The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (17 page)

Nature.
God has given man dominion over nature. Nature is a resource for prosperity. It is there to be used for human profit.

Corporations.
Corporations exist to provide people with goods and services, and to maximize profits for investors and upper management. They work most “efficiently” when they do maximize their profits. When corporations profit, society profits.

Regulation.
Government regulation stands in the way of free enterprise, and should be minimized.

Rights.
Rights must be consistent with morality. Strict father morality defines the limits of what is to count as a “right.”

Thus there is no right to an abortion, no right to same-sex marriage, no right to health care (or any other government assistance), no right to know how the administration decides policy, no right to a living wage, and so on. However, there is a right to owning guns—especially conservatives owning guns—since guns provide a form of authority to those who possess them.

Democracy.
A strict father democracy is an institutional democracy operating under strict father values. It counts as a democracy in that it has elections, a tripartite government, civilian control of the military, free markets, basic civil liberties, and widely accessible media. But strict father values are seen as central to democracy—to the empowerment of individuals to change their lives and their society by pursuing their individual interests.

Foreign policy.
America is the world’s moral authority. It is a superpower because it deserves to be. Its values—the right values—are defined by strict father morality. If there is to be a moral order in the world, American sovereignty, wealth, power, and hegemony must be maintained and American values—conservative family values, the free market, privatization, elimination of social programs, domination of man over nature, and so on—spread throughout the world.

The culture war.
Strict father morality defines what a good society is. The very idea of a conservatively defined good society is threatened by liberal and progressive ideas and programs. That threat must be fought at all costs. The very fabric of society is at stake.

Those are the basics. Those are the ideas and values that the right wing wants to establish, nothing less than a radical revolution in how America and the rest of the world functions. That the vehemence of the culture war is provoked and maintained by conservatives is no accident. For strict father morality to gain and maintain political power, disunity is required. First, there is economic disunity, the two-tier economy with the “unworthy” poor remaining poor and serving the “deserving” rich. But to stay in power, conservatives need the support of the conservative poor. That is, they need a significant percentage of the poor and middle class to vote against their economic interests and for their individual, social, and religious interests. This means that what appears to be a division among conservatives on the basis of domains of interest actually constitutes strength for conservatism on the whole. Conservatism in all those domains of interest is required for conservatism to reign.

This has been achieved through the recognition that many working people and evangelical Protestants have a strict father morality in their families or religious lives. Conservative intellectuals have realized that these are the same values that drive political conservatism. They have also realized that people vote their values and their identities more than their economic self-interests. What they have done is to create, via framing and language, a link between strict father morality in the family and religion on the one hand and conservative politics and business on the other. This conceptual link must be so emotionally strong in those who are not wealthy that it can overcome economic self-interest.

Their method for achieving this has been the cultural civil war—a civil war carried out with everything short of live ammunition—pitting Americans with strict father morality (called conservatives) against Americans with nurturant parent morality (the hated liberals), who are portrayed as threatening the way of life and the cultural, religious, and personal identities of conservatives.

Conservative political and intellectual leaders faced a challenge in carrying out their goals. They represented an economic and political elite, but they were seeking the votes of middle- and lower-class working people. They needed, therefore, to identify conservative ideas as populist and liberal or progressive ideas as elitist—even though the reverse was true. They faced a massive framing problem, a problem that required a change in everyday language and thought. But strict father morality gave them an important advantage: It suggests that the wealthy have earned their wealth, that they are good people who deserve it—and that those who govern, both in the public and private sphere, should maintain the right moral order in society. It is a kind of conservative social contract.

Through the work of their think tank intellectuals, their language professionals, their writers and ad agencies, and their media specialists, conservatives have worked a revolution in thought and language over forty to fifty years. Through language they have branded liberals (whose policies are populist) as effete elitists, unpatriotic spendthrifts—using terms like limousine liberals, latte liberals, tax-and-spend liberals, Hollywood liberals, East Coast liberals, the liberal elite, wishy-washy liberals, and so on. At the same time they have branded conservatives (whose policies favor the economic elite) as populists—again through language, including body language. From Ronald Reagan’s down-home folksiness to George W. Bush’s John Wayne–style “Bubbaisms,” the language, dialects, body language, and narrative forms have been those of rural populists. Their radio talk show hosts—warriors all—have adopted the style of hellfire preachers. But the message is the same: The hated liberals are threatening American culture and values, and have to be fought vigorously and continuously on every front. It is a threat to the very security of the nation, as well as morality, religion, the family, and everything real Americans hold dear. Their positions on wedge issues—guns, babies, taxes, same-sex marriage, the flag, school prayer—reveal the “treachery” of liberals. The wedge issues are not important in themselves, but are vital in what they represent: a strict father attitude to the world.

