How to Create Your Own Political Positions
Political identity is not a political position.
Most of us can name our political identity faster than we can describe a single political position. Liberal, conservative, progressive, independent, Democrat, Republican. The label does real work. It gives us a place to stand, people to stand with, and a shorthand for dozens of questions we have never had time to answer one at a time. It also does something quieter. It answers those questions for us, and it does so without ever showing us what the questions were.
A country is a set of shared responsibilities. Land, water, food, learning, care, roads, work, protection, and the rules for how power gets used and checked. Every one of these carries its own set of choices, and our opinions about them can vary by area. We can believe that we are under-regulating our relationship with the land, so that soil is being depleted of the nutrition that made food worth eating, and believe at the same time that we are over-regulating our schools, so that teachers are shaping a year of curriculum around a standardized test rather than around the children in the room. Neither belief fits on a line from left to right. Both are positions. Together they begin to describe a person.
The rest of this piece offers a way to build positions of our own. A country is responsible for seven domains: stewardship, education, health and care, infrastructure, livelihood, safety, and governance. Inside each domain there are five things worth having an opinion about: how much capacity we want, what we constrain, who controls it, which direction it should move, and what we are willing to trade. Thirty-five decidable questions replace one label. Before we get to the map, it helps to understand how we came to need it.
Why a Therapist Is Writing About This
A fair question is why a therapist is talking this openly about politics on a therapy blog. The answer is that I am a systemic interventionist. The work I do with families is the work of finding the pattern that keeps a system stuck, tracing it upstream to its source, and changing the conditions rather than blaming the people inside them. I have spent years deconstructing our current polarization the same way, and I want to help.
That intention is not a finger wagged at all of us. It does include a claim about responsibility. For a country to round this corner, each of us will have to own our part in how it got here, and the rest of this piece is an attempt to make that part concrete. What we owe is not guilt. It is a position.
There is good news underneath the diagnosis. Polarization runs on a feedback loop, and feedback loops run in both directions. If we replace a methodology that rewards outrage with one that rewards solving, the loop begins to turn the other way, and problem-solving becomes the natural thing a country does with its attention. That belief is the whole reason for the exercise below.
The Sign Instead of the Menu
It is tempting to hand the responsibility for our polarization to politicians and the people who run their campaigns. Billions of dollars go into organizing our attention every election cycle, and the message rarely has a shape we could use. The other candidate is dangerous. Wolves are being reintroduced and will come for what we love. Someone is coming for our children. Health care, immigration, crime, and the cost of living get named, and naming is not a position. Saying “crime” is not a public safety system. Saying “health care” does not tell us what should be funded, what should be constrained, who should decide, or which costs we are willing to carry.
The clearest example is what happens to our values. Equality and justice for all is an American value, and it is the one that gets hijacked most reliably. A campaign brings up transgender athletes, and within a week no one is asking any candidate to state a viewpoint on infrastructure, education, or the land. All that is required of a candidate is something emotionally evocative. The rest of the country’s business goes quiet.
Still, that account is incomplete. We kept going back to a shitty restaurant that had no menu because the sign out front mentioned a hobby we liked. Sometimes the sign warned us that the restaurant across the street would poison our kids. Sometimes it promised the owner was one of us. On the rare occasion a menu did appear, it said something like “we serve cooked food” and “we believe drinks should be a nice temperature.” A position so abstract it cannot be disagreed with is not a position. We came back often enough that the restaurant learned it did not need to tell us what it served.
Responsibility here is shared without being equal. Campaigns, parties, donors, media companies, and platforms hold more power than any one voter. And the system learned from our attention. We clicked, we shared, we donated, and we treated opposition to the people we feared as evidence that someone was prepared to govern. Replacing the people currently in office does not by itself change the incentives that selected them. Some humble pie belongs to all of us; we allowed ourselves to be tricked, and the trick worked because it asked nothing of us.
What the Labels Were Trying to Protect
A generous reading starts by assuming the labels were not invented as team names. Each one carried a real question about what should be kept, what should change, and how shared power should be used, and each one is easier to understand once we notice which of those questions it was answering.
