The U.S. refugee and asylee population paid $63 billion more in taxes than they received in benefits to all levels of government from 2005 to 2014.
— U.S Department of Health and Human Services
The overriding impact of immigrants is to strengthen and enrich American culture, increase the total output of the economy, and raise the standard of living of American citizens.
— David Bier and Alex Nowrasteh, Cato Institute
Embracing cultural distance, cultural-distance nationalism, means, in effect, taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites.
— Amy Wax, University of Penn Law School Professor; Graduate of Yale, Harvard Medical School, and Columbia Law School
Values are a society’s collective ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, desirable and undesirable behaviors.
Values can be descriptive, simply telling what is, or aspirational, reflecting who we want to be.
The documents that our Founding Fathers drafted and adopted in forming our government included many compromises, mostly bridging conservative and liberal positions and beliefs.
At this point, 230 years later, we see more of a partisan distribution, where common ground has become much harder to find.
Stereotypes have the effect of widening the divide. Claiming that sanctuary cities love terrorists, or that all Republicans love assault rifles, is clearly inaccurate. Further, they make dialog, and the search for common ground, much more difficult to reach.
The three quotations above show that unanticipated perspectives can be found across that divide. The conservative Cato Institute affirmed the valuable contributions of immigrants, while a white nationalist position is espoused by an Ivy League university faculty member.
Briefly exploring three pairs of conflicting American values can illustrate and help us examine some of the complexities of who we have been, who we are now, and who we want to be. These are:
• Personal achievement and Humanitarianism
• Equality and Race
• Religious faith and Individual freedom
Personal Achievement and Humanitarianism
During his eight years in office, beginning in January 2011, Republican Representative Sean Duffy, of Wisconsin’s large, rural 7th Congressional District, voted repeatedly to destroy Obamacare. He also voted for a 2017 bill that would have made insurance coverage less available and/or more expensive for those with pre-existing conditions and voted against the Protecting Americans with Preexisting Conditions Act of 2019.
In September 2019, Duffy announced that he was going to retire from Congress, and that part of his planning was to make sure that his family had coverage for his about-to-be-born daughter’s anticipated open-heart surgery — that is, they will have and use medical insurance coverage, insurance that covers preexisting conditions, which is available to him and his family because of Obamacare.
Duffy grew happy to lean on the safety net offered by a [liberally sponsored] government program in order to get the help that he, or any other family, might need when encountering conditions beyond their personal control. That’s a more constructive way to look at what could otherwise simply be dismissed as hypocrisy.
Reaching for the American Dream
The American Dream has been described as the opportunity for personal achievement that enables people to move above the economic level they were born into. Success that is based on one’s efforts, rather than on rank or riches of family, is strongly valued by conservatives. And it’s respected by liberals.
A larger structure often needs to be in place for such personal successes to be possible, as, for example, the truck driver who needs and uses the roads built by the government in order to build and sustain a successful trucking company.
A child may be born with a disease that require resources beyond those available to most families. Having the resources of a collective governmental program that cares for those who are not able to care for themselves is important to liberals. And it’s drawn upon by conservatives.
Some suggest that such aid can be abused by those not willing to do their own hard work. Some others will point out that, while some at the lower end of the spectrum may cheat by hiding a bit of income in order to qualify for assistance, the major fraud cases are those in which members of the medical community lie via phantom and fraudulent billing in order to collect millions of dollars for non-provided medical services.
An apocryphal tale has two parts that highlight some of the fallacies of each position if taken to an extreme:
A man is drowning 50 feet from the end of a dock.
A conservative rescuer on the dock sees the man and calls out: “I have 25 feet of rope here. You need to swim the first 25 feet on your own, and then I’ll throw you the rope for the rest of the way.”
[Liberals may be heard laughing here.]
A liberal rescuer on the dock sees the same drowning man and generously throws 75 feet of rope out to him. Then the rescuer drops his end of the rope and goes off to see who else he can help.
[Conservatives may be heard laughing here.]
Perhaps we can all find a more balanced perspective in Georgia’s state motto: “Wisdom, justice, and moderation.”
