steamHouse Position Statement: Political Values

Up vs. Down, Not Left vs. Right

Version: 1.0
Date: January 2026
Status: Draft for Review

Executive Summary

steamHouse is organizationally non-partisan. We do not take positions on policy disputes or advocate for political parties. But non-partisan is not the same as non-political.

steamHouse is deeply committed to a vertical axis of political values—the quality of how we think, engage, and govern together—rather than the horizontal axis of left vs. right policy positions. We care intensely about how people reason, not what conclusions they reach on contested questions.

The Distinction:

  • Horizontal Axis (Left ↔ Right): Policy positions, party affiliations, ideological commitments—where steamHouse maintains neutrality

  • Vertical Axis (Up ↔ Down): Quality of thinking, democratic capacity, civic virtue—where steamHouse is emphatically NOT neutral

We believe some ways of engaging political questions are better than others. We believe democratic norms deserve protection. We believe truth matters. And we believe these commitments are compatible with—indeed, essential for—genuine political diversity.

Part I: The Vertical Axis Defined

What "Up" Looks Like

The upward direction on the vertical axis represents:

Epistemic Quality:

  • Seeking evidence before reaching conclusions

  • Distinguishing between facts and values

  • Acknowledging uncertainty appropriately

  • Updating beliefs when evidence warrants

  • Recognizing motivated reasoning in yourself

Democratic Capacity:

  • Treating political opponents as legitimate competitors

  • Accepting electoral losses without claiming illegitimacy

  • Distinguishing "people I disagree with" from "enemies to destroy"

  • Valuing institutions that constrain power

  • Exercising restraint even when you could technically do otherwise (forbearance)

Civic Virtue:

  • Good-faith engagement across difference

  • Prioritizing accuracy over tribal loyalty

  • Willingness to criticize your own side

  • Commitment to persuasion over coercion

  • Respect for the epistemic commons (not spreading claims you haven't verified)

What "Down" Looks Like

The downward direction represents:

Epistemic Degradation:

  • Believing what feels right without checking

  • Treating truth as tribal—"true for us"

  • Motivated reasoning unchecked

  • Certainty without evidence

  • Dismissing inconvenient facts as enemy propaganda

Democratic Erosion:

  • Viewing opponents as illegitimate or evil

  • Justifying any means to defeat the other side

  • Treating norm violations as acceptable when your team does them

  • Seeking to concentrate power rather than constrain it

  • Constitutional hardball—exploiting every technical advantage regardless of spirit

Civic Degradation:

  • Bad-faith engagement (strawmanning, deliberate misrepresentation)

  • Prioritizing tribal victory over accuracy

  • Refusing to criticize your own side

  • Preferring domination to persuasion

  • Polluting the epistemic commons with unverified claims

The Critical Insight

People across the political spectrum can move up or down on this axis.

A conservative and a progressive can both exhibit high-quality thinking, democratic commitment, and civic virtue. They will reach different conclusions—but they can disagree well. They can model what healthy political discourse looks like.

Conversely, authoritarianism and epistemic degradation appear across the political spectrum. Left-wing authoritarianism exists. Right-wing epistemic degradation exists. Neither has a monopoly on democratic threat or intellectual dishonesty.

steamHouse cares about the vertical axis because that's where our principles apply.

Part II: How This Connects to the Four Principles

Personal Agency → Upward Movement

Personal Agency means owning your choices and capacities—including your cognitive choices. This requires:

  • Recognizing when you're operating on automatic tribal instinct

  • Choosing to engage conscious, reflective thinking

  • Taking responsibility for your beliefs, not just inheriting them

  • Being the author of your political identity, not just its product

The downward direction is cognitive passivity: absorbing the positions of your tribe without examination, letting algorithms and echo chambers determine your views.

Mutual Respect → Democratic Capacity

Mutual Respect means recognizing the worth and dignity of others—including political opponents. This requires:

  • Accepting that people who disagree with you are usually acting from sincere moral concern

  • Treating opponents as legitimate participants in shared governance

  • Distinguishing between "their policies would be harmful" and "they are subhuman enemies"

  • Maintaining relationships across political difference

The downward direction is dehumanization: viewing the other side as existential threats, traitors, or moral monsters rather than fellow citizens with different views.

