TELLURIDE, Nov. 8, 4:32 p.m. - Scientists have been studying why humanity breaks down into left and right, liberal and conservative – and genetics, not surprisingly, could well play a part. Generally, the theory goes, those whose personalities that tend toward order, structure and closure go conservative and those who are more open to new experience tilt liberal. In any case, it’s obvious that societies organize themselves roughly into two camps with opposing political views, and that this is a universal phenomenon.

How can we understand Telluride, then, which stands firmly in the liberal camp on national and global issues, but still manages to divide itself roughly down the middle on local issues, as this past week’s election has once again demonstrated? 

Where exactly is the fault line in local politics? How can we define the “Tice camp” versus the “Fraser camp”? Is one side liberal and the other conservative?

An uninvolved observer would likely see far more similarity coming from the two camps than deep differences. You could build a strong Telluride consensus around the beliefs not only that George W. Bush is a disaster and global warming is real but also that locally our most important issues revolve around sustaining our local environment and our community in the face of outside pressures that threaten both. It sure sounds like we should all belong to the same political party.

And yet the bitterness in local politics is no less fierce than the rivalry between Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly, or Bush and Clinton. What exactly is it we fight over?

The two Telluride camps eye each other with deep suspicion, each convinced that it is the true liberal camp and the other side is secretly conservative, or is so misguided that it serves regressive goals.

Which is the truer progressive impulse: to seek to sharply restrict development in order to preserve things as they are, or to seek to guide appropriate development to economically sustain what’s left of the community? Which is the greater threat to Telluride: too much bad development or too little good development?

If, generally speaking, conservatives seek to protect traditional values and project them into the future and liberals seek to change society through enlightened policy and are receptive to new approaches to old challenges, then which Telluride camp represents conservatism, and which represents liberalism?

By these definitions, Tice is a conservative, because his thrust is to do whatever can be done to keep Telluride as it has been and to keep the destructive impulses of the outside world at bay. Our challenge, in the Tice view, is to hold fast to what we are and have been. He stands for traditional Telluride values, that small is beautiful, the environment is sacred, and our remoteness from the world our saving grace. There’s surely merit in all that, since these traditional Telluride values are what drew most of us here in the first place.

And Fraser is the liberal, because he is focused on helping the community adapt to a rapidly changing world through enlightened and proactive policies concerning economic development and housing. There’s merit in that, too, even though traditionalists see his adaptability as weakness, because we have all seen plenty of examples where inflexibility has led to a worse outcome.

For the conservative, the future represents a threat to present-day values; new ideals and new values are to be considered warily. For the liberal, the future represents an opportunity for improvements, a chance to correct current and past imbalances in how we function as a community.

However we label ourselves, these are the lines that divide us, and it seems conceivable that the difference in how we join one camp or the other really is a matter of temperament, of personality, of perspective so fundamental that is may well be genetic, something utterly hardwired in us.

But regardless of how we vote, we are faced with a rapidly changing world.

We are strapped together in a toboggan that is careening out of control down an icy slope toward an uncertain future. We could easily crash.

Some of us have the instinct to hold on to the brakes. Others think we should try to steer.

Either way, we are rushing toward the bottom of the mountain – where the future lies – arguing all the while over whether we should put our limited energy into braking or steering.

If we knock each other out, we may do neither well and we will surely crash. 

If we work together, we may do just enough of both to survive.