic societies seek to pursue some good purpose. The right question is not who is good and who is bad. The right question is: What balance should be struck in a situation like this?
In the 1980s, my main concern was economic hardening, and I thought the Reagan/Thatcher policies, including tax cuts, were the right response. Right now, I think the main concerns are inequality and social division, and I think Biden’s policies, including tax increases, are the right response.
We pluralists believe that conflict is a permanent part of public life – we will always struggle with how to balance competing goods – but that it is of a limited kind. It is a conflict, a debate between patriots, not a fight to the death between the children of our nation. Children of light and darkness. In our view, Congress should be a place for this kind of balancing, a place where different kinds of representatives come together to weigh interests and find compromises. This should not be a place where compromises are destroyed so that representatives can go on television with ideologically pure positions.
Pluralism is a creed that brings humility (even among those of us virtue-resistant experts). Pluralists never believe that they have the truth and that everyone else is living in error. The pluralist is slow to claim certainty because he knows that even his detractors are probably partially right. “It’s boring to read about the Confederacy,” Berlin once confessed.
Berlin worked hard to argue that pluralism was not relativism. It is not a belief that we can all have our own truth. It is the belief that objective truths exist, but unfortunately in political life they do not fit into a single, frictionless whole.
He was more interesting when writing about specific people, such as Machiavelli or Churchill, than when he wrote about abstract ideas. It captures something very human about his worldview. So there’s always an explorer at the center, wrestling with cynicism and discomfort, always trying empathically to understand other minds, always trying to keep one’s head while others are losing theirs. It means that there is.
Berlin argued that if there was a final solution, if there was a “final pattern in which society would be arranged,” then “freedom would become a sin.” However, there are no final correct answers to political questions, and history remains an endless dialogue.
Many American voters reward politicians who offer holy war. If we were more pluralist, we would elect more people interested in gradually and steadily improving their lives.