Without the mutually supportive relationships among the domains of interest—individual, governing, business, and social—conservatism as an overarching moral system cannot flourish. What appears to liberals to be fragmentation and disunity could be a mutually reinforcing structure that is powerful and threatening to progressive values and American democracy.

The prevailing wisdom of progressives, on the other hand, is that ideological divisions are tearing conservatism apart. But we had better consider both possibilities.

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What Unites Progressives

T
o approach what unites progressives, we must first ask what divides them. Here are some of the common parameters that divide progressives from one another:

• Local interests.
For example, you might come from a farming community, or a high-tech region, or a city with a military base, or a home base with a large racial or ethnic minority population—and you place the concerns of that region high on your priorities.

• Idealism versus pragmatism.
As a pragmatist, you are willing to compromise and get the best deal you can; as an idealist, you may be unwilling to compromise. Idealists tend to accuse pragmatists of not having ideals (when they do, but can’t realize them); pragmatists criticize idealists, saying “the perfect is the enemy of the good.”

• Biconceptualism.
If you are mostly progressive but have some conservative views, total progressives will accuse you of being a conservative; biconceptuals tend to accuse total progressives of being dogmatic or extremists.

• Radical change versus gradual change.
Radicals accuse gradualists of not being truly progressive; gradualists accuse radicals of being impractical and hurting their own cause by not using slippery slope tactics.

• Militant versus moderate advocacy.
Militants are loud, aggressive, and punitive, and sometimes use strict father means to nurturant ends, and see moderates as being cowards or insufficiently caring; moderate advocates think that militancy offends people and causes a reaction against their cause.

• Types of thought processes.
Progressive values can be weighted toward different areas of concern: socioeconomic, identity politics, environmentalist, civil libertarian, spiritual, and antiauthoritarian (see
Moral Politics
for details). Each thought process has consequences in choosing what causes to pursue, how to rank priorities, how to use political capital, where and how to raise money and what to spend it on, who your friends and acquaintances are, what to read, who to pay attention to, and so on.

A great many progressives have been critical of President Obama. If you were to make a list of the criticisms, they would mostly be defined by one or more of these parameters: too pragmatic, not a real progressive, going too slow, too timid or cowardly, not militant enough, not doing enough for
my
major interest.

When you consider that each progressive has some distinct combination of these parameters, the number of types of progressives becomes astronomical. When Will Rogers said, “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat,” this is the kind of thing he meant.

This makes it all the more important to understand what unites progressives and how to openly discuss that unity—despite the differences defined by these parameters.

Programs are a major problem for attempts at unity. As soon as a policy is made specific, the differences must be addressed. Progressives tend to talk about policies and programs. But policy details are not what most Americans want to know about. Most Americans want to know what you stand for, whether your values are their values, what your principles are, what direction you want to take the country in. In public discourse, values trump policies, principles trump policies, policy directions trump specific programs. I believe that values, principles, and policy directions are exactly the things that can unite progressives, if they are crafted properly. The reason that they can unite us is that they stand conceptually above all the things that divide us.

Ideas That Make Us Progressives

What follows is a detailed explication of each of those unifying ideas:

• First,
values
coming out of a basic progressive vision

• Second,
principles
that realize progressive values

• Third,
policy directions
that fit the values and principles

The Basic Progressive Vision

The basic progressive vision is of community—of America as family, a caring, responsible family. We envision an America where people care about each other, not just themselves, and act responsibly both for themselves and their fellow citizens with strength and effectiveness.

Democracy means acting on that care and responsibility through the government to provide public resources for all—from the needy to the average citizen to those running businesses, great or small. In short, the private depends on the public. And if you used those public resources to become wealthy on the basis of taxes paid by others for the resources you used, then fairness requires that you pay a higher share of your wealth in taxes so that others may benefit as well.

We are all in the same boat—that’s what democracy means. Red states and blue states, progressives and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. United, as we were for a brief moment just after September 11, not divided by a despicable culture war.

So far as I know, every progressive shares those values and that view of democracy.

The Logic of Progressive Values

The progressive core values are family values—those of the responsible, caring family. You could characterize them as
caring and responsibility, carried out with strength of commitment and effort.
These core values imply the full range of progressive values, listed below, together with the logic that links them to the core values.

• Protection, fulfillment in life, fairness.
When you care about someone, you want them to
be protected from harm
, you want their
dreams to come true
, and you want them to be
treated fairly
.

