Shades of Purple

It looks like Ilya Shapiro has come up with the notion of Purple Politics, as well, although his version varies somewhat from mine. Marc Comtois summarizes Shapiro:

I'm pretty confident that Shapiro is a Libertarian, and that is what he means by being not RED or BLUE but PURPLE. A mix of both, the classic fiscal conservative, social liberal, but not a moderate. I'm sure we differ on various issues, but the larger point is that those of us who like our "culture" sometimes risk a bit of harassment from those who share our fundamental political beliefs, which in turn cause fits of near-apoplectic disbelief among our colleagues in academia or "society." I think being part of Purple America is fun, myself. It's fun not being easily pigeonholed, after all.

The gap that Marc uncovers by tagging Shapiro as a libertarian is — if libertarians who read this will forgive me a generalization — typical of folks of that persuasion. It's often a self-congratulatory ideology... truth through contrarianism... the best of both worlds... thought of a higher order. As Shapiro puts it:

In the wake of the 2000 presidential election, one of the most bitter, close, and bizarrely concluded votes in American history, the colors became an important part of socio-political discourse in this "50-50 nation." Yet we are finally starting to transcend them. Purple Americans, among others, defy political and cultural stereotypes, and thus confound the conventional wisdom of the media, pollsters, and pundits.

Unfortunately, thorough thinkers can't long straddle this line. In an attempt to do so, Shapiro puts Red and Blue in entirely different aspects of life — values and tastes, respectively:

I gather that I am not alone in sensing a certain disconnect between my cultural and political affinities. That is, I am a cosmopolitan conservative, residing in that nebulous region distrusted by both coastal elites and the populist sages of the heartland, Purple America.

Purple America is not so much a place as an idea, or more precisely a confluence of values from Red America with tastes from Blue America. It believes in personal responsibility, discipline, civil society, spontaneous order, ordered liberty, and that the best thing government can do is not get in the way. Yet it craves independent films, fine cigars, Belgian ales, and South American fútbol -- along with a good baseball game (preferably without the designated hitter).

Phrased like this, of course it's possible to see a blend as not only possible, but preferable, as the marriage of good sense and good taste. But Red and Blue aren't defined thus. Although I can't currently find it, I've linked, in the recent past, to an essay arguing that the schism of fine tastes from common values is a relatively modern event in our country.

Not too long ago, the elite would have been among the pews with the average folk. Elites might have preferred wine to beer while having a picnic, but both blue and white collars would have been found beneath faces frowning upon certain lusts being indulged in the bushes. It reduces conservatives to rough buffoons to believe that, as a class, they reject high culture as high culture, not because it is currently served with a subtext that they find abhorrent.

Red and Blue are all about values, not whether one privileges values. This is where Shapiro's separated feet start to slip away from the line:

[Purple America] couldn't care less who sleeps with whom where, just that its tax dollars aren't used to subsidize or photograph the event. ...

Purple America demands independent creativity grounded in a solid moral core, and its inhabitants develop an inevitably thick skin, being attacked for its Godless "hedonism" on one side and its politically incorrect "insensitivity" on the other.

Does he demand a solid moral core, or does he not care whether people behave morally? When he proceeds to give examples, he reverts to the values/fashion distinction; "Godless 'hedonism'" isn't an accusation generally thrown at people who wear Italian clothing. Now, I haven't read enough of Shapiro's work to make concrete statements from my limited observation within this one piece, but it seems to me that he overlooks the deeper differences between the sides in the culture war.

There are real disagreements about values, and what makes each stereotype accurate, in its way, is that those values are applied across a range of issues more or less consistently. For example, in the conservative view, it matters what people do, whether or not it is federally subsidized. Shapiro apparently empathizes, because he claims on behalf of Purple America belief "in personal responsibility, discipline, civil society, spontaneous order, ordered liberty, and that the best thing government can do is not get in the way." Yet he apparently wishes to deny a practical consequence of that collection of principles: that some other structure than government must ensure responsibility, discipline, and so on. Believing in small government doesn't mean that we can "care less," but that we must care more.

The danger, a particularly libertarian one, of seeking to transcend the political order is that it leaves one with no independent ground on which to stand. Those who fall prey to the temptation are no less easily pigeonholed for the fact that they are floating.