ONCE WE BOTH ACCEPT THAT THE PROBLEM IS THEIR LOCAL CULTURES...:

 The post-2016 conservative awakening to the problems of poverty and the notion that there are, perhaps, some structural factors that go beyond personal responsibility contributing to economic and social collapse has left many long-time researchers and advocates with their mouths agape. During the 1980s and 1990s, scholars like William Julius Wilson persistently argued that the problems of Black unemployment, family dissolution, social disorganization, and chronic poverty had their roots in the transformation of the U.S. economy. As jobs shifted away from urban-based manufacturing to information and services work, Wilson said, family-supporting employment moved out of reach both geographically and in terms of education and skills. It was this labor market transformation and the relentless escalation in demand for higher levels of education and skill rather than a "culture of poverty" that detached Black men from the workforce and helped to generate rising levels of social dysfunction in the nation's urban neighborhoods. The comparison between conservative attitudes toward Black poverty then and white poverty now ought to induce much more introspection among conservatives than it does.

In progressive, psycho-social stinginess toward white poverty and the great awakening to the structural underpinnings of poverty among conservatives, we may be able to see the reverse image of an important national consensus where ideologies on both sides bend toward a new, shared reality. For instance, being poor can be hard on your character, leading to all sorts of negative behaviors and outcomes, and it can also be strongly influenced by factors over which an individual little or no control, ranging from the conditions of birth to the strictures of an impoverished childhood, to the outsourcing and offshoring of jobs.

A clear-thinking progressive can affirm that a young person from Appalachia speaking in a distinctive twang and dialect may indeed face discrimination in educational and employment opportunities in the same way a young Black person experiences such discrimination for their own patterns of speech or comportment. A conservative newly appreciative of the social disorganization and fragmentation that occurs when a major employer closes taking secure jobs with them should, in principle be able to extend concern and sympathy to a Black or Hispanic teenager whose family and community has been worn down by joblessness and poverty over decades as family-supporting jobs fled the cities for the suburbs. With sympathy comes understanding, and with understanding a step toward one another in a social détente that enables a renewed pursuit of the common good.

The Common Ground of Human Dignity

With social and political tensions at a recent historical peak, where could such a dialogue start? It would be foolish and premature to leap immediately to policy and programs on which little or no consensus exists and where gridlock is the order of the day. Legislation is an endpoint to a much longer, more important process of developing awareness of a shared humanity and social and economic destiny. I would therefore focus on fostering a national conversation that would help resurface an instinct that progressive and conservatives share, namely the dignity of the human person and the role that human dignity plays in ordering our public life. Here's why.

To thrive, democratic societies require a vision for the purpose of our shared life. The answer for those of us in the West is that human dignity and flourishing--personal, social, cultural, and economic--has been the central purpose of human community and its political order. The bias toward human flourishing is so deeply embedded in our beliefs, behaviors, and social and political organization that it often goes unnoticed, like the air we breathe. In our imperfect pursuit of this aspiration, human dignity has been violated and abused in many contexts, but the arc of Western societies has been toward a gradual expansion of the definition of who is human, who deserves the protection of the law, and who has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The American story in particular has been one of a gradual expansion of principles and laws that protect the dignity and rights of the person including the elimination of slavery, abolishment of Jim Crow legal codes, expansions of suffrage, and outlawing of discrimination against, women, the elderly, children, the disabled, sexual minorities, and, increasingly, the unborn.

Of course, the ultimate foundations of human dignity are much in dispute. Religious traditions, particularly Judaism and Christianity, root human dignity in the concept of the imago Dei, while thinkers like Adam Smith and much of modern neurobiology rely principally on human nature and its evolution to form and sustain a concept of human dignity that is driven by social reciprocity. The clash between these perspectives is often intense, part of the long and ultimately unresolvable division between theists and secularists both of whom suspect that, if it's opposite ever achieves dominance, it will endanger the freedom of those who anchor their views the other perspective.

What's lost in this "violent agreement" is that we are actually joined by our differences, commanded or driven, depending on your commitments and perspectives, to love others as ourselves. Our deepest instincts tell us this truth is unavoidable if we are to survive and flourish and that the effort to "get behind" that instinct, to establish a final, shared epistemological basis might require an illiberal surrender of prior beliefs under a coercion that would actually be the opposite of the commandments or instincts from which it arises. From the standpoint of our public engagements, our differences over the source of human dignity ought not to divide but to point us toward one another and serve as a shared basis for exploring how to secure human dignity and make human lives as fruitful as possible.

This shared, underlying agreement about the dignity of the person is the gravitational center around which our polity and politics orbit. It is the truth that illuminates all the other questions we grapple with, from national defense to welfare policy.

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