• Freedom, opportunity, prosperity.
There is no
fulfillment
without
freedom
, no
freedom
without
opportunity
, and no
opportunity
without
prosperity
.

• Community, service, cooperation.
Children are shaped by their
communities
. Responsibility requires
serving
and helping to shape your community. That requires
cooperation
.

• Trust, honesty, open communication.
There is no
cooperation
without
trust
, no
trust
without
honesty
, and no
cooperation
without
open communication
.

Just as these values follow from caring and responsibility, so every other progressive value follows from these. Equality follows from fairness, empathy is part of caring, diversity comes from empathy and equality.

Progressive Principles

Progressives not only share these values but also share political principles that arise from these values.

Equity.
What citizens and the nation owe each other. If you work hard, play by the rules, and serve your family, community, and nation, then the nation should provide a decent standard of living as well as freedom, security, and opportunity.

Equality.
Do everything possible to guarantee political and social equality and avoid imbalances of political power.

Democracy.
Maximize citizen participation; minimize concentrations of political, corporate, and media power. Maximize journalistic standards. Establish publicly financed elections. Invest in public education. Bring corporations under stakeholder control, not just stockholder control.

Government for a better future.
Government does what America’s future requires and what the private sector cannot do—or is not doing—effectively, ethically, or at all. It is the job of government to promote and, if possible, provide sufficient protection, greater democracy, more freedom, a better environment, broader prosperity, better health, greater fulfillment in life, less violence, and the building and maintaining of public infrastructure.

Ethical business.
Our values apply to business. In the course of making money by providing products and services, businesses should not adversely affect the public good, as defined by the above values. They should refuse to impose wage slavery and corporate servitude and so should work with unions, not against them. They should pay the true costs of doing business—not externalize, or offload, those costs onto the public (for instance, they should clean up their pollution). They should make sure their products do no harm to the public. And rather than treat their employees as mere “resources,” they should see them as community members and assets to the business.

Values-based foreign policy.
The same values governing domestic policy should apply to foreign policy whenever possible.

Here are a few examples where progressive domestic policy translates into foreign policy:

• Protection translates into an effective military for defense and peacekeeping.

• Building and maintaining a strong community translates into building and maintaining strong alliances and engaging in effective diplomacy.

• Caring and responsibility translate into caring about and acting responsibly for the world’s people; helping to deal with problems of health, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation; population control (and the best method, women’s education); and rights for women, children, prisoners, refugees, and ethnic minorities.

All of these are concerns of a values-based foreign policy.

Policy Directions

Given progressive values and principles, progressives can agree on basic policy directions, if not on the details. Policy directions are at a higher level than specific policies. Progressives usually divide on specific policy details while agreeing on directions. Here are some of the many policy directions they agree on.

The economy.
Investing in an economy centered on innovation that creates millions of good-paying jobs and provides every American a fair opportunity to prosper. The economy should be sustainable and not contribute to climate change, environmental degradation, and so on.

Security.
Through military strength, strong diplomatic alliances, and wise foreign and domestic policy, every American should be safeguarded at home, and America’s role in the world should be strengthened by helping people around the world live better lives.

Health.
Every American should have access to a state-of-the-art, affordable health care system.

Education.
A vibrant, well-funded, and expanding public education system, with the highest standards for every child and school, where teachers nurture children’s minds and often the children themselves, and where children are taught the truth about their nation—its wonders and its blemishes.

Early childhood.
Every child’s brain is shaped crucially by early experiences. We support high-quality early childhood education.

Environment.
A clean, healthy, and safe environment for ourselves and our children: water you can drink, air you can breathe, and food that is healthy and safe. Polluters pay for the damage they cause.

Nature.
The natural wonders of our country are to be preserved for future generations, and enhanced where they have been degraded.

Energy.
We need to make a major investment in renewable energy, for the sake of millions of jobs that pay well, improvements in public health, preservation of our environment, and the effort to halt global warming.

Openness.
An open, efficient, and fair government that tells the truth to our citizens and earns the trust of every American.

Equal rights.
We support equal rights in every area involving race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation.

Protections.
We support keeping and extending protections for consumers, workers, retirees, and investors.

A
stronger America
is not just about defense, but about every dimension of strength: our effectiveness in the world, our economy, our educational system, our health care system, our families, our communities, our environment, and so forth.

Broad prosperity
is the effect that markets are supposed to bring about. But all markets are constructed for someone’s benefit; no markets are completely free. Markets should be constructed for the broadest possible
prosperity
, as opposed to the exponential accumulation of wealth by the wealthy coupled with the corresponding loss of wealth by most citizens—and with it the loss of freedom and fulfillment in life.