To understand American democratic society is to understand how liberalism and conservatism apply citizenship to individual rights.
Although they have had different party affiliations throughout America’s history, as I describe in Why did the Parties Switch to Conservative & Liberal?, today, the Democratic Party represents liberalism and the Republicans, conservatism.
Liberalism, as practiced by the Democratic Party, recognizes that diverse groups can strengthen our democracy. However, liberalism, as an economic philosophy, emphasizes individuals’ right to control their property as they wish, aligning with conservative beliefs. This is an example of how both philosophies hold sometimes competing beliefs.
Liberals have always protected individualism, dating back to the influence of the Enlightenment on our nation’s founders. It began with the right of individuals to interpret the Bible directly without being interpreted by the Roman Catholic Church or a monarch.
Conservatives supported the status quo; in the Middle Ages, it was to abide by the distribution of power and rights. Part of that orientation was to align with the local community’s beliefs and prejudices.
Liberals, not conservatives, believe individuals should have equal rights across all communities. That extension allows greater participation in determining government policies. Broadening citizenship is a step toward creating a universal democracy rather than one stratified by groups having different rights.
Liberalism has amended the Constitution to accommodate the needs of individuals in unrepresented communities. Consequently, liberals have been more successful than conservatives in altering America’s society. Expanding citizenship rights to new communities is a prominent conservative concern in the twenty-first century, but it stretches back over a hundred years.
Diversification allowed three huge communities to be eligible to vote.
President Andrew Jackson opened the gate to diversity by changing how we select our national representatives. He was the first major presidential candidate to call for “universal” suffrage, ending the property requirements that barred small landholding, mainly white male farmers, from voting.
Jackson gave rise to the Democratic Party by allowing white males to vote regardless of whether they lacked property in various states. Jackson’s efforts pushed voting participation from 360,000 in 1824 to 1.2 million in 1828. It enabled him to win the presidency after losing it by a close margin in the prior election.
However, that process was not completed within all states until 1856 when, in effect, all white men, including migrants and transients, had the right to vote. The 1860 election of Lincoln saw a total of 4.7 million voters. In the space of two generations, voting increased by a thousand percent. Our Civil War immediately followed, which ushered in the second major step to diversify American citizenship: ending slavery and allowing Black citizens to vote.
Like Jackson, Abraham Lincoln campaigned for the presidency in 1864 by endorsing a radical new idea. He supported a constitutional amendment that would override states’ sovereignty by abolishing slavery throughout the country. After Lincoln won, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, doing just that.
However, it took another five years for all the states to ratify it. Even before it was ratified, the margin of General Grant’s popular majority vote in 1868 to become president resulted from winning a high percentage of the half-million newly enfranchised black men. He won reelection in 1872, with his popular vote increasing by half a million. Grant won over half of the old Confederate states, with Black citizens able to vote in the reconstructed Confederate states.
The last significant diversity occurred when women gained the right to vote with the 19th Amendment in 1920. However, women’s suffrage took 72 years to achieve, beginning in 1848 with the Seneca Falls Convention, the first public gathering to advocate for women’s rights.
The 1920 election saw Republican and Democratic Party conventions endorse the Susan B. Anthony (woman suffrage) Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. However, the Republican Party was the liberal party, promoting the suffragette movement to amend the constitution before the Democrats.
Consequently, Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding lobbied the last state to ratify it just months before election day. Harding won, his vote tally doubling that of the previous Republican presidential candidate. This was likely due to a huge wave of new women voters. The total votes cast in the 1920 election exceeded the 1916 total by 8 million votes, a 40% increase.
Conservatives failed to stop diversity.
The ultimate form of diversity is expanding citizenship among a diverse population. Conservatives have continuously opposed this expansion because it could disrupt the political system dominated by the community they represent. While their reasons have varied, their core objective has been to conserve the culture and resources of this community. By protecting the rights of the existing dominant group, conservatives restrict the rights of individuals not part of that group.
Before the move to broaden our citizenship, our government was generally controlled by the largest community – property-owning white males. This was the standard arrangement for European countries, adapted to establish the United States of America.
Our country’s founders believed that property ownership was a strong indicator of the virtue necessary to participate in a new democratic government. This new expanded form of government shifted ruling from a monarch, most beholden to the landed gentry and the most prominent commercial and financial families, to a much broader base of people owning property who elected a leader from among them.
Our democracy adjusted and strengthened as our population changed through immigration, the expansion of land, and population growth. Diversity in citizenship made that transition possible, expanding in three stages by admitting all white males, all males regardless of race, and all women as equal citizens.
These transitions took decades – at least four for extending legal citizenship to all males and over double that for women. Although Amendments were passed to allow all citizens to vote, conservative-endorsed obstacles still hinder voting access for some.
However, individual rights extend far beyond equal access to the ballot box. They are about the freedom to live a full life without trampling on the rights of others. Finding this balance is at the heart of our cultural war over how individuals can exercise their freedoms in America as a single, open culture.
