We don’t out fight conservatives. We out create them.

This post is my answer to the political battles of the last 12 months. To Brexit, to Trump, to the resurgent racist #AltRight, and most of all to a kind of conservatism that I do not see as an enemy, but which seems to see me as one. But it doesn’t quite begin there.

I’m a writer, and the essay is one of my favourite forms. I love storytelling the most, but there’s also a need in this world to speak plainly about what we think. My best essay to date was published three years ago by Aeon magazine. Entitled “Sparks Will Fly”, it was an essay about what I call “Creator Culture”, the idea that technology and social progress are making all of us, instead of passive consumers, active creators.

That essay was brought back to my mind this week with the publication of a new and rather fine audio edition. Listening to this new narration, I realised that my essay of a few years ago had already answered, in part, the political realities I find myself chewing over today.

I write to understand. I write because, until I go through the disciplined process of composing disparate ideas into a coherent argument, I don’t truly know what my position is. Through the summer of Brexit and Trump I thought through a number of written responses. Most weren’t trying to understand. They were a call to arms. A fight-them-on-the beaches rhetoric, certainly a feeling many liberals hold today. But I don’t think fighting conservatism is ever the answer. Instead, we need to out create it.

Conservatism is not a creative ideology. It relies, always, for growth and new energy, on liberalism. Five centuries ago, not torturing people to death was the new liberal idea on the block, along with the Earth not being flat. Conservatives were outraged. They always are. But deep down conservatives know they are always doomed to lose, because the the only true alternative to growth and change, is stasis and death.

“the strains on our social order created by high speed progress are the core of 2016’s many political conundrums”

In political terms 2016 grew out of two problems. The less serious, but more dramatic, is the huge new influence of crazed demagogues in our political system. Nigel Farage and Brexit, Donald Trump, Steve Bannon’s Breitbart, the various petty agitators conglomerated as the #AltRight, and their early cultural indicators like Gamergate and the Sad Puppies, are all the same problem. Social media empowers demagogues, and the left has a few of its own to admit to (Michael Moore, Oliver Stone and Adam Curtis, I’m looking at you…and anyone on the left who repeats the junk they put out without questioning it.)

But these demagogues are exploiting a deeper and far more serious problem, of which they are only one of many symptoms. It’s an age old social conflict, from which many of humankind’s greatest achievements, and worst failures, have sprung. We’ve had these same arguments at every stage of social growth, from the transition from hunter-gatherer to agrarian society,  to the emergence of industrialism, capitalism and of course communism. Today this struggle is out of control, and causing serious problems.

On one had we have the forces of social progress, most often championed in Liberalism. On the other hand we have the forces of social cohesion, represented in bulk by Conservatism. I choose to call the goal of conservatives “cohesion” because I think it’s important, actually essential, to acknowledge that the basic aim of conservatives – a stable social order – is not in and of itself a bad thing. And that the strains on our social order created by high speed progress are at the core of 2016’s many political conundrums.

What are people really saying when they talk about wanting manufacturing jobs back? Well, in large part they just a want a stable work life, that allows time with their family and friends. Instead, increasingly, we have debt fuelled lives, insecure jobs with crazy work hours, and crumbling family relationships. I’m sure everyone recognises that new reality, and feels a little grief at least for the losses. Nearly all of us can react in deeply conservative ways, when change places our basic happiness at risk.

“For decades, technology and globalization have made us more productive and connected. This has created many benefits, but for a lot of people it has also made life more challenging. This has contributed to a greater sense of division than I have felt in my lifetime. We need to find a way to change the game so it works for everyone.” Mark Zuckerberg

The balance between liberal progressive ideals, and conservative calls for social stability, must be a constant negotiation. Neither position is right, they are forces that must be forever balanced and rebalanced. That negotiation has, in recent decades, collapsed into polarised, partisan name calling, around increasingly illogical positions on both left and right. This failure allows the worst aspects of both sides, the demagogues, racists, regressives, bigots and outright criminals, to flourish.

Fighting conservatives won’t re-establish that negotiation. And, let’s be honest here, liberal progress is not achieved through conflict. Activism, of course, plays a part. But it has never been the primary tool of social progress, because it so eaily becomse self-defeating, unleashing exactly the forces of anger and hopelessness that liberal progress must stand against. Instead, liberal progress has a much more powerful tool.