Our Political Strife Can Be Laid to These Underlying Differences

Part IV of a series March 9, 2025

One of the biggest aha moments in the early field work for Our Common Purpose came in a small farming community in very rural Nebraska.  I had been drawn there by a book that claimed the town of Superior possessed the “common sense values of America’s Heartland.”

The subject being discussed in a lengthy discussion with a couple of town leaders was equality.  The participants readily agreed that everyone deserves equal opportunity.  However, in a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business, they weren’t willing to let the subject go at just that.

For starters, they wanted it known that the folks of Superior don’t judge each other by the color of their skin but by their contributions to the community, to the extent they are able.  And what really galled them was that while the great many busted their butts, some did little more than sit on their duffs.  The offenders had drifted into town because housing was dirt cheap, and otherwise they lived off public assistance.  To be clear, these assertions were not being made about people of color.

The clash over what should be regarded as fair and equal was one of the formative moments in my early work on Our Common Purpose.

It closely parallels, albeit on a much smaller scale, the earlier experience of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt as he went about developing the moral foundations he explores in his seminal work The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.  He and his colleagues were forced to make a major revision to their initial list of moral foundations due to conservative pushback over exactly the same point.  As Haidt describes it, “fairness, which focused on proportionality, not equality.”

These conflicts occurred long after the death of Isaiah Berlin (in 1997) but he wouldn’t be a bit surprised.  In fact, he fully anticipated it.

His theory of values pluralism, on which Our Common Purpose’s study of