This primary season, peel off political labels

I was an outspoken supporter of public education in my community and yet two of my Jewish children when to private Catholic schools. Then I wrote an essay that The Wall Street Journal accepted. Apparently, conservatives and liberals could agree with my premise that the practices of insurance companies could be exploitative. I found that I had other views that readers of the Journal liked. And fiercely disagreed with. Just like the readers of The Christian Science Monitor.

I wrote a piece a year or so ago calling for the abolition of foreign languages as a requirement for liberal arts education. My liberal friends were appalled. (We were, after all, liberal arts majors).  But it sparked dialogue.

I suspect we are all a pile of contradictions. We are all a mix of conservative, moderate, liberal. A mix of outrage and compassion. We believe in separation of church and state except when we don’t. We believe government should help the poor except when it helps too much. Life’s complicated. And so are we.

Political primaries push every candidate into a box. Our goal should be to look beyond labels and nurture our contradictions. Contradictions make life interesting. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that consistency is for the little mind.

A good way to break the labels habit is to read political commentators you disagree with. If you think you’re liberal, read George Will or Charles Krauthammer. See if they make sense. If you’re conservative, try Maureen Dowd or Nicholas Kristof. And in my opinion, everyone should read David Brooks. He’s one of the most thoughtful commentators writing today. And he’s a Jewish Republican writing for The New York Times. That’s a sentence full of contradictions.

As I got older, my father, who I labeled earlier in this piece as a standard-line liberal Democrat, started to get very interested in guns. He joined the National Rifle Association. He carried that card proudly next to his one for the American Civil Liberties Union. To him, this was not a contradiction. He believed both groups supported his right to exercise the Second Amendment.

If my father could find common positions, at least philosophically, between the NRA and the ACLU, then anything’s possible. So here’s to a new label I hope we can all embrace: contradictarian. 

Jim Sollisch is creative director at Marcus Thomas Advertising.

Previous

1 | 2