Conservative began as a disposition toward continuity. It asks what inherited knowledge, relationships, institutions, and traditions have proven valuable enough that changing them requires care, and it favors maintenance over reinvention because large changes can destroy functions we did not understand until they were gone. Maintenance takes control to sustain it, so the conservative instinct tends to accept a firmer hand where the thing being kept is at stake.
Progressive began as a willingness to change arrangements that preserve preventable harm. It grew up alongside industrial growth, concentrated wealth, and unsafe work, and it favors a trajectory of innovation: building new public capacity or new constraints when the existing system is producing outcomes we would not choose. It does not require enthusiasm for every new thing. A progressive position can constrain a technology when its costs land on workers, communities, or the ecology.
Liberal carries two meanings that pull in different directions, which is part of why the word confuses us. In its dictionary sense it means liberating the individual from restriction: rights, private choice, property, expression, and limits on what a government may do to a person. In its older moral sense, the one that runs through the Judeo-Christian tradition, it means liberating people from suffering: community-funded efforts against poverty, exclusion, and need. The first favors the individual over collective rule. The second favors collective investment in the individual. Both begin with freedom and disagree about what freedom requires.
Republican and Democrat are a different kind of label. They name coalitions rather than philosophies. The Republican coalition has historically been most concerned with the free market, which means favoring individual rights over collective control and preferring state and local authority to federal reach. The Democratic coalition has kept capitalism and asked what rules it needs so that it also serves the worker, which is why unions, worker protections, and social insurance have sat at its center for nearly a century. Neither coalition is one position. Each is a bundle that has been re-weighted many times.
This is why real people rarely fit their labels. A person can be conservative about family and community, progressive about technology and the economy, classically liberal about privacy and speech, and strongly collective about water, schools, and public health. Another person can favor markets and support unions, want local control of education and federal standards for clean air, or prize institutional continuity and demand rapid infrastructure innovation. None of that is confusion. Those positions answer different questions inside different domains, and that is what a position looks like.
The difficulty began when the coalitions absorbed the philosophies. A Republican conservative is asked to hold a free market, which rewards constant innovation and resists control, alongside a commitment to continuity, which asks for maintenance and the control that sustains it. A conservative progressive may hold deeply traditional values about how a family and a town should work and want the economy and its technology to move fast. Those are workable combinations once we can say which domain each value lives in. They become unworkable when the label asks us to apply one level of control, one level of constraint, and one direction of change across stewardship, education, care, infrastructure, livelihood, safety, and governance at once, without ever showing why the same setting would make sense in all seven. The transparency went away, and the coalition became the position.
Political identity compresses these choices. A political position opens them again.
An Invitation
What follows is an invitation to spend some time with our own values. Seven domains cover what a country is responsible for, and within each one there are five things worth having an opinion about. None of this asks us to become experts. It asks us to notice what we care about and how much. Some of us will find we have strong feelings about potable water and the viability of fishing across the country and no particular feelings about the fate of the armadillo, and that is information too. A position does not have to be complete to be real.
The Seven Domains
A political identity tries to answer too much at once. We need a smaller unit of thought. Seven domains give us a working map of the material responsibilities of a shared country. The categories overlap, and the overlap is a property of the world rather than a flaw in the map. Water belongs to stewardship, health, infrastructure, livelihood, and security all at once. The point of the categories is to give us somewhere to begin.
- StewardshipPreservation. Conservation and regeneration. Responsible production, including agriculture, fishing, forestry, mining, extraction, and energy.
- EducationFoundational education. Vocational, higher, and lifelong development. Research, knowledge, and civic capacity.
- Health and CarePrevention and public health. Treatment and access. Disability, aging, caregiving, and long-term support.
- Infrastructure and AccessTransportation, housing, and land use. Water, energy, waste, and utilities. Communications and public technology.
- Livelihood and Economic LifeWork, wages, and household security. Enterprise, markets, trade, and innovation. Taxation, spending, debt, and public finance.
- Safety and SecurityCommunity protection and emergency response. Defense, diplomacy, borders, and alliances. Cybersecurity, biosecurity, and systemic resilience.
- Governance and JusticeRights and equal standing. Law, process, enforcement, and recourse. Representation, administration, accountability, and institutional competence.
