What I Love About Liberals

More fun, better music, endless curiosity: they'll always be my tribe, even if I'm a black sheep

I’m in a strange position. See if you can relate: my values are unfashionably traditional, but my lifestyle is urban and cosmopolitan. I write and worry endlessly about the need for roots, family, and tradition, but my reference frame is global, even rootless. Although I attend Mass religiously (no pun there), my orientation to the world is, well, open. I like learning new languages, eating new foods, doing adrenaline-juicing stuff.¹

In other words, I’m a liberal personality pursuing a conservative life.

I didn’t choose this schizoid state of being. When the Great Awokening swept over the NPR-listening, college-educated, Jared Diamond–reading Smart People I’d always considered my own tribe, conservative ideas started looking more appealing. Before long, I found that religion and traditional values provided a much stabler, more satisfying life than the one I’d known as a rootless liberal.

But I’m still the same person. I enjoy novelty and travel. I score scarily high in openness to new experience, a personality trait that strongly predicts liberal political values. Socially, I’ve always continued to gravitate toward artists, poets, intellectuals, and other oddballs. Stereotypically “conservative” pastimes, like watching football or, I don’t know, fishing, are only “meh” levels of appealing.

So my values and my personality are on different wavelengths. This means doing a lot of weird dancing around values questions at parties. It also means dealing with some loneliness. A lot of progressive artists and academics simply don’t want to be friends with someone who attends Mass and thinks that maybe no-fault divorce wasn’t such a great idea. I’ve paid a social (and professional) price for going traditional. It can be a bummer.

Yet because of my personality, I still enjoy being around my original people, the earnest, NPR-listening² liberal-progressives who formed my baseline community, the bedrock of my social existence, for the first 30 years of my life. I can’t just cut my losses and content myself with a conservative-only social circle. That would crush my spirit like a Sumo wrestler sitting on a poodle. Progressives just have too many charming numerous virtues, even if these are sometimes the obverse side of their weaknesses.

Let me tell you about some of the traits I love about the friends and loved ones whose worldview I abandoned but who will always be my native tribe.

1. Liberals are better at (my kind of) fun.

Hands down, many of the best parties I’ve been to have been thrown by people who would, if they could, overthrow both capitalism and the government of the United States in the same night. The combination of openness, zest, and — in many cases — rootlessness drives liberal-minded young people (and older ones too) to experiment with everything and want to go everywhere and be practically addicted to meeting new people. There’s a buzz in the air when you bring a lot of these people into one house or bar and crank up the music.

For me, it’s easy to mingle at these parties. You just step into the swirl and get swept into eager, animated conversations about anything and everything: what it’s like to learn classical Chinese, the unsung history of the telegraph, the enormous but unrecognized influence the Boston band the Pixies exerted on rock music in the 1990s. Whatever. Just avoid talking politics, and you’ll have a blast.

2. Liberals like to talk about Big Ideas.

On the same note, the liberals in my life are overwhelmingly more likely to gush about a Book They’ve Recently Read than conservatives are. Whether it’s Jared Diamond in the 2000s, Malcolm Gladwell or Thomas Piketty in the mid-2010s, or Robin DiAngelo or Yuval Harari in the early 2020s, liberals love the buzz of encountering Big Picture ideas that purport to explain wide swathes of the world and human experience in a single fell swoop.

The fact that these books always eventually turn out to be flawed or myopic in some important way is part of the fun. It means that there’s always another Big Idea book, buzzy and popular, to talk about at the next party.

This habit can, of course, occasionally have unpleasant collateral effects. Robin DiAngelo’s explain-everything-with-a-single-over-leveraged-idea version of toxic antiracism spread across the nation via earnest book clubs hosted by white, college-educated liberals. This wouldn’t happen if conservatives ran book clubs. But this is only because conservatives don’t run book clubs. At least not ones about the latest Big Idea.

By and large, conservatives just aren’t as interested in that glorious satori moment when a speculative idea seems to suddenly make sense of a million disconnected facts about the universe.

So if you enjoy asking “what if” questions and gobbling up facts about everything from medieval economies to civilizational collapses to the prospects for green energy, your best bet is to find some local liberals, make overtures, and befriend them. Then you can invite them to parties at your house and proceed to happily discuss the latest Big Idea books while eating unpronounceable hors d’oeuvres.³

3. Liberals like science (or at least Science™).

The kind of person who gushes about the latest upper-middlebrow Big Idea book is also, basically by default, the same person who has always just Read About a Study and wants to tell you about it. Liberals are the overwhelming majority of subscribers to pop-science astronomy magazines and perusers of the New York Times Sunday “Science” section, guzzling up tidbits to haul out for shared examination during conversation. Discussing the latest science is an important social connection ritual for liberals, much like elaborate mating dances are for crested grebes.

By contrast, conservatives are, on average, simply less jazzed by science on an intellectual level. They might think that a new technological advance is cool. They might be grateful that medical technology works when they need a surgeon. But it’s rare that a bunch of conservatives gather in an excited little clot in the corner at a party to discuss the latest findings from CERN.

