You Don’t Have to Be Progressive or Conservative—Just American
How shared civic commitments became partisan property
Last year I got sick and needed an antibiotic. Nothing dramatic—just one of those “you need this to get better” moments that most of us have had. I went to pick it up at the pharmacy inside my grocery store and found myself standing in that slow-moving line while people around me were doing their weekly shopping—basket brimming, scanner beeping, someone debating which cereal their kid would actually eat this week.
My prescription wasn’t ready yet. While I waited, I learned the price was going to be $200.
I was genuinely gobsmacked.
Most people would have done one of two things: pay it because you’re sick and you want to go home, or walk away because you can’t justify it. I did something else. I went home, did some research, and discovered I could get the same antibiotic at a fraction of that price at another nearby pharmacy.
The experience wasn’t just frustrating—it was revealing.
Prescription drug pricing in the United States is notoriously opaque and inconsistent, often varying dramatically by pharmacy, insurer, or discount program. Even nonpartisan reporting has shown how common it is for identical medications to cost wildly different amounts depending on where and how they’re purchased.¹
That variability isn’t a “left issue” or a “right issue.” It’s a human issue. It’s a reminder that some of the systems governing our lives feel arbitrary even when the stakes are basic and physical: health, stability, the ability to function.
And yet—somehow—even concern about that can come with an unspoken follow-up question:
Which side are you on?
Care about democracy? People assume you’re progressive.
Care about crime reduction? You must be conservative.
Care about public transportation? Obviously left-coded.
We no longer hear concerns as concerns. We hear them as signals. And the strangest part is how quickly a single opinion now comes with the full subscription package—newsletter, tote bag, and an entire tribe of assumptions about what you must believe next.
To be fair, I understand why this happens. In a chaotic world, belonging can feel safer than thinking alone—and tribes offer shortcuts that spare us the exhausting work of discerning everything from scratch.
But that shortcut comes with a cost.
Somewhere along the way, politics stopped being primarily about governing and started being about sorting. We infer entire moral and ideological frameworks from a single conviction. A belief is no longer just a belief—it’s a badge. And once it’s a badge, disagreement feels less like debate and more like betrayal.
When every belief becomes a badge, citizenship becomes a loyalty test.
The Central Mistake We Keep Making
At the heart of this dysfunction is a quiet but consequential error. We’ve collapsed three distinct things into one:
Moral concern
Policy preference
Political identity
They are not the same—but we increasingly treat them as inseparable.
Moral concerns should be broad. Policy preferences should be debatable. Political identities should be provisional. When those lines blur, politics becomes less about solving problems and more about enforcing belonging. The question stops being Is this true or good? and becomes Is this ours?
And here’s a question worth asking plainly:
When did we start treating concern as a confession of party loyalty?
That dynamic explains why so many ideas that should invite serious discussion now trigger reflexive resistance. Not because they’re inherently flawed—but because the “wrong” people are associated with them.
Consider a few examples.
You Don’t Have to Be Progressive to Care About Democracy
Concern for democratic norms has become culturally coded as progressive. That’s a strange turn of events. Respect for constitutional processes, institutional restraint, and the peaceful transfer of power were once core conservative commitments. At the same time, progressives have historically warned about concentrated power and democratic erosion.
Most people who care about democracy aren’t trying to score points—they’re trying to preserve a system where disagreement doesn’t turn into rupture.
Democracy isn’t a policy outcome—it’s the system that makes disagreement survivable. It’s the framework that allows pluralism to function without violence. Caring about democracy doesn’t mean you agree on every election reform or judicial decision. It means you believe legitimacy matters more than winning.
Democracy doesn’t belong to the left or the right. It belongs to anyone who wants political disagreement without political breakdown.
You Don’t Have to Be Conservative to Care About Crime Reduction
Public safety is often treated as a conservative fixation, as though concern for crime automatically signals indifference to justice or reform. In reality, safety is a precondition for freedom—especially for the poor and vulnerable.
Many people who want safer neighborhoods aren’t trying to sound tough—they’re thinking about walking to their car at night, letting their kids play outside, and living without a low-grade hum of fear.
High crime corrodes trust, limits opportunity, and fractures communities. Over-policing corrodes legitimacy and cooperation. These are not opposing concerns; they are interdependent ones.
Order without justice breeds resentment. Justice without order leaves people exposed.