Objective Reason → Epistemic Quality

Objective Reason means seeking truth through evidence and honest inquiry. This requires:

  • Evaluating claims based on evidence, not source

  • Acknowledging when evidence challenges your prior beliefs

  • Distinguishing between empirical claims and value claims

  • Maintaining commitment to shared epistemic standards

The downward direction is tribal epistemology: treating truth as whatever helps your side, dismissing inconvenient evidence, living in information bubbles that never challenge your assumptions.

Reflective Thinking → Self-Awareness

Reflective Thinking means examining your own mental processes. This requires:

  • Noticing when tribal instincts are operating

  • Recognizing your own motivated reasoning

  • Questioning whether you're holding the other side to standards you don't apply to your own

  • Examining the emotional and identity factors shaping your political views

The downward direction is unreflective tribalism: never noticing your own biases, assuming your political opponents are irrational while you are simply responding to facts.

Part III: What steamHouse Teaches (and Doesn't Teach)

What We Teach

Diagnostic Tools:

  • Recognizing warning signs of authoritarian behavior (across the spectrum)

  • Understanding the psychology of polarization

  • Identifying motivated reasoning in yourself and others

  • Detecting manipulation, propaganda, and epistemic attacks

Democratic Foundations:

  • Why democratic norms matter (mutual toleration, forbearance)

  • How democracies die—gradually, from within

  • The role of civil society and institutional health

  • The relationship between truth and democratic capacity

Civic Skills:

  • How to engage productively across difference

  • How to evaluate political claims

  • How to maintain relationships despite political disagreement

  • How to participate in democratic processes

Historical Context:

  • How previous generations navigated polarization

  • What distinguishes healthy conflict from democratic erosion

  • The conditions under which democracies thrive and fail

  • The structure of successful social movements

What We Don't Teach

Policy Positions:

  • Which party to vote for

  • Whether specific policies are correct

  • How to resolve contested value trade-offs

  • Which ideology is superior

Ideological Conclusions:

  • That conservatives or progressives are correct

  • That particular political movements are good or bad

  • That the evidence clearly supports one side on contested empirical questions

  • That there's only one legitimate way to apply democratic principles

The Distinction in Practice

We will say:

  • "Evidence-based reasoning requires checking claims against data, regardless of whether you like the conclusion."

  • "Democratic norms include accepting that your opponents have a right to compete and govern."

  • "This leader's rhetoric exhibits warning signs that historians associate with authoritarian movements."

  • "Different moral foundations can lead reasonable people to different policy conclusions."

We won't say:

  • "Vote for X party."

  • "This policy is clearly correct."

  • "Conservatives/progressives are wrong about Y."

  • "If you reason correctly, you'll reach conclusion Z on this policy question."

Part IV: The Supertribe Connection

Why the Vertical Axis Matters for Supertribes

steamHouse's concept of "supertribe" describes MANY people sharing FEW core principles—consciously chosen affiliation across profound difference.

Constitutional democracy, at its best, is a supertribe: people with vastly different values, backgrounds, and policy preferences united by commitment to minimal shared principles (rule of law, mutual toleration, peaceful transfer of power, protection of rights).

The vertical axis is what makes supertribes possible.

When people move downward—toward tribal epistemology, dehumanization of opponents, and democratic erosion—supertribes fracture into warring comfort tribes. The shared principles cease to bind. The minimal common ground disappears.

When people move upward—toward epistemic quality, democratic capacity, and civic virtue—supertribes can hold. People can disagree about everything in the blue and gray zones while preserving the green checks that make cooperation possible.

The Positive-Definition Principle

steamHouse defines supertribes by what members SHARE, not what they EXCLUDE.

Applied to political values:

  • Wrong framing: "We're the people who aren't liberal/conservative"

  • Right framing: "We're the people committed to evidence-based reasoning and democratic norms"

The vertical axis commitments are positive: commitment to quality thinking, democratic health, and civic virtue. They define who's "in" by shared affirmation, not by shared opposition.

This means:

  • A thoughtful conservative who reasons carefully is "up"

  • A thoughtful progressive who reasons carefully is "up"

  • They can disagree on everything horizontal while sharing the vertical

  • They're both in the supertribe; they just have different positions within it

Part V: Addressing Concerns

"Isn't This Just Hidden Partisanship?"

The concern: "Up" sounds like code for "agrees with my side."

The response: The vertical axis applies across the political spectrum. If we only saw epistemic degradation on one side, that would indeed suggest hidden bias. But:

  • Left-wing authoritarianism exists (desire to silence opponents, enforce ideological conformity, use power to punish dissent)

  • Right-wing authoritarianism exists (cult of personality, rejection of democratic norms, conspiracy thinking)

  • Tribal epistemology appears everywhere (progressives believing things because progressives believe them; conservatives believing things because conservatives believe them)

The honest application of vertical-axis principles will sometimes criticize your own team. That's the test. If you only see problems on the other side, you've failed the test.

