Originally published in the Daily News-Record, Harrisonburg, VA. The author would like to get other than local responses to the survey at the end.
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The current terms of left and right, Democrat and Republican, are in part responsible for the current dysfunctional state of our government, a dysfunction spreading to Eurasia, destabilizing the relative peace that has followed the catastrophe of WWII. I think that rather than being defined within a dualistic terminology, people are located on a multidimensional conceptual continuum.
Deconstructing the left/right opposition might be a good place to start. If people were able to describe what they think those terms mean, they might surprise each other and perhaps even discover that they have more in common than difference. For example, a good friend who voted for Trump told me she thought leftists supported bureaucracy, an association that surprised me, an aging hippy from the sixties who challenged both Republican and Democrat bureaucrats responsible for the war in Vietnam and dictators in Central and South America.
The problem in this conversation lay in identifying bureaucracies as either good or bad, whereas they are a necessary part of governance—the question is then not an either/or but the size, efficacy, values, and political structure it supports.
I wonder whether my conceptions of ideologies of the right are as misleading as my friends’ notion of leftists. I think of the right as government minimalists, prioritizing individual freedom over community welfare—or maybe imagining that in a laissez-faire world free of governmental interference, the push and pull of different interests will result in compromise benefiting the community. Hobbes argued something like this in the 17th Century, although like Plato in “The Republic,” he was arguing for the imperative of a King.
Possibly because of my ideological silo, I think President Trump is imagining himself as King. I began this Viewpoint before Trump blamed the airport crash in DC on DEI initiatives, claimed USAID spent millions to send condoms to the people in Gaza, insisted that President Zelenskyy was responsible for Russian invading Ukraine, ambushed President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in an embarrassing attempt to show the world how tough he, President Trump, is.
I don’t know where to go from here. As the 2025 narrative has unfolded, I have located the centrality of my belief system in democracy, grounded in a government that works for all of us, not primarily for the billionaires at the expense of the working and underprivileged social classes.
Maybe I can encourage a conversation by describing value-systems I think I might share with my friends who voted for Trump.
Work to support our community. When our self-interest conflicts with the community, we should go with community.
Pay attention to the teachings of prophets like Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha: Love over hate, welcome strangers, find your inner peace through empathy with others.
Avoid the love of power and conquest.
Confirm that all people are created equal.
Insist that nations should not invade other nations.
Based on this value-system, I want to create a space in which readers who either support Trump OR disagree with his policies can describe their responses to questions on government preferences, the role of wealth in policy-making, voting patterns, and the invasion of Ukraine. I will review the results of this survey in a subsequent Viewpoint.
Here is the link to the survey: https://tinyurl.com/DNRquery
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