Thomas Jefferson, Bob Inglis and the healing of a divided America

This election year, climate action remains at the mercy of deepening partisanship in the States. These two stories point the way out

On 11 June 1812, Thomas Jefferson sat down to write a letter.

This was hardly an unusual occurrence. ‘From sunrise to one or two o'clock I am drudging at the writing table,’ he said, producing perhaps 19,000 letters over the course of his life. But June 1812 – three years after stepped down as President of the United States – was a moment of crisis.

A few days earlier, on 1 June, President James Madison – Jefferson’s protegee – had petitioned Congress to debate a declaration of war against the United Kingdom. The issue split the country along partisan lines: not a single one of the 39 Federalist members of Congress joined Madison’s Republican-Democrats in voting aye, which to this day makes it the most divided war vote in American history. The split ran beyond Washington too; in Baltimore, a 300-strong mob responded to the declaration by destroying the offices of an anti-war newspaper and pouring hot candle grease into the eyes of the Federalists that protected it.

It was in this febrile atmosphere that Jefferson wrote to his old friend and fellow founding father, Elbridge Gerry, who had just been voted out as Governor of Massachusetts. At the start of May, with war on the horizon, Gerry had made a speech to Massachusetts lawmakers calling on them to put divisiveness to one side and support (his) government in resisting British tyranny. But it was a rather disingenuous last-ditch effort to save his career in the face of public anger at his partisanship, court-packing and redistricting.

Perhaps Gerry hoped his old friend would join him in lambasting the opposition. Instead, Jefferson argued he should take pride in his defeat and remember the value of a healthy political opposition:

‘I do not condole with you on your release from your government. The vote of your opponents is the most honourable mark by which the soundness of your conduct could be stamped…There was but a single act of my?whole?administration of which that party approved…and when I found they?approved of it, I confess I began strongly to apprehend I had done wrong, & to exclaim with the Psalmist, ‘Lord, what have I done that the wicked should praise me!’

Wry humour in dark times is a wonderful thing. So too is a statesman who openly welcomes the loyal opposition of his critics. Gerry was complaining about the danger of the partisan opposition, and lost his seat in part because he sought to extinguish them (he is now remembered for lending the ‘Gerry’ to ‘gerrymandering’). By contrast, Jefferson was a conviction politician who nonetheless built political bridges (and friendships) across the aisle, because he believed that the civilised conflict of ideas made him a better statesman.

?As he put it in another letter:

‘Difference of opinion leads to enquiry, and enquiry to truth.’

In 2010, Republican Congressman Bob Inglis was hosting a campaign rally at the Landrum airport in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. Bob – husting for his seventh consecutive term – had chosen the strip because it was big enough to host the 300 local Republicans who wanted to attend.

America in 2010 was beginning to show cracks of serious division, but Bob felt confident in his record representing the ‘shiny buckle of the Bible Belt’ for more than ten years. Yes, he had voted against the Iraq surge, and for the bailout and immigration reform; but he was proud of his lifetime ratings of 93% from the American Conservative Union and 0% from the progressive Americans for Democratic Action. Even his score of 23 from the labour unions must be a mistake, he said: ‘I was really hoping for a zero.’

That day on the airstrip, however, did not go as Bob would have hoped. The host of the hustings asked him a simple yes or no question: do you believe humans are causing climate change? And in Bob’s own self-deprecating words, ‘I had a bad habit of answering questions.’

The reality was that Bob had been on his own climate journey. Back in 2006, ‘I didn’t know anything about [climate], except that Al Gore was for it,’ he explained. But when his five children said they would only vote for him if he cleaned up his act on the environment, he was shocked – and decided to look again.

He visited Antarctica. He went to the Great Barrier Reef. He had an encounter with an oceanographer which convinced him that protecting the planet was ‘worshipping God in the creation.’ And he changed his mind.

Unfortunately, in Bob’s own wry words, it was to prove a ‘deathbed conversion’ for his political career. When he answered that question at the re-election rally – yes, he believed in anthropogenic climate change – his one-time supporters booed him so strongly, ‘I was blasted out from underneath the tent.’