Much of this difference is psychological. In addition to openness, liberals tend to score more highly in a construct psychologists call “need for cognition,” or the tendency to enjoy effortful thinking. Liberals also generally have more reflective cognitive styles, meaning that they think analytically and question intuitions more than conservatives do.⁴ Conservatives, by contrast, have a stronger need for cognitive closure (a preference for simple answers that arrest the process of inquiry).

Also — controversially, but it seems to just be true — liberals really are on average slightly more intelligent than conservatives.

Psychologically, then, liberals are people who enjoy thinking, who are curious, and who are open to new topics (if not always new ideas). These are the ideal traits for many kinds of scientists — and for consumers of pop science. So as my life has grown more conservative and traditional-ish, I’ve found to my dismay that I simply find myself wandering into fewer spontaneous conversations about, well, CERN than I used to. I don’t spend as many hours gawping into the dark abyss of time, looking at eerie fossils in museums with others, enjoying the vertigo of imagining the countless eons before humans. I sort of miss that kind of thing.

4. Liberals are crunchy hikers.

The emphasis I’ve put so far on personality and cognitive types runs the risk of depicting liberals as a generic bloc, a sort of absolute social type that could be found anywhere, in any culture. That’s probably true to a certain point — if ideology is partly based on personality, then there are probably Inuit and Dari “liberals” just as there are BaYaka and Berber “conservatives.”

But I’m writing from a particular point in space and history, and the sort of American liberal-progressives I’m writing about in this essay are essentially crypto-Yankees — the idealistic, enlightened, public radio–supporting, Subaru-driving heirs of New England reformism and Puritanism, of Thoreau and Whitman. Whether they’re white or black, Jewish or Gentile, Californians or Vermonters today, this cosmopolitan tribe’s cultural roots are firmly planted in the utopian soils of the 19th-century American northeast.

And it’s from the proto-hippies of 19th-century New England that we inherit the modern liberal passion for hiking, granola, and the outdoors. For wilderness. Thoreau and the Transcendentalists saw the unclimbed mountain or the lonely pond as a wellspring of spiritual nourishment, not a wasteland. Thank God for them. Without them, there’d be no REI today.

Before the 19th century, Western cultures hadn’t really seen wilderness as a destination, per se. Most people worked outdoors as farmers or serfs or whatever, but they didn’t go hang out for fun in the wilderness. Wilderness was something you beat back with a stick or flattened with a plough.

But for Thoreau and the other ancestors of today’s granola-eating hikers,⁵ loving nature for nature’s sake was a natural extension of the modern view from nowhere that had captured the Enlightenment and Romantic imaginations. Suddenly, the value of the outdoors wasn’t contingent on whether we could wring anything valuable out of it. The wilderness wasn’t about us. Tiny ants against the greatness of Nature, we began to revel in our smallness.

There’s a direct line, then, from the sublime 19th-century Hudson River School paintings, with their hulking, enormous mountains overshadowing the tiny humans somewhere in the corner of the canvas, and national park trailheads crowded with Subarus and hikers today. Liberals love the outdoors for many of the same reasons they love science: both help create, and make meaning out of, the modern vertigo of living in a world where we’re not the center.

Albert Bierstadt, “Cho-looke, the Yosemite Fall.” Today this location is a gravel parking lot filled with Subarus

So when I say “outdoors,” I don’t mean it the way Republican-voting hunters or ATV drivers mean the outdoors. Their outdoors smells like gunsmoke and gasoline, and it sounds like a NASCAR rally. Fine for them, I guess. Our outdoors — and here I mean the liberal outdoors — smells like water-wicking Patagonia jackets and DEET-free bug repellent. It sounds like the soft click of fiberglass poles on granite. It tastes like gorp. And it feels like home.

5. The Music. It’s So Good

Cultural conservatives like to think of themselves as preservers of tradition and continuity, but what are they preserving? It’s not always obvious. The 1950s? Lukewarm bourgeois Protestantism? Pretenders to the Hapsburg throne? Who knows?

One thing they strangely don’t preserve, though, is folk music. The hippies cornered that market in the 1960s, and really good popular music has been a reserve of the crunchy cultural left ever since. And not just folk music — the endlessly creative iterations of authentic American musical styles, from rock n’ roll to outlaw country to underground hip-hop, have all been dominated by men and women of the left from their origins to today.⁶

But let’s stick with folk music. All music begins as folk music, after all. The glorious melodies that pervade the orchestral works of world-class composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams or Aaron Copland often originated as country melodies among the humble people of the British Isles or the early United States. The 1960s folk revivals on both sides of the pond turned up further treasure troves of popular melodies and lyrics.

In a stroke of genius, a pair of lefty Yankee Quakers then gathered up many of these gems and, along with hundreds of other American folk songs, gospel tunes, and prairie, rural, and urban immigrant ditties, printed them in a delightfully countercultural volume called Rise Up Singing.