Caring about crime reduction is not about ideology—it’s about whether daily life is livable.
You Don’t Have to Be Progressive to Want Good Public Transportation
Public transportation has become one of the strangest ideological litmus tests in American life. Support for transit investment is often dismissed as progressive social engineering rather than treated as what it is: a question of infrastructure, productivity, and shared civic space.
Many people who support better transit aren’t trying to redesign society—they’re trying to get to work on time, make their city less congested, and build something that functions for ordinary life.
Good public transportation expands economic access, reduces congestion, supports workers, and makes cities function better. It benefits people who never set foot on a bus or train by reducing traffic and increasing labor mobility. It’s not an aesthetic preference—it’s a systems question.
There are good-faith critiques of transit projects—cost overruns, poor execution, corruption. But the category itself shouldn’t be tribal. A badly run project is an argument for competence and accountability, not for making mobility a partisan identity marker.
Transportation isn’t about left or right. It’s about whether a society designs systems that actually work.
You Don’t Have to Be Progressive to Care About Humane Immigration—or Conservative to Care About Borders
Immigration debates often collapse into false binaries. Borders are framed as conservative. Compassion is framed as progressive. But functioning democracies require both sovereignty and humanity.
Many people who feel strongly about immigration aren’t trying to be cruel or naive—they’re trying to protect something they believe is fragile: social trust, economic stability, national identity, human dignity.
States exist to govern territory. Laws that are optional are not laws. At the same time, policies that dehumanize people undermine moral credibility and social cohesion.
A system that is cruel isn’t legitimate—and a system that isn’t enforced isn’t a system.
Caring about immigration means caring about order and dignity. Pretending you must choose one over the other is a failure of civic imagination, not a serious argument.
You Don’t Have to Be Conservative to Want Healthcare That Doesn’t Bankrupt People
Healthcare is another issue trapped in a partisan binary: progressives are assumed to care about access and affordability; conservatives are assumed to care about markets and personal responsibility. But wanting a healthcare system that doesn’t financially ruin families shouldn’t require an ideological password.
Most Americans don’t experience healthcare as an abstract debate. They experience it as anxiety—often quietly, often alone.
You can believe in markets and still recognize that healthcare is not a normal market. When you’re sick, you don’t price shop like you’re buying a toaster. You can care about personal responsibility and still recognize that no amount of budgeting makes a major diagnosis “affordable.” You can oppose big government solutions and still see that the current system often feels expensive, confusing, and bureaucratic—just not always democratically accountable.
Wanting reform doesn’t commit you to a single policy. It commits you to a principle:
In a wealthy country, access to basic care shouldn’t be a luxury good.
That’s not a left-wing position. That’s a civic sanity check.
What This Pattern Reveals About Us
Taken together, these examples point to a deeper problem. Political parties increasingly position themselves as moral monopolies—each claiming ownership over certain virtues while neglecting others. Citizens are asked to accept full ideological bundles rather than think carefully and modularly.
Most people aren’t trying to become ideologues. They’re trying to be good and safe in a loud world.
We are no longer asked what we believe. We are asked who we belong to.
I’ve felt this pull myself—the temptation to reject a good argument simply because I didn’t trust the tribe making it. That instinct is human. But when it becomes habitual, it turns politics into a closed system and citizenship into a loyalty test.
Raising the Civic Standard
Maybe the question isn’t whether an idea is progressive or conservative. Maybe the better question is whether it helps a pluralistic democracy function.
Being American, at its best, has never meant uniformity. It has meant shared responsibility amid deep disagreement: constitutional order, peaceful conflict, moral argument without mutual contempt.
And in a time like this, grace isn’t just a private virtue—it’s a civic posture. It’s the decision to refuse contempt even when conviction stays firm.
This is the part I love, and the part I want to protect:
The fragile trust that lets millions of strangers share a country without treating each other like enemies.
You don’t have to agree on everything to agree to the same country.
You don’t have to be progressive to care about democracy.
You don’t have to be conservative to care about public safety.
You don’t have to belong to a tribe to want systems that work.
Here’s a practice worth trying—small, but clarifying:
Pick one issue you’ve outsourced to your tribe, and try to articulate the best argument for it in your own words before you decide where you stand.
You just have to be willing to care about the country you share with people who see the world differently.
What belief have you dismissed—not because it was wrong, but because it came from the “wrong” side?