What Are America’s Real Values
The U.S. refugee and asylee population paid $63 billion more in taxes than they received in benefits to all levels of government from 2005 to 2014.
— U.S Department of Health and Human Services
The overriding impact of immigrants is to strengthen and enrich American culture, increase the total output of the economy, and raise the standard of living of American citizens.
— David Bier and Alex Nowrasteh, Cato Institute
Embracing cultural distance, cultural-distance nationalism, means, in effect, taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites.
— Amy Wax, University of Penn Law School Professor; Graduate of Yale, Harvard Medical School, and Columbia Law School
Values are a society’s collective ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, desirable and undesirable behaviors.
Values can be descriptive, simply telling what is, or aspirational, reflecting who we want to be.
The documents that our Founding Fathers drafted and adopted in forming our government included many compromises, mostly bridging conservative and liberal positions and beliefs.
At this point, 230 years later, we see more of a partisan distribution, where common ground has become much harder to find.
Stereotypes have the effect of widening the divide. Claiming that sanctuary cities love terrorists, or that all Republicans love assault rifles, is clearly inaccurate. Further, they make dialog, and the search for common ground, much more difficult to reach.
The three quotations above show that unanticipated perspectives can be found across that divide. The conservative Cato Institute affirmed the valuable contributions of immigrants, while a white nationalist position is espoused by an Ivy League university faculty member.
Briefly exploring three pairs of conflicting American values can illustrate and help us examine some of the complexities of who we have been, who we are now, and who we want to be. These are:
• Personal achievement and Humanitarianism
• Equality and Race
• Religious faith and Individual freedom
Personal Achievement and Humanitarianism
During his eight years in office, beginning in January 2011, Republican Representative Sean Duffy, of Wisconsin’s large, rural 7th Congressional District, voted repeatedly to destroy Obamacare. He also voted for a 2017 bill that would have made insurance coverage less available and/or more expensive for those with pre-existing conditions and voted against the Protecting Americans with Preexisting Conditions Act of 2019.
In September 2019, Duffy announced that he was going to retire from Congress, and that part of his planning was to make sure that his family had coverage for his about-to-be-born daughter’s anticipated open-heart surgery — that is, they will have and use medical insurance coverage, insurance that covers preexisting conditions, which is available to him and his family because of Obamacare.
Duffy grew happy to lean on the safety net offered by a [liberally sponsored] government program in order to get the help that he, or any other family, might need when encountering conditions beyond their personal control. That’s a more constructive way to look at what could otherwise simply be dismissed as hypocrisy.
Reaching for the American Dream
The American Dream has been described as the opportunity for personal achievement that enables people to move above the economic level they were born into. Success that is based on one’s efforts, rather than on rank or riches of family, is strongly valued by conservatives. And it’s respected by liberals.
A larger structure often needs to be in place for such personal successes to be possible, as, for example, the truck driver who needs and uses the roads built by the government in order to build and sustain a successful trucking company.
A child may be born with a disease that require resources beyond those available to most families. Having the resources of a collective governmental program that cares for those who are not able to care for themselves is important to liberals. And it’s drawn upon by conservatives.
Some suggest that such aid can be abused by those not willing to do their own hard work. Some others will point out that, while some at the lower end of the spectrum may cheat by hiding a bit of income in order to qualify for assistance, the major fraud cases are those in which members of the medical community lie via phantom and fraudulent billing in order to collect millions of dollars for non-provided medical services.
An apocryphal tale has two parts that highlight some of the fallacies of each position if taken to an extreme:
A man is drowning 50 feet from the end of a dock.
A conservative rescuer on the dock sees the man and calls out: “I have 25 feet of rope here. You need to swim the first 25 feet on your own, and then I’ll throw you the rope for the rest of the way.”
[Liberals may be heard laughing here.]
A liberal rescuer on the dock sees the same drowning man and generously throws 75 feet of rope out to him. Then the rescuer drops his end of the rope and goes off to see who else he can help.
[Conservatives may be heard laughing here.]
Perhaps we can all find a more balanced perspective in Georgia’s state motto: “Wisdom, justice, and moderation.”