Governance runs through the other six, because it decides how every other decision gets made.
The Five Questions
Once we pick a domain, five questions make a position legible. Do we want a lot of control here or a little, and in whose hands? Do we want things to stay the way they are, or move, and in which direction? Together the five questions broaden what it means to support something. Support has come to mean funding, and funding is one of five moves.
What should we build, fund, staff, maintain, or make available? Do we want the minimum a society needs to survive, or a system that develops human and ecological potential? Capacity is not one dial. A country can want a large military and a small federal school system, or a vast public library and a thin public payroll.
What should we permit, prohibit, require, or regulate? Constraint has more shapes than a ban. It can be a prohibition, a requirement, a license, a standard, a disclosure, or a limit on scale. Where does freedom create something new, and where does one person’s freedom become a cost everyone else carries?
Who decides? This is where most of us have been sold a false binary. The question is not only whether the federal government regulates something or leaves it alone. Should the safety of a food additive be settled by Congress or by science? Should the look of a redeveloped Main Street be decided by an arts board, a planning department, the property owners, or a vote? Should a curriculum be shaped by a family, a school board, a state, or a profession? Should water be run by a market or a public utility? Control can sit with individuals, families, communities, professions, expertise, markets, towns, states, or the federal government, and each is a different position. A person can believe in strong control and still refuse to hand it to Congress. And when a shared resource gets used, control includes who receives the benefit.
What do we do with what already exists? This is where the largest opportunity in every domain lives. There are three answers. Innovate: build the thing that does not exist yet. Maintain: keep what we have running as it is. Let go: stop paying and let it fade. A train system can be revolutionized with new technology, kept running, or allowed to rust. Each answer moves a different amount of money, and doing nothing is a position with costs of its own.
Which legitimate values are in tension? What does each direction protect, what does each cost, who benefits now, who pays later, and which loss remains even after we make the best decision available to us? Seven tensions recur across nearly every question: freedom and safety, individual and collective, efficiency and humanity, transparency and privacy, justice and mercy, innovation and tradition, urgency and sustainability. They do not decide anything for us. They show us what the decision is asking us to hold.
The Domains, One at a Time
What follows runs each domain through the five questions. The examples are meant to be varied enough that we can find ourselves somewhere in them and notice what we think.
Stewardship
Stewardship begins with a question of innate value. Do polar bears, elk, bison, forests, and rivers matter only when they are useful to us, or does helping an ecology survive carry value of its own? Utility stays in the room either way. Most of us live in houses made of wood. We use metals, electricity, roads, food, and water, so the question was never whether human beings should touch the natural world. We already depend on it.
How much living ecology do we want to hold, and how much of it do we want to be able to reach? Wilderness that stays wild. Species that do not go extinct because we could not be bothered. National parks, trails, rivers, and public land that a family can actually get to. Healthy soil, intact forests, fish populations that recover, and water that stays drinkable without treatment.
What do we prohibit or require in how we farm, log, mine, fish, build, and dump? Where is a place off limits entirely, where is it open to mixed use, and where is it a working landscape? Deregulate a river completely, so that anyone can throw anything into it, and trash bills go down. The saving is purchased by moving the cost into the water, where we will eventually spend far more than we saved trying to recover something safe to drink, assuming recovery remains possible.
Who awards the privilege to extract from land we all own, and who receives the benefit? Is a forest managed by a federal agency, a state, the county it sits in, a private lessee, or the scientists who study it? Does a wildlife biologist or a legislature decide whether a species is in trouble?
Innovate: a country where every ecology can thrive, every person lives within reach of a sustainable natural environment, and no species is lost to human causes on our watch. Maintain: current practice, which in this domain means a slow loss of habitat and species. Let go: the same loss, faster.
Clear-cut a forest and lumber gets cheaper this year. That benefit is real. So are the losses to habitat, soil, water, fire behavior, future timber, and the people who inherit the land. Preserve a valley and the mine, the road, and the jobs that would have gone there do not exist. Short term against long term. Pleasure against fulfillment. Innovation and tradition.
Education
Education holds the same question in a different form. Is knowledge worth having only when it improves economic life? Research into the origin of the universe may never change the price of groceries. We may still believe that knowledge for its own sake is part of what a society exists to preserve.