"Doesn't This Privilege Certain Political Traditions?"

The concern: Liberal democracy itself represents a political commitment, so advocating for it isn't neutral.

The response: Yes, this is correct. steamHouse is not neutral about democracy. We believe:

  • Democratic governance is better than autocratic governance

  • Truth matters for collective decision-making

  • Institutions that constrain power are good

  • Citizens should have voice in decisions affecting them

These are substantive commitments. But they're procedural commitments—about how to make decisions—not substantive commitments about what decisions to make. Within democratic procedures, enormous diversity of policy views is possible and welcome.

If someone explicitly rejects democratic principles—believes autocracy is better, truth is unimportant, institutions shouldn't constrain their preferred leaders—then yes, there's genuine incompatibility with steamHouse. We acknowledge this honestly rather than pretending perfect neutrality.

"What About When Democratic Norms and Democratic Outcomes Conflict?"

The concern: Sometimes majorities vote for authoritarian leaders. What then?

The response: This is a real tension. steamHouse teaches:

  • The difference between democracy and liberalism (majority rule vs. protected rights)

  • The "illiberal democracy" problem (using democratic procedures to dismantle democratic safeguards)

  • The role of constitutional constraints (protecting certain rights from majority override)

  • The historical cases where this tension played out

We don't pretend there are easy answers. But we give young people frameworks for thinking about the tension rather than ignoring it.

"Doesn't Teaching About Authoritarianism Advantage One Side?"

The concern: In current American politics, warnings about authoritarianism are associated with one party attacking another.

The response: steamHouse teaches the general patterns that historians identify across cultures and eras, then helps young people apply those patterns themselves. We don't say "Party X is authoritarian." We say "Here are the indicators that predict authoritarian behavior across history. Apply them to current events yourself."

Importantly:

  • The indicators should be applied to both sides

  • Recognizing authoritarian temptation in yourself (not just opponents) is essential

  • Historical examples should be drawn from across the political spectrum

  • The goal is pattern recognition, not partisan conclusion

If one side in current politics more clearly exhibits authoritarian warning signs, that's something students discover through applying general principles—not something we teach as conclusion.

Part VI: The Bottom Line

steamHouse believes:

  1. The quality of political thinking matters. Not all ways of engaging political questions are equal.

  2. Democratic norms deserve protection. Mutual toleration, forbearance, and commitment to peaceful transfer of power are precious and fragile.

  3. Truth is a shared resource. The epistemic commons—our collective capacity to distinguish true from false—requires active maintenance.

  4. These commitments are compatible with political diversity. People can reason well and still disagree about policy. The vertical axis is orthogonal to the horizontal axis.

  5. We're non-partisan, not non-political. We don't tell people how to vote. We do tell them that voting matters, that how they think matters, and that democracy requires cultivation.

steamHouse's political position is simple:

We care about Up vs. Down, not Left vs. Right.

We want to help young people move upward—toward better thinking, stronger democratic commitment, and healthier civic practice—wherever they land on the horizontal axis of policy.

And we believe this is both principled and genuinely inclusive: welcoming everyone who can affirm the vertical commitments, regardless of their horizontal positions.

Appendix: Key Terms

Constitutional Hardball: Exploiting institutional powers to the maximum extent technically allowed, violating norms while following rules. The opposite of forbearance.

Epistemic Commons: The shared social infrastructure that enables truth-seeking—institutions, norms, and practices that help communities distinguish true from false.

Forbearance: Restraint in deploying institutional powers—not doing everything you technically can do. Essential democratic norm.

Horizontal Axis: The left-right spectrum of policy positions and ideological commitments.

Mega-Identity: When partisan identity aligns with multiple other identities (race, religion, geography), making political opposition feel like existential threat.

Mutual Toleration: Accepting political opponents as legitimate competitors with equal right to exist and govern.

Negative Partisanship: When political motivation comes primarily from hatred of the other side rather than support for one's own.

Supertribe: MANY people sharing FEW core principles—consciously chosen affiliation across profound difference.

Tribal Epistemology: Treating truth as whatever helps your side; believing claims based on source rather than evidence.

Vertical Axis: The up-down dimension of epistemic quality, democratic capacity, and civic virtue.