It’s difficult to describe how precious a resource this little songbook is. You gather in circles with other NPR listeners and sing songs from the Second Great Awakening about Jesus. You sing African-American resistance songs like Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, then gamely attempt to muddle your way through old British rounds until everyone forgets where they are in their part and trails off or collapses into giggles. I can’t think of anywhere else such a diverse range of authentically traditional music is still sung in a single room.

Another example of the liberal American genius for preserving earthy music is shape note singing. This a cappella style originated as worship hymnody for extremely low-church (and not at all liberal) Protestants whose theology forbade the use of instruments, but who nevertheless desired to make a truly stupendous amount of noise. It uses a simplified musical notation with shapes instead of notes to make it easier for non-experts to read. The music is based on haunting vocal harmonies and — did I mention this? — extremely loud singing.

Shape note is an authentic folk-American product, a precious piece of our continent’s ridiculously rich musical heritage. And today in North America it’s mostly sung by only two groups: 1) fervent, low-church Protestants in tiny wooden churches in the South, and 2) folky crypto-Yankee hipsters and hippie elders in and around large cities. Guess which major party the latter group usually votes for?

If you go to a folk music festival in upstate New York or rural California, you’ll spend days immersed in some of the most beautiful traditional music in the world. You’ll also be completely surrounded by ambling mobs of good-natured peacenik anti-nuclear activists and granola-munching hikers. Many of the Subarus crammed in the open-field parking areas will sport “Coexist” bumper stickers and pride progress flags.

You definitely don’t want to talk about politics at these festivals. At least I don’t. But who wants to go to a folk music festival to talk politics anyway? There’s another shape note workshop to go to. Under a tent that smells like sweat and essential oils. Surrounded by people wearing tie-dye.

Sorry, but you can’t get that in any conservative backyard barbecue.

The Meeting of Opposites

There are certain places you just don’t expect to find traditionalist Catholics mooching around. For example, music festivals where the median attendee’s political location, if “1” is super-progressive and “10” is ultra-conservative, is -4. But there I am.

Twenty years ago, the conservative commentator Rod Dreher wrote about “crunchy cons,” traditionalists who maybe voted Republican but who shopped for organic food or dropped out of the rat race to raise chickens on experimental farms. Well, my wife and I haven’t started a farm (yet), but I guess that’s me.

I grew up in the progressive-liberal subculture whose politics I’ve abandoned. But even if my natal family had been straight-laced Republicans who forced me into semiweekly crew cuts, I would probably have migrated to the crunchy liberal world eventually in adulthood. Because my settings are liberal. Openness to new experience, love of excitement and strange music, intellectual orientation: I didn’t have a chance of making it in the mainstream conservative world.

In fact, I’m glad I grew up in the liberal-progressive bubble, because I might never have gravitated toward the Church otherwise. One facet of openness to experience is resistance to authority. I was probably going to rebel against whatever I was given. By God’s grace, I was given naïve utopian hippiedom, so that my own bloody-mindedness could lead me to something deeper, older, and truer.

It’s still dicey, continually bumping around awkwardly in crunchy, bohemian spaces, nervous that I’ll be outed as Literally Hitler. I keep coming back, though, for the tremendous gifts these spaces steward — gifts that are mostly unappreciated by the conservatives whose worldview I probably more closely resonate with.

But I guess that’s another double-sided gift of being constitutionally liberal. Liberalism prioritizes the liminal, the in-between places and the fringes. Conservatism is by definition not the liminal, not fringe. Yet in today’s context, liberal-souled people who commit to conservative values or do absurd things like convert to traditional Christianity can wind up playing the most liminal part of all. Caught between worlds, not fully comfortable in either, hoping to somehow mash together the best of both in a dialectical synthesis,⁷ we end up as a meeting place of opposites.

I guess I wouldn’t have it any other way.

1. I recently ate, for reasons I won’t go into here, giant fried grubs, for example. On the same trip that required me to eat bugs, I got parasites (not from the grubs), and I returned to the United States 10 pounds lighter, my immune system in a low-grade panic. This is not typical behavior for suburban American conservatives.

2. For as long as there still is an NPR, anyway…

3. Disclaimer: Big Idea books are, of course, less sophisticated than actual literature, the classics, or the Bible. The minority of conservatives who are intellectually oriented tend to read and talk about these kinds of books rather than the latest buzzy New York Times-bestselling doorstopper. I’m lucky to be friends with many of this sort of conservative.

4. At least on tests administered by liberal psychologists.

5. Which includes the German Romantics who inspired Emerson and Thoreau.

6. The obvious exception is non-outlaw country, which does seem to attract Republican types. And a lot of it is genuinely rooted in the soils of popular American folk musical traditions, evokes rural and pastoral imagery, and excites romantic attachment to place and history — all while relying heavily on the driving beats American popular music inherited from Africa.

7. Ugh, I can’t believe I’m ending this post with Hegel.