A floor or a ceiling. A population needs literacy, numeracy, history, and enough critical thinking to notice when emotion is being used in place of evidence. A fuller commitment means the kid whose intelligence lives in mathematics, carpentry, caregiving, or the harp has somewhere for that ability to grow, and a retiree can learn something new and turn around and teach it to kindergartners.
What do we require of every school, and what do we stop requiring? A standardized test is a constraint, and so is the curriculum that ends up shaped around it. A licensing rule for who may teach is a constraint, and so is the absence of one.
Families, teachers, school boards, states, the federal government, or the profession itself. Each answer produces a different classroom.
Innovate: a high school where a student can learn to run a bike shop or frame a wall alongside algebra, and a system that keeps teaching people across a whole life. Maintain: one size fits all, with a great deal left out. Let go: fewer teachers, older buildings, and a shrinking idea of what school is for.
Variety is harder to standardize, more expensive to run, and harder to hold to a consistent quality. Efficiency and humanity do not go away because we prefer one of them. They become the structure of the choice.
Health and Care
Most of what shapes health happens long before anyone reaches a clinic. Health and Care runs from the school lunch to the ambulance after someone falls down the stairs, and it includes the conditions that decide whether the ambulance becomes necessary: what is in the food, whether there is a park within walking distance, and whether a life leaves room for sleep and movement.
What do we pay for, and how? Do we fund the emergency room, or the school lunch, the park, the paid maternity leave, and the nutrition of a pregnant mother that keep people out of it? Do we want a system that treats illness or one that grows health?
What do we permit in food, air, water, and advertising, and what do we require of the people who sell them?
Is the safety of what we eat decided by Congress, by an industry, or by science? Is care organized by a market, a profession, an insurer, or a public system? And if there is a collective health agenda, is it led by ideology or by evidence about what actually lowers the bill?
Innovate: a system designed upstream, where prevention is the main event and treatment is the backstop. Maintain: a system built around treatment, with prevention as an afterthought. Let go: access that erodes until the emergency room is the only door.
Prevention costs money now for a benefit no one can point to later. Treatment costs more and is easier to see. Urgency and sustainability, individual and collective, efficiency and humanity.
Infrastructure and Access
Infrastructure can be barely functional. The road is wrecked, and a four-wheel-drive truck can still get across town. Technically, we can get across town. It can also enlarge what shared life is for, and it covers far more than roads: water, sewage, energy, waste, housing, and the networks that carry information.
A high-speed train that makes travel, adventure, and each other available to people who cannot or will not fly or drive. Housing that a working family can afford. Water that reaches every tap and every playing field. Energy that does not depend on a single fuel. Broadband that reaches the ranch as well as the city.
What protects the people and places in a project’s path, what rules govern who can build where, and what standards must a water system or a power grid meet?
Who decides where the line runs and what the station looks like: a federal agency, a state, a town, an engineering profession, a private operator, or an arts board? Is water a market or a public utility? Is the grid owned by shareholders or by the people who draw from it?
This is where the most money moves and where the biggest opportunity sits. Innovate: solar-powered desalination plants so that every person and every playing field has an abundance of water, waste systems that turn what we throw away into product, rail that connects the country. Maintain: patch the broken water mains and keep the lights on. Let go: let the mains fail, the bridges close, and the grid brown out.
Construction costs, ecological burdens, maintenance, property fights, and the risk of building something no one uses, held against what a connected, watered, and housed country becomes.
Livelihood and Economic Life
Imagine we all live around a lake and eat its fish. One person’s grandfather invents a trap that guides most of the fish into an enclosure they can enter and not leave. His ingenuity eased the burden of survival for everyone, and his family now controls the food supply. Several generations later, everyone else still needs to eat.
What does a household need to stay secure, and what does a country need to keep inventing? Do we fund the conditions for a small business to start, and do we fund the floor beneath the people it displaces?
Should one person in a company earn a thousand times what its lowest-paid worker earns? If we decide that difference has become destructive, a second question arrives immediately: what constrains it, who enforces the constraint, and what new behavior the constraint will produce.