So it proved. He suffered a landslide defeat to a Tea Party candidate in that 2010. Once out of office, however, he turned his full attention to the climate crisis. In 2012 – 200 years after Jefferson’s letter to Elbridge Gerry – he founded the Energy and Enterprise Institute at Virginia’s George Mason University, to convince conservatives of the need for carbon taxation and other forms of free-market climate action.

In 2015, that work saw him awarded a Profile in Courage Award from the JFK Library Foundation. That a politician simply changing his mind on climate change is enough to win should strike fear into us all.

Two stories, two centuries apart, that demonstrate that political polarisation has always been with us. Cold comfort, perhaps, but let’s face it – Western culture wars are one of the most challenging obstacles to net-zero we face today. Reading about the downfall of Bob Inglis at the hands of the Tea Party might give climate progressives a sense of smug satisfaction – at least it’s the fault of those idiots over there.

?Hold that thought.

‘Data and evidence can never be considered in a vacuum. They often come with identities and cultural meanings,’ is how Alex Edmans explained polarisation to me on the most recent episode of Conversations on Climate. Alex is Professor of Finance at London Business School, and has just released his second book, May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics and Studies Exploit our Biases. It is a fantastic analysis of our misinformation problem and how to solve it. But anyone expecting a simple lambasting of the cultural meanings of the right will be disappointed. This is not a call for progressives to simply double down.

‘I think [ESG activists] are being too monolithic,’ Alex declared. Instead, we should ‘step into other people’s shoes and show empathy, which is something often missing from these discussions.’ When we mock or attack Republicans like Ted Cruz for climate denial, we also bind their supporters more closely to the anti-climate cause; it becomes more important for them to defend their Republican identity than to establish the factual reality of the science.

The implication, therefore, is also that progressives must take some responsibility for polarisation too. That responsibility is not 50:50 – I haven’t been living under a rock! But to claim that’s it’s all the fault of bad-faith conservatives is also to renounce our own power to do something about it. And that is also the moral of Thomas Jefferson’s tale – there is more than one way to respond to polarisation. We have choices.

One path through is to understand the value of cognitive diversity. We should actively try to recruit allies from the other side because it will not only make climate action more likely but improve the quality of that action too. Professor Edmans illustrated this with the concept of ‘red teaming’ – deliberately cultivating conflicting perspectives – and how it helped President Kennedy (in whose name Inglis was recognised) successfully navigate the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Even if Green parties won every major election for the next century, we would still do a better job solving climate by including opposing perspectives. We need liberals and conservatives, free-marketeers and communitarians, technocrats and artists. How can we not only simulate diversity (red teaming) but actively recruit for it?

Edmans is a believer in the Inglis approach – find Republicans to deliver the climate message, and to ‘separate the message from the identity.’ If we share the same goals, then arguing over different policies is actually helpful. Inglis himself voted against the 2009 cap-and-trade bill because he believed that the mechanism wasn’t right, and introduced his own Raise Wages, Cut Carbon bill instead.

That’s all fair enough. But I think we can go further, and actively seek to recouple climate protection to a positive right-wing identity. As Republicans increasingly set themselves against science and evidence as epistemic categories, storytelling might actually be our best hope to reach them, rather than something from which values-free evidence should be extracted. Promoting diversity as a common value would be a great start.

In that regard, Jefferson stands as a story we can all gather around. He is a popular figure amongst the right, lauded as a founding father and defender of small government and freedom of speech. He speaks to Republican’s regard for tradition and history and was a stranger to neither the bible nor science. Most importantly, he stands as a role model for respect across the political aisle too, valuing disagreement and loyal opposition. As he wrote in yet another letter:

??“I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.”

Can we put down the weapons with which we wage our culture wars, and remember each other as friends once again? Gaia is counting upon it. And for anyone progressives still unwilling to countenance embracing the other side, I will leave you with the question Inglis addressed to his fellow Republicans in 2023, but which we must all answer to at life’s end:

"Was I an agent of chaos in a house divided, or did I work to bring America together, healing rifts and bridging divides?"

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