Why MAGA Conservatives fear diversity.
MAGA conservatives fear diversity will endanger their rights because it legitimizes behavior that deviates from America’s established White dominant culture.
Liberals support individuals accessing abortion, recognizing institutional racial discrimination, allowing for gender identification, tolerating non-traditional marriages, and respecting different religious principles. Conservatives see these beliefs and practices as anti-American because Conservatives define America as their community.
Two leading conservatives describe individual freedoms wholly within the context of being a proper American and not diverting from conservative values.
Kevin Roberts is the President of The Heritage Foundation, which created and spent $22 million to staff and write the Presidential Transition Project 2025 report that Trump is proceeding to enact. Roberts wrote that the federal government, “must protect and promote the values that most Americans espouse and to “revive—marriage and family, church and community, private enterprise and public spirit.” He then ties “the rights of the individual” to “the virtue of local communities” and “the centrality of the family.”
Those are beliefs anyone is free to express in America. But Roberts goes one step further. He says “we”, meaning the majority of Americans, need to figuratively burn down federal “institutions like the Department of Homeland Security, the EPA, the Federal Reserve, the FBI, the Department of Education.” Adding that they are the enemy and “function as anti-American, anti-constitutional predators. They cannot be negotiated with or accommodated. They must be defunded, disbanded, and disempowered.”
Roberts makes no direct mention of stopping DEI or opposing diversity training, but Trump is following Project 2025 by attacking these institutions as spreading hate against America through DEI.
Michael Shellenberger founded the conservative Substack publication Public and is a journalist and book author. He uses classic liberalism to promote meritocracy as an antidote to DEI manipulating Whites to feel guilty about their heritage. He writes, “They love America. They built America as the greatest nation because of individual initiative. The Democrats just want to tear down that image, tear it down as a flawed myth.”
Shellenberger appeals to the “common sense” underlying the anti-DEI movement, that individual responsibility rewards achievement based on personal effort and ability rather than external factors like inheritance or race. This line of reasoning acknowledges no immense wealth being passed from one generation to another or institutions that have and continue to discriminate based on color.
His position reflects what Trump said in a Time Magazine interview, “I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country and that can’t be allowed either.”
Shellenberger is more direct: “The big idea behind DEI programs is that white people, all white people, are responsible for the bad behaviors of a few white people in the past, and they are uniquely advantaged, or ‘privileged.”
Liberals must link diversity to protecting individual liberties.
Democrats must expose the Republicans’ “illiberal” crusade against diversity as a threat to dismantle our commonly shared belief that we all should have the freedom to exercise rights that are not bound or enhanced by belonging to any group.
Those rights have been extended for over 150 years by expanding who can vote. Similarly, individual rights in choosing how to live peacefully with others must continue to develop for the next 150 years as our society changes.
Republicans’ assault on diversity, as exemplified in attacking DEI programs, does not protect the dominant white and traditional family culture. It is a distraction from obtaining a more informed and caring citizenry.
Understanding our collective history does not elevate the status of Blacks and other minorities above that of Whites. It does not undermine the nuclear male and female marriages by upholding LGBTQ rights.
If presented properly and respectfully, the message of obtaining and sustaining equal citizenship across all communities is at the heart of liberal and Democrats’ efforts. That effort can build trust across communities and not feed the anxiety we all feel about change.
Thank you, Nick… for the perspective and insight.
Ethnic and racial discrimination is a universal problem that will always crop up here and there, but slavery in the US left us with a festering sore that has few equals. That’s what this is really about, isn’t it? At its root.
Conservatives have sure run away from the problem all along. Liberals can feel somewhat self righteous about this, but they’ve done the next thing to giving up: they’ve pursued policies that haven’t worked, and not letting that reality deter them.
Have they worked? I mean, for decades, institutions at every level have dutifully followed directions, hiring policies, university admissions, curricula. Are black people living the life now? No. They’re better educated, but other than that.
The civil rights advances in the ’60s were real. But liberals stuck with that playbook after it stopped working, because they weren’t radical enough to step up to the other real problem, in the economic structure itself.
The civil rights initiatives in the ’50s and ’60s were necessary. Eisenhower wasn’t any liberal, he was just honest about what had to be done, whether there was or was not real popular consensus on the matter. That has become too much the liberal model in following decades – less and less concern for popular consensus, vs. the dictates of their liberal conscience. Conservative politicians have opted out of any constructive role, and here we are.
Diversity and inclusion are healthy, but it has to be real. It can’t be very effectively imposed by fiat, so the only way to the get there is to address underlying problems in society. Conservatives won’t tell you that, because radical change is not their thing. The liberal establishment won’t tell you that, because they have linked arms in solidarity with their program and anyone who questions it is justifying racism. Americans are caught in the middle – stuck with a policy approach they despise that isn’t working, while conservatives have only denial as an alternative. I hope we bounce back to the other side next election, but when will we see real progress?