How long does an achievement grant authority over a shared necessity? How should descendants benefit from something they inherited rather than built? What happens when one company comes to control all of the energy, or all of the seed, or all of the information?
Innovate: an economy that promotes new ideas and small enterprise while making sure the rest of us are not marginalized by what gets invented. Maintain: the current arrangement of ownership and wages. Let go: let it drift toward whoever already holds the trap.
Two things are true at once. The grandfather deserves celebration. The rest of the lake needs access to food at a price that is not whatever one family can demand. Innovation and tradition, individual and collective, justice and mercy.
Safety and Security
Safety covers defense, crime, emergencies, and disaster, and it forces a decision about when protection begins and whose responsibility it is.
How much standing protection do we want: police, fire, military, storm walls, thinned forests, hardened water systems, and a response that shows up when a wildfire takes a town?
How much present freedom do we trade for protection against a possible future harm? At what point does preparation become escalation?
Should a country act before it is attacked or only once aggression has occurred, and who gets to make that call: a president, a congress, an alliance, a general? When a wildfire or a flood hits, is the response the town’s job, the state’s, the federal government’s, or the homeowner’s?
Innovate: rebuild defenses and disaster systems for threats that did not exist when the current ones were designed, from cyberattacks to fire seasons. Maintain: keep what we have and hope it holds. Let go: let it age and find out.
Prevention costs money before anyone can see the benefit. Waiting preserves resources until the threat is real, at which point the cost is larger and the options fewer. Urgency and sustainability are not competing slogans here. They are different locations in time.
Governance and Justice
Governance decides whose knowledge counts, what the government is answerable to, and what happens when power serves itself.
How much institutional competence do we want to pay for: courts that move, agencies that answer, elections that can be trusted? Which institutions are necessary, and which would be more helpful than the ones we have?
Should members of Congress trade individual stocks while making decisions that move particular industries, or should taking office require moving their holdings into a broad fund, so that they still profit from the country doing well and not from a vote they cast on Tuesday?
What do we want the government to be responsible to? There has been a large movement away from government being answerable to science, and some of us would prefer it be answerable to religion, to tradition, to a market, or to a vote. When expertise and democracy disagree, which one decides, and in which domains?
Innovate: redesign the process by which we decide, so that it is harder to manipulate and easier to trust. Maintain: the institutions we have, with their current incentives. Let go: let trust fade until the process is a formality.
Equality can mean equal standing, equal access, equal treatment, equal opportunity, equal burden, or equal outcome. Those are related commitments, and they are not interchangeable. Transparency and privacy, efficiency and humanity, justice and mercy.
Governance also depends on education. Without the knowledge to understand a system, our opinions remain more available to emotional manipulation, which returns us to the sign out front of the restaurant.
Where We Stand
None of this asks us to become experts in soil science, monetary policy, military strategy, and constitutional law. That standard would make participation impossible. The responsibility is more basic. We can know which questions our label has been answering for us, and we can start answering a few of them ourselves. Am I fine with the way we water things, or do I want change? Do I want the land left alone, or do I want energy there? Do I want the school my kids attend maintained, or rebuilt?
One person might run stewardship and land somewhere like this. Capacity off the charts: a country that is a master steward, with soil producing the best food and forests with a thriving ecology. Constraint nowhere close to enough, with far more limits needed on how soil is managed, how forests are managed, and how the privilege to extract gets awarded. Control that returns the benefit to everyone who pays the downstream consequence. Trajectory that innovates rather than maintains. And on dialectics, an honest naming of what that costs in the short term.
The same person might then want fewer centralized constraints in education, far more public capacity in infrastructure, and more local control in health. Another person arrives at a different configuration. Neither of them is described by a point on a line, and the two of them may find they share a value and weigh its consequences differently.
The five questions are drawn from a larger method I have spent years building, Dialectic and Deconstruction Solutions, which traces a problem upstream to its source and then holds the competing values in tension long enough to design something that works. The method and the problems it has already been run on live at SolveSomething.com. This post is the citizen’s version of it: the part that asks each of us where we stand before we ask anyone to represent us.
Attack advertising hands us an enemy before it hands us a menu. The sign tells us where we have been sorted. The menu asks what we believe, one domain at a time, and most of us have never been asked.
