Conservatives and progressives would likely agree that modern American culture is “problematic.” However, they would do so for very different reasons—reasons that highlight the foundational differences between these two worldviews.

When American progressives criticize American culture, they tend to follow a familiar pattern: By establishing norms, our culture subtly oppresses those who don’t fit in.

For example, many progressives believe that mental disorders like ADHD have always been common. As their story goes, people with ADHD used to find work appropriate to them in a more agrarian age. Because they were able to work outdoors and shift between tasks like weeding, animal husbandry, and carpentry, their ADHD wasn’t obvious.

With its emphasis on education and office work, our modern environment—often categorized as “late-stage capitalism”—has changed that. By imposing norms onto people with ADHD, it has made them suffer. The compassionate response to this suffering is to change American culture and institutions to make it easier for people with ADHD to thrive.

Conservatives take a different view. Rather than seeing culture imposed onto individuals, conservatives think that culture forms individuals. Thus, when they see a rise in mental disorders, conservatives argue that a dysfunctional culture has created people who do not fit into society.

Much like progressives, conservatives argue that the compassionate answer to this problem is to change American culture. Yet that is where the agreement ends. For while both progressives and conservatives might want to change American culture, they wish to do so for entirely different reasons. For while progressives want to adapt culture to people with conditions like ADHD, conservatives want to change culture so that fewer people develop ADHD.

In a way, these views are polar opposites—and they’re evident in debates over wide-ranging issues.

Progressives think we should change American culture so that people who have been “marginalized” fit in. Thus, they search endlessly for people who defy social norms and elevate them to high-status positions. Rather than finding ways to fit the exception to the rule, they want the rule to fit the exception. If you boil this position down to a simple phrase, it goes like this: Culture is a constraint.

You can see this view manifest in progressive policies across a slew of social issues. The entire LGBT movement is an effort to change social norms to accommodate exceptions. So, too, is progressive policing, which aims to soften criminal laws in order to legalize formerly illegal activities.

Conservatives, on the other hand, want to change American culture so that it forms people who are capable of participating in normal life. Rather than abandoning norms, they wish to reinforce them. And though exceptions do exist, conservatives want them to remain exceptional, instead of making them normative. If you boil their view down to a slogan, it sounds like this: Culture is creative.

This conservative view animates a broad range of policies as well. To combat crime, conservatives strive to reinforce the traditional family structure, arguing that children raised in two-parent homes are more likely to become law-abiding citizens. Similarly, conservatives advocate for high standards in education because they think that challenging students causes them to rise to the occasion and perform better.

While conservatives and progressives might agree that American culture is broken, they do so for completely different reasons. For conservatives, culture is a creative force holding society together. For progressives, it’s a constraint that pushes people to the margins.

As long as Americans hold such fundamentally opposed views of culture, it’s likely that “culture wars” will remain an integral part of modern American life.

Yet that doesn’t mean that conservatives and progressives will always disagree. On the topic of ADHD, for example, both camps might support more recess time for students and discourage screen time.

Progressives would do so because they recognize that students with ADHD will focus better if they have an opportunity to move. Meanwhile, conservatives would do so because they recognize that students who stay indoors all day are more likely to develop ADHD. The reasoning may be subtly different, but the policy recommendations are identical.

To move forward, politicians need to find opportunities to build agreement on policy, even when agreement on principle is lacking. In our politically polarized country, those places of unity offer an opportunity